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Comment by arglebarnacle | Hacker News Reader

That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does.

Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc.

If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.

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> it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc.

Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? And not every doctor is dealing with serious life threatening illnesses, just like not all developers are working on bootstrapping their uber for cats with Angular 2 and pouchdb.

It's crucial because people can die. That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.

> It's crucial because people can die

Not every illness is lethal, for most of them you can just make it worse. Even less requires quick decision. Also, software evolves and scales much quicker than humans which makes our industry less standardised.

> That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.

In my world, there is a risk assessment which defines if we have time to research, test, etc. or just fix it on the go, because it is not a big deal if it occurs. In other cases we have a cold sweat and dead silence during deployment, don't we?

> Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"?

Because you can't google every single symptom. And sometimes the symptom is only mentioned very briefly in passing. And sometimes the patient is hiding the symptom. And sometimes the important piece of information isn't a "symptom".

So, you need to have these in your head so that you can connect the dots to "I thought it was X, but new data Y suggests it might be Z. I need to go push on abdomen, put stethoscope to stomach, right now while patient is sitting in my office." A good example of a non-symptom that would go into your diagnosis--patient just got divorced and started dating again ... hmmm, STD's are probably back in the probability pool again, might want to check for one given the other symptoms.

Where computers are useful, but, sadly, we don't have good implementation is spotting localized trends. If one person comes down with Karposi's Sarcoma, that's an anomaly. If 10 people come down with it, that's a problem. It would be good to have databases with data from multiple doctors so that we could let the computers spot those things.

I mean, my doctor usually just types my symptoms into Google anyway...

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