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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, I honestly don't know this:

Is this expectation that you're always on the learning treadmill* an issue for other professions like doctors and lawyers? For example, do doctors _need_ to continue to stay abreast of the latest surgical techniques in order to remain employed? Or do they do they consider it an optional activity, to maybe work at a better hospital or something?

* I hate to put it that way, and while I'm a big fan of always learning, not everyone is, and the "technology treadmill" is definitely a thing.

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Lawyers in most jurisdictions are required to take Continuing Legal Education courses, but my experience was they were of limited use and the ongoing practice of law kept me far more current about legal trends than the courses did. They seemed more geared toward keeping the lowest common denominator from dropping into the realm of malpractice than teaching you anything that would be 'cutting edge'.

> Is this expectation that you're always on the learning treadmill an issue for other professions like doctors and lawyers?

Of course. A certain minimum is even required by law for licensure for some professions.

"For dedicated professional engineers, earning a PE license is just the beginning. Many state licensing boards require that PEs maintain and improve their skills through continuing education courses and other opportunities for professional development."

https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/maintaining-license

"Continuing legal education (CLE), also known as mandatory or minimum continuing legal education (MCLE) or, in some jurisdictions outside the United States, as continuing professional development, consists of professional education for attorneys that takes place after their initial admission to the bar. Within the United States, U.S. attorneys in many states and territories must complete certain required CLE in order to maintain their U.S. licenses to practice law."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_legal_education

"Almost all states require some amount of continuing professional development education and training be completed by teachers to maintain their licenses. Specific requirements for license renewal vary greatly from state to state, and are often quite complex."

http://www.teachtomorrow.org/continuing-education-for-teache...

"More than 40 jurisdictions require that architects complete continuing education to update their professional skills to renew their license while additional states are considering such requirements."

http://www.ncarb.org/Continuing-Education/Continuing-Educati...

PE continuing education requirements are a joke compared to what this industry expects. Texas, where I used to work and considered getting my PE requires 15 hours per year. What person here in their right mind is going to claim a software engineer can keep current with that little independent study?

15 hours is just the minimum that Texas chose to require for continued licensure. I'd be rather surprised if successful PEs didn't spend as much time in independent study as successful software developers.

First off, I wouldn't be. I used to work with them.

Second off, your post, and the others in this chain, are putting forward CE requirements in other professions as evidence that the at-times insane self-learning required by this industry is not unusual. It is. CE requirements are a joke and hold no weight in this discussion. If you want to argue other professions have similar impositions to ours, you need to do it without referring to these requirements.

The term that you would want to use in place of "learning treadmill" is "continuing education".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_medical_education informs me that many states in the US require some form of CME in order for a doctor to remain licensed. It's easy to imagine why this might be the case; as the state of medical science changes, so to would a doctor's recommendation.

edit: I can imagine that lawyers probably need to stay abreast of recent decisions as well, since precedent makes for a compelling argument.

I think that the difference is that continuing education builds on established precedent, while the CS learning treadmill is often about throwing out existing ideas in favor of some new paradigm -- or some new Javascript framework that's gratuitously incompatible with the previous version of the same framework.

For doctors, yes. You get sued if you aren't. More importantly, you're giving suboptimal care and effecting people's lives.

Some licensed medical professions in the US are contingent upon completion of "continuing medical education" requirements. This often involves learning about changes in diagnoses and treatments of illnesses.

The difference is that other professionals get paid for this, whereas software developers are expected to sacrifice their free time for it.

Yes, at least around here in .nl, both doctors and lawyers are required to take a certain number of hours of training every year to keep their licences.

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