Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Curious about this. I often find engineers motivated purely by the desire to solve the problem. Was just at defcon - witnessed many people vaguely wandering around the tables of teams trying to hack devices, then getting sucked in as they offered solutions and inevitably got involved with trying to solve the problem. Did it myself a couple times, even though I had planned on attending more talks.

View on HN

They hate solving problems when someone comes up to them with a strange and incomplete description and says "can you fix my problem"? The made a whole show about this called the IT Crowd where they play a tape that says "Have you tried turning it on and off again" instead of legitimately answering phones.

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

Here's a subreddit where people complain about the problems that people bring them: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/

Here's a subreddit for which the tagline starts with "Tired of stupid customers?": https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/

There are many problems in the tech field which are exceedingly difficult yet uninteresting. There are many problems that people bring that are vague descriptions that eventually turn out to be user error. It would not be surprising for the same phenomenon to exist in the medical field as well.

The human body apparently has pretty terrible UI/UX.

It's not bad for something we found in a cave.

Huh, I had never thought of that - the daily issues that patients bring a doctor I can see as a parallel to an engineer being presented with "can you fix my email?" - complete with user stupidity - "My heart don't feel good" "Did you quit smoking and start exercising like I told you to?" "No."

I've wondered the same thing myself pretty much every time I've come into contact with a doctor. The fundamental lack of curiosity for someone in a field related to science (seemingly based on science) is astonishing.

That has never been my experience with any doctor, and I have met many doctors of many different specialties.

Perhaps the problem here is not doctors, but the way you are communicating (or not) with them. Your sotto-voce "seemingly based on science" is exceedingly derisive; perhaps that is carrying across. I too tend to minimise the length of conversations with people that treat me with contempt.

Yes, you could potentially "solve the problem." Unless there is a test or a treatment that is easy and effictive enough to use empirically it is much harder to diagnose that person. Physicians have to balance quality of life improvement for patients along with treatment. There may be a trade-off between efficacy rate of treatments and the likelihood of adequate compliance. People may not change their diets or take their meds appropriately to improve their health for example.

If you can't rely on the patient you might never find the solution. You may just be better off at improving their quality of life even if it doesn't ultimately solve their underlying condition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com