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Comment by faeyanpiraat | Hacker News Reader

I do not completely understand your points.

Shouldn't hospitals have multiple surgeons?

If one of them is on vacation, the other one does the work, and vice versa?

But the more you avoid birthday surgeries altogether, the more those that end up still happening are extreme cases with high mortality rates. So if your target is to avoid this scary statistical anomaly, you might instead want to promote more benign surgeries on birthdays.

The types of surgeries performed should be controlled for when performing a statistical study.

They were. This entire line of criticism comes from not reading the study methods.

I don't think surgeons are fongible assets. There is a lot of planning and study taking place before a complex operation. Not to mention most surgeons have specialties.

The long term plans and studied for surgeries can be moved one day forward or backward basically by definition.

Except if something changes suddenly and surgery is suddenly needed - that’s what makes it an emergency.

A surgeon seems more fungible than a developer, to me.

All sorts of standards, compliance, and licensing requirements.

Surgeons are generally specialists in one particular area and possibly even specialists within that area (ie: only do knee replacements, etc.). Surgeons get better with experience, it's a skill, and different surgeries are different enough that experience doesn't transfer too much. There's also changes over time in best practices so skills degrade not just due to lack of recent experience. If I remember the best predictor of the outcome of your surgery is how many similar surgeries the doctor does per year.

Nobody's making any points about developers

My gut instinct is that this is incorrect, too, but I don't know enough about surgery to make a compelling argument.

I'd back myself to pick up Ruby (a language I've never touched before) and be productive, more than I'd trust a surgeon who only has experience with heart surgery to operate on my brain. Maybe that's ignorant of me.

Even if a Ruby bug would mean death?

EDIT: I take this back. I missed the point of the argument.

That'd change the risks, sure.

I don't think that's the scenario @jrh206 was talking about, though. Most code written in Ruby doesn't have the sort of immediate risk to life or limb surgeries do.

Those requirements are fairly general.

They don't test for "I've been doing this particularly tricky type of bone biopsy right next to the spinal cord for decades" scenarios.

For non-emergency surgeries it's often a long-term relationship where the same doctor who has seen the patient a few times would be the one operating - so if that particular surgeon isn't available for whatever reason, the planned operation would be rescheduled to a different date with the same doctor, not to a different doctor in the same day.

There’s research, consultations, who is covered under what insurance, etc.

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