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Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

The reason why it always comes up is because programmers are relatively well paid yet nobody really understands what we do.

Therefore you get these really silly memes such as if a factory worker's job is outsourced, you can just retrain them to be a programmer. Or the only reason why some downtrodden group is not a programmer is because they were prevented by someone from being a programmer.

The thing that is ridiculous about the memes is that programming is the only field that is completely clear of gatekeepers. You don't have to go to college to be a programmer - the top programming coursework is available online for free (or nearly free). If you want to be credible as a programmer, there are plenty of open source projects that would welcome you. Compare that to doctors or lawyers which really do need college degrees and certification.

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I feel like this is also top-down status anxiety from the traditionally high-status people (lawyers, doctors, academics, managers etc.) who really don't like that these prole nobodies are suddenly making good money, without being properly embedded in the elite caste and their manners. So they keep kicking and biting down to say how what we do is really just some blue-collar monkeying around that any janitor could do starting tomorrow, and the real, hard, serious jobs are still in their realm.

Definitely.

Doesn't help that a lot of prominent figures are also drop outs (Zuckerberg, Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, Musk, the list goes on).

Doctors insist on having everyone call them "Dr" and each-others too. They get their prestige from their tittles.

Meanwhile Bill Gates is just... Bill Gates. No prefix needed!

It's not clear of gatekeepers, they're just moved to a different point in the process, and scattered about the industry. You don't hear about doctors being given a mystery patient and forty-five minutes to save their life using only a whiteboard; once you've got the qualifications, they're not subject to anything like the same level of challenge.

"You don't hear about doctors being given a mystery patient and forty-five minutes to save their life using only a whiteboard"

That's actually a pretty accurate description of what doctors have to do, at least in the UK. For the first nine years after finishing medical school, doctors have to take a series of exams, including written exams and practical tests, which are primarily diagnosing and proposing treatments for real ("mystery") patients. This is a centralised process, rather than ad-hoc tests at every interview, but doctors do have to continue demonstrating their competence during their careers.

The centralization is the critical difference, though. Lots of professions have ongoing exams. Programming is different in that there's no institution to set the exams, so instead we have ad hoc tests of dubious reliability, repeated for every interview.

Doctors have to take board exams every couple years to stay licensed.

That's an interesting point. How are doctors evaluated if they move to a new city or something? How do they know if the candidate is a good cardiologist? Is it purely based on their CV and their previous roles? I admit it's absurd to imagine that a cardiologist would be asked to label parts of the heart (~fizzbuzz) on a diagram at the interview. I also don't think they look at outcome stats of their patients.

Or is it mainly based on who they know and who recommends them?

Maybe the different in processes means that their diploma, medical license, and other certifications means they've been effectively whiteboarded already and do not require re-testing along those same lines.

Would be interesting to consider if it's possible to administer a whiteboarding exam on programmers once, and then consider them solid on the concepts tested if they pass. And if not, then why? Does that mean whiteboarding as it is practiced now is insufficient? Because it certainly seems like for engineers who switch jobs every 2-5 years, they have to be whiteboarded again even if they've had prior experience, even at larger corporations known for rigorous interview practices.

It's as if this industry lacks confidence in its own employment standards, unlike the medical, legal, and other accredited fields.

Another example is language certificates. Maybe less well known to the monolingual English speakers here, but jobs in non-English speaking countries often have the requirement to speak English for business contact, to read professional reference material etc. There are many exams and certificates (local ones, or international ones, like TOEFL, IELTS, etc.), and they are nice on a CV, but they will always do a short test if you can actually speak the language. Passing a standard test is not always enough.

It may also be the fact that doctoring is more about keeping a large amount of facts and experiences in mind as condensed expertise, while programming is more about raw intelligence and solving novel problems analytically (although this sounds a bit pretentious and self-important, I know). Cardiology is very unlike logic puzzles. Now sure, day-to-day programming may also not be much like logic puzzles, hence the endless criticism of whiteboard leetcode interviews.

> How are doctors evaluated if they move to a new city or something?

Depends which border they cross. Then there's a lot of red tape and regulation by the local cartel to deal with.

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