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Comment by MathYouF | Hacker News Reader

Asking a doctor who had completed their 12 years of medical school and residency basic biology questions would be a bit absurd.

Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer.

Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so many basics of CS who have finished degrees, bootcamps, or have been employed in those roles for years.

Doctors simply aren't able to get accreditation or employment with the same ease as software developers.

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It is a strange comparison, though I don't think the "stringent process" is the issue and it's more just that they are entirely different fields with different ways of working with different kinds of feedback in the broader economy with different levels of observability. You might find that even the doctors that had years of study and paid supervised practice (residency) are unable to answer basic things. From an MD last year: "Even doctors forget the relationship between calcium and Vitamin D, and I have spoken with doctors who did not realize that 5000 units a day could cause problems. As a doctor, there is a lot to know and remember, and most doctors haven't studied calcium metabolism in many years." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065115)

On the other hand we all deserve to be treated with dignity.

Some people avoid the dilemma by only interviewing candidates from prestigious CS programs and with previous employment at famous companies, locking out those without the "right" credentials.

If you're going to demand that you be treated as an honest estimator of your own abilities beyond doubt don't be surprised if that ends up eliminating opportunities for people who are trying to break into the field without those credentials that put their abilities at a near certainty.

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