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Comment by throwawaynay | Hacker News Reader

except we are not doctors? the average web dev(aka most devs) is closer to a plumber or an electrician than a doctor

maybe 10% of devs have actually complicated jobs, the rest is just crud BS

we have access to good jobs and good salary because the educational system is crap, not because SWE is some kind of elite field unreachable to most people

it's outrageous that learning about software development is not an option starting from middle school, at this point it's more important than like half of what you learn in school

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I am not a doctor and cannot say this for certain. I respect the effort involved in acquiring the title of a medical doctor. But purely as a thought-experiment, I'd argue that the actual intellectual complexity of the job of many programmers far exceeds that of many doctors, outside of some complicated specialties or surgery I suppose.

Many doctors' jobs essentially become following checklists that insurance companies require. Many of them do not do much of anything other than push whatever pills and medications that Pharma salesman wine and dine them to automatically push. And unlike TV shows like House, most doctors do not do much investigation to try and diagnose ailments outside of trying the most common solution: the number of stories you can read about patients' pain not being taken seriously by doctors and having to read WebMD and try and diagnose themselves and then begging a physician to try and seriously consider their theory is breathtaking.

I'd recommend watching Scrubs if you think surgeons are perceived as the intellectuals in medicine. Or watch a talk about Egyptology by literal brain surgeon Ben Carson.

Please most medicine isn't that complex either. Only a small minority of doctors really do anything the average person cannot do. Its really just that they've set up barriers to protect themselves. The really complex stuff in any field generally involves open ended research-y work and the reality is that that research work has fairly low demand. Though to clarify, I don't think we should be setting up more barriers to software development, I think we should be reducing barriers to all fields. I also do agree we should be teaching basic coding to all kids, it would compliment math classes well. I also don't think basic webdev roles will pay this much in 10 years when the average person knows how to code.

Facts.

Your GP isn’t a genius, and they’re more often than not just reading the solution from webmd the same way you might look it up on stackoverflow.

I know this because my GP flat out told me this is the case.

It’s certainly a job that requires a lot of skill, knowledge and experience so as not to do harm, but that’s true of software engineering too.

Your gp could probably be replaced with a chat bot

> when the average person knows how to code

Some exposure to some kind of programming is probably a good thing, but I think this it is very unlikely for the average person to learn to code without either thousands of years of evolution, genetic engineering of humanity, or changing the definition of coding.

The average person cannot build a consistent mental model of complex abstract concepts. Schools have done lots of tests to prospective CS students trying to see how they'd be as programmers. The point isn't to see if they got the right answer, the point was to see if they could merely come up with a consistent mental model of what abstract symbols mean, and many people can't do that.

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