If you feel like your knowledge is getting flushed away with a new platform, then you've been learning the wrong things.
I have no idea how much stuff a brain surgeon has to learn, but having the idea that there are people who are brain surgeons, it cannot be so much harder than being a really competent programmer.
Think John Carmack for example. That guy is a friggin beast in learning new systems and producing working code. That is really, really hard to do. It requires immensive amount of thinking and applying, and sitting in front of computers while balancing your body and health at the same time so you dont kill yourself in the process or go mentally insane and just give up.
Oh yeah, but Carmack is a rocket scientist too .. so, maybe not the best example.
But putting those jobs above really competent programmers is just stupid, if you want to be best in what you do, in any life path you are taking, it will take all of your effort, and then some more. So why compare. It's all about doing what you love.
Well, we know how everything about how a CPU works. We don't know everything about how a brain works.
Not really my field, so I truly don't know. But I'd be a little suspicious of someone who claims there's nothing new to learn here.
The other thing is that while the brain is highly complex, that doesn't mean that people who work in it have managed to master something more complex than CPUs (or house wiring, for that matter). They may simply not really understand what they're doing to the same extent.
To me, the thesis in the original post is this "[if] there are people who are brain surgeons, it cannot be so much harder than being a really competent programmer."
I tend to agree, because I think that some types of programming push people's mental ability and sheer stubbornness past the point of human ability. In short, it will take all you have, and there will still be things you just can't understand or do.
If you define the task as "the things that we understand and can do", then by definition is is not equal in complexity to the brain, but like I said, I think the statement is a contrivance.
Almost nobody can do that. The hardware alone is so complex, these modern CPUs have many BILLIONS of transistors packed so tight that it is impossible for us to even fix them. So we just have a vague understanding of what is going on when we program, but really, we have no clear picture. But the best programmers out there, they have this map of the computer in their heads and the systems, and the better you are, the better the map in your head is.
Think NASA level programmers. They truly have to know how the system works, and yet, they cannot most probably understand the whole stack even, down to the transistor level operation, and then below that even in some really extreme cases where the systems overheat and there is magnetic bit flipping happening and other obscure stuff.
Immense amounts of work equals to amount of commitment required, which equals hard. To be a really competent programmer that knows how to truly take advantage of the machine is really rare, and even then it is down to some very specific domain, like graphics programming, systems programming and so on. So it is very hard to achieve, and very rare.
There are plenty of other fields that do as well, but software absolutely belongs in the mix.
Comparing "computer surgeon" to brain surgeon is like comparing sudoku to racquetball.
My point was, you can teach yourself a half-dozen programming languages, operating systems, databases... (which is inevitable for most developers) or you could have spent that time collecting diplomas in academia. This is not really a new concept, I read it somewhere else. Any profession that demands a lot of ongoing learning, I think people will quit because the effort may not seem worth it.
I agree you have to learn the "right" things but that takes experience and strategy. That's an interesting aspect of all of this. When everybody says "iPhone" you might bet on Android. Everyone says "Google Glass" and you might bet on Unity. If you have a crystal ball, maybe you're the next Warren Buffett ;-)
I understand the point you're highlighting, but there are very few interesting jobs where you get to say "Ok, now I'm done learning and I know everything I'll ever need to know to do this job perfectly."
Of course, there's a bit of a difference, in that you can call yourself a programmer even if you can't program. Whereas you can't call yourself a lawyer until you've passed the bar, which almost always involves attending 3 years of law school. So it's not really an apples to apples comparison. There is really no barrier to entry to programming that sets a minimum bar. So if you're comparing something with a minimum education standard with something with no minimum standard… well then yeah.
But personally, I don't think the required training to become a lawyer is anywhere close to as rigorous as what it takes to become a brain surgeon or rocket scientist, and if you look at typical pre-law majors, they aren't as difficult or rigorous as common undergrad degrees for software developers (CS, math, engineering, physical sciences). Let's face it, people don't drop out of poly sci because physics would be an easier major with more time to party.