Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

I'm a graduating medical student with a master's in computer science. In a lot of ways CS is the polar opposite of medicine; one values derivation and automation while the other emphasizes memorization and one-on-one interactions.

Surprisingly, teamwork is one area where CS wins out. I've found that despite the professed importance of the healthcare team, healthcare often doesn't function like a team at all. Doctors, nurses, PAs, patient care assistants, administrative staff, can make or break your life by providing support or creating obstacles. I think it's a result of a inherently tiered system with a single person (e.g. the attending) on top who decides the treatment plan. In CS you almost never have a single person who is overly-trained relative to peers. Maybe you'll have a better developer, UI designer or manager, but none of these attributes makes that person the sole decider. The pay structure in medicine reflects its hierarchical system: software managers don't earn 10x what software developer make, whereas attendings easily make 10x a nurse's salary.

> I'm a graduating medical student with a master's in computer science.

That's... actually really neat. What made you go for a graduate degree then on to med school, if you don't mind me asking?

I would guess that doctors have better career stability.

I actually got my master's in the middle of medical school (I took a leave of absence). My undergrad degree is in computer science as well. It's my long-term goal to start a radiology informatics company.

Thanks for answering! How do you feel among your peers? Performance-wise and general understanding of topics? Is there no noticeable difference or do you find that you're learning things from a different form of understanding?

Sorry for all the questions, I think it's fascinating when people wind up in a very different field from one they've more formally studied in.

Computer-science wise: I'm a rather good developer, according to my supervisors. I'm quite comfortable with Java, Python and a bit of Swift. I love writing code, starting with BASIC when I was 11 years old.

Medicine-wise: I'm in the bottom quartile of my class. I'm terrible at sitting there and studying. It's a completely different mind set. I did really poorly on UMSLE Step 2 in particular; most med students do +20 points higher relative to Step 1...I did 40 points lower. That test is entirely memorization, we're talking memorizing immunization schedules for children, the screening guidelines for low-dose CT, the warning signs of an acute abdomen, and so on...

In terms of benefits, I'm much faster at research data analysis. I'm doing imaging work and I can take a DICOM, convert it to NIfTI, run an algorithm in Python or MATLAB, and dump the results in under and hour. That kind of stuff is second-nature to me, but takes my fellow lab mates an indeterminate amount of time. I've written a number of 20-line scripts for my classmates that do basic stuff like vertical lookups in Excel and searching for files on the filesystem. Really simple stuff that would take a person a long time by hand.

One more thing, the MCAT was a blast for me. It was a wonderful test. It emphasizes integration and application of what you've learned on novel problems, very much like computer science. The USMLEs were hell. I got 98th percentile on the MCAT; 40th percentile on the USMLE.

>In CS you almost never have a single person who is overly-trained relative to peers.

You have no idea. Skill and knowledge differentials are VAST. I cannot find capital letters large enough to emphasise this enough. You get everything from the 'not invented here' guy reinventing a triangular 'wheel' that doesn't roll, all the way to the superstar who develops generic APIs and algorithms that generate value for literally decades.

Skill != training. Medical care is spit from 2 years of training to nearly 20 years. With arguably the most important group first responders getting weeks of training.

That's a puzzling analysis. Of course job skill correlates with training. Usually the better programmers have spent far more time training (usually on their own, auto-didact style) than the poor ones. I'm sure it's the same for top surgeons.

I have often noticed a strong negative correlation with degrees held. Someone without a degree must be really good to get and stay on the team. People with PHD's tend to have a lot of really bad habbits from years of school related development with long matenance cycles or production exposure.

Though I have also noticed people with a few years of professional exprence between collage and starting a masters program tend to be vastly better so YMMV.

I wish IT was more like this. The agile (communist) manifesto that seems to treat all programmers as replaceable cogs (related buzz words: bus factor, knowledge transfer, pair programming), leads inevitably to really poor teams that can't engineer anything but the most dumbed down web application, where the best performers are artificially restricted. Fred Brooks' description of a surgical like team always seemed to me like a good approach, but I've yet to see it applied, at least not ad-hoc.

I was probably a bit harsh here in retrospect comparing agile to communism ;-). I do feel agile culture though, or XP in particular, tends to to encourage a lowest-common denominator approach where individuals can't really shine.

You would be surprised how this doesn't apply to many software companies out there and how the hospital environment is exactly the kind of culture existing. There is no one thing fits all fact.

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