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Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

This again. Is a doctor in his first year of being a full fledged doctor any less of a doctor than one with 20 years of experience? The more experienced doctor is almost assuredly better and preferable, but both of them are doctors.

This assumption that you have to be a master of the front end and a master of the back end to be a full stack developer is flawed from the start. Have you created economic value with a completed project that you build the front end and back end for (no matter how spaghetti)? Congratulations you are a full stack developer. A shitty one maybe, but one no less.

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I don't think your analogy holds up. Theres really no such thing as just a "doctor". Everyone specializes in some field, even if that specialization is in generalization. But doctors who specialize in general cases (i.e. family practice) serve the role of passing you off to the appropriate specialist to fulfill your needs. And in the same way I would expect a highly experienced programmer to know the limits of their skillset and when to delegate tasks.

So how doesn't it hold up? In no way did OP suggest that you need to be able to do everything on any conceivable project by yourself. There could be plenty things that are outside the scope of any given Full Stack Developer. How would that invalidate all the times when they were not?

Maybe he meant, for example, that a 1st year cardiologist is probably going to be a better cardiologist than a 20 year nephrologist. The OP seems to be insinuating in his medical analogy that only time - not specialty - is the most important metric. Take that 20 year nephrologist: if he had spent 10 of those years in cardiology, I don't think most other nephrologists would say that makes him a better doctor just because his experience was more balanced across two fields. In fact, I think they'd say he was a lesser doctor than one who devoted the 20 years to one subspecialty.

Lesser doctor or lesser nephrologist? Semantics are very important in these sorts of discussions.

Lesser doctor. That was my point: it is my understanding that covering a wider but shallower expertise in medicine would not elevate a doctor among his peers as much as a doctor who plumbs the depth of one specialty (barring one of the well-recognized interdisciplinary field like sleep medicine).

Specialization is for insects.

Being an insect doesn't seem like such a bad thing[1]

1. http://www.techtimes.com/articles/19731/20141108/insects-are...

I can attest that there is a such thing as a doctor. I saw one just a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty sure she specializes in family practice, but she is a doctor none the less. And she'd probably be be very confused if I told her she didn't exist, or she wasn't a doctor because doctors don't exist.

But she wouldn't be confused if you said she wasn't a heart surgeon, because she's not. She can tell you a bunch of stuff about the heart, she can probably do surgery if she was in a position where she had to, but she's not a heart surgeon and wouldn't claim to be.

Depends on your illness, and quality of the doctor, often I've met younger doctors whose up to date knowledge out bests that of experienced doctors who have not kept abreast of their field, more likely through resource challenges than malice!

Correct. This is the way of life. Fortunately, as our jobs aren't protected by legislation, we are forced to keep up or die out.

I love keeping up.

the analogy with doctors although valid on principle doesn't take into account that you can rewrite buggy code due to inexperience, but you can't undo a brain surgery gone bad.

So? You can't undelete files that were not backed up either. Some mistakes are reversible while others aren't.

An experienced physician also (likely) has outdated knowledge. For example they might instruct you to eat a low fat diet, even though that is pretty thoroughly discredited nowadays.

First, it depends on the age of the physician. At some point in the late 90s or early 00s most (if not all) of the medical boards require that doctors continue to take continuing education credits to keep up on changes in medicine. In addition they have to re-certify every 10 years. That was not the case in the past, and older doctors are grandfathered. But if you doctor is younger than 40, they will likely need to re-certify and keep up to date.

Second, the prevailing wisdom on low fat diets are still up in the air. AFAIK, the American Academy of Physicians and the American Heart Association have not changed their positions on low fat diets.

Promoting the low fat diet (or just demonizing saturated fat) is incredibly misguided, there simply isn't (and never was) any evidence for it. It's not surprising the AHA et. all hasn't changed course, they made a terrible error and admitting that is embarrassing and stains their legacy (but their legacy is already stained by any right-thinking person).

I believe the low fat diet will be seen as almost equal to the promotion of radium water for health is seen now. At least radium water only affected small quantities of people. The human suffering caused by the low fat diet is unquantifiable. It's a relic of the Cold War that is unfortunately still alive and kicking.

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