Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

What does it take to be a good surgeon?

If you can coordinate a large social event, you have all the mental capacity required to be a good programmer/ surgeon

All you have to do as a surgeon is to follow an extremely specific script. and the script does not change that often since human bodies tend to be more static than operating systems, compilers, and web browsers.

Can you eat a steak? Well then you have the cutting skills you need.

Have you ever taken needle and thread to do some sort of job? Well then you understand sutures

Do you really need all As in high school and compete like crazy to get into Med school, then learn all latin names and bone sequences etc school to be a surgeon?

I don't think so because these skills are something near every possesses.

Yes they try to make it seems like you have to be really smart to be a surgeon, but if you scrape away all the complexity that is only there to protect the "smart people" who already are doctors, nearly anyone could be a good surgeon and we would have much better surgeon.

The profession would be far more inclusive and all that shared culture and experience will just make medicine richer and better for everyone. We could finally do away with the insane expenses medical procedures have today.

So let us do away with the archaic ritual of a pointless medical degree and open it up for everyone.

This is a pretty bad comparison. Not only are doctors trained for years through a mentorship process, go on to teach others, and are tested against standards; every surgery they perform for the rest of their lives is subject to review which might result in an independent board of other doctors recommending changes to the process.

This is one of the things we're missing in software development (although retros are supposed to solve it), and the author points this out. Often, we get stuck in a bad framework or organizational structure that leaves us so we're forced to get use complex CS ideas to solve the problem when a better approach would allow for simpler solutions.

> Team A are those who work with metal utensils, team B work with wooden utensils, C use electrical appliances and D are in charge of all food heating. Trying to make sense of how one creates a crème brûlée with a worker grouping like that requires a lot of intelligence.

This is only tangentially related, but it dawned on me that we truly have a unique culture as programmers that you're basically forced to learn in the process of getting a CS degree.

And you can usual use cultural references (such as joking about 'Do you know how to close Vim?' or complaining about symbolic links, or talking about RMS) to tell who is a more traditional programmer versus someone who has had less exposure to the programmer culture (this obviously only applies to Americans, with international hires they'll have their entire own programmer culture)

Another thing I noticed is how niche cultures tend to be less homogeneous, I feel like in all 'mainstream' cultures, the celebrities are almost always white, attractive, and socially confident. While in programming, our celebrities are pretty off-putting to the mainstream.

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