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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Thought process: “In theory auditing a government agency is simple. I can write assembly for a computer with millions of moving parts. How hard could it be to debug an organization with twenty thousand employees that need support to configure their own email? I spent literally two weeks watching accounting channels on YouTube, so with my mighty developer ultrabrain, this should be a snap. If only developers had time to work on these problems the world wouldn’t need all of these suits.”

People might read that and think I’m being hyperbolic, but I had someone on HN argue that their debugging skills rendered them better at medical diagnosis than doctors, and better at fixing cars than mechanics, by their own totally objective genius developer standards.

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That's exactly how they think. Coders tend to employ systems thinking to a fault, where they reduce something very complex to fit a too-simple mental model. It's like going into a room with a lion and thinking it's a house cat because they're both shaped the same. Failing to take note of the key differences will quickly lead to your demise.

Right. Like I always say — you can create a simple solution to any complex problem if you ignore enough pertinent factors.

Can't speak to doctors, but I've been a mechanic and yes there's some large overlap in debugging skills between a good mechanic and a programmer, a mindset of wanting to understand how things work, and breaking down the problem into manageable parts.

Sure. There’s overlap with a lot of things. This developer said that it was (paraphrased) ‘hard for him to take people like mechanics seriously because they lack his superior debugging skills.’ There was no attempt to draw similarities. He was simply saying that developer smarts were the best smarts and they trumped all other smarts.

I can’t tell you how many times developers have tried to explain cooking concepts to me knowing I’m a classically trained and experienced chef. Or explain design to me knowing I have a design degree and years of experience doing it. Some developers just have unending hubris.

Well, some professionals fail at being counter-examples.

I’ve worked in several professions, with dev being the longest— I’ve encountered more bullshit and incompetence from devs than any other industry I’ve worked in except for tech support. I’ve heard developers saying they’ll simply ‘pivot’ if the big productivity machine eats up their corner of the dev market. Oof… They’re looking at a rude awakening when they see how preciously developers are treated compared to most other employed adults, and how badly they underestimated the unseen complexities in other people’s jobs.

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