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What are you talking about? When you roll a new version of a high volume web app if it has bugs that don't get caught in certain scripts then you can literally cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars before it is fixed.

eg. A trading platform, an advertising platform, etc.

This is not that rare.




Disagree, I think that's rare across the whole spectrum of programming work that's done. The vast majority of websites have perhaps 100's of users at most. The majority of software written has anywhere from 1 user to 10's, sometimes 100's, and more rarely thousands to millions. For every hedge fund trading platform I bet there are 1000's of Bubba's blogs and Joe's file-munging Perl scripts. The latter is the general case, not the former.

Almost every doctor or pharmacist you deal with on a daily basis can say something or do something that, if mistaken, can end up getting you dead or seriously sick -- or at least fail to prevent you from becoming so. A dead website can be fixed and brought back to life. Dead humans cannot. Well, for now anyway! :)


I disagree. Medicine is not that powerful. Doctors don't have that big power over people's lives. And the ones that do have are mostly edge cases, like it is in programming. Most of the doctors just move you around the "system". I can tell you this because I am a doctor myself. And gave up medicine in favor of programming. Medicine is a beauroucratic closed society, that is not willing to accept new members. They have the power and connections to make their profession seem "elite" and "important" and "dangerous". And they impose expensive university education (which is mostly unneeded in order to "do the job"), government regulations and all kinds of other hindrances in order to hide that their profession is just like the rest. From my experience so far, programming is much more difficult (unlike medicine, you need to think all the time), changes much faster, and changes are far more radical. In medicine you don't pick a new speciality every few months/years (like we do with languages). In medicine patients don't get released with new versions (incompatible with former ones), every other month. Doctors' tools (pharmaceuticals) don't change with the speed our tools (libraries, frameworks) change. You don't have to pick different "styles" and "philosophies".

I guess you will now ask me "why the hell did you choose programming then"? Yeah, I could earn more money with less work, with less thinking. But it would be much less enjoyable. And I guess this is the reason why programmers get paid less. We love our job. And we are willing to do it just for the sake of doing (and a little money for living).


Okay, I've just graduated as a vet and I had a bit of a crisis where I was worried: 1) That medical professions remain in their elite positions by using inaccessible language and a closed community 2) That there was a limited range of tools where much clinical work is just remembering someone else's solution to a particular disease and involved little in the way of problem solving and as a consequence something that I thought would be a mentally stimulating career just wasn't. I don't think I would have got into programming had some parts not been fairly dull.

So i finished the course and am looking forward to going into practice. As far as having a closed and (seemingly) elite community goes thats actually not such a big problem. Textbooks are available to anyone. The closed society should just be considered as a quality control. It is possible to get hold of any of the equipment required for medical practice but when you go to a doctor (a member of a profession) you are seeing an individual who has their competence vouched for and is subjective to professional discipline should their service be found to be lacking. I think it is difficult to justify the rates doctors get paid but self regulating professions do at least have quality assurance.

I also agree that there is a lot of university education in terms of what is learnt didactically is unnecessary for most of the day to day job but this totally misses the paint. Even though pharmaceutical tools may be fairly limited our understanding of pathology and epidemiology is continuously expanding fairly rapidly and what it teaches you is to educate yourself rapidly as this information emerges (and particularly in veterinary medicine collate this information sensibly when the information you want is not directly addressed in the literature - something that can only be done with a thorough understanding of physiology, immunology etc). Secondly since this discussion seems to be focusing on edge cases a lot we should not forget emerging diseases since these cannot be properly addressed by someone that is limited to the day to day 'do the job skills'. An excellent example of this is the diagnosis of blue-tongue virus when it first arrived in England.

As for wanting to be in a profession where you have to think all the time, I think it is possible but I think you need some kind of developer spirit. To do this you need to try and get yourself to some kind of cutting edge. This is easier to find with programming because it is a much newer skill set (and with veterinary medicine as compared to human medicine). To this end if you consider specialising and doing clinical research or doing something that involves policy making, or practicing somewhere where resources are fairly limited then I think you can have an intellectually rewarding career. Any career can be as interesting as you make it. If you find yourself bored because you are having to treat the same thing over and over again either change your specialty in medicine (pick a different "style" or "philosophy" [you may see the problems the patient has differently and take a different approach in addressing them]) or go and try address the root cause of the problem. You miss also that what is interesting in programming is that problems that you are faced with also seem to be changing rapidly as do areas of new development. I'm sure new tools would eventually get boring if the problems became static.

I think you're spot on about picking a career that you enjoy. I you've shown as well how important it is to consider where your at regularly and make an effort to keep what yo do interesting. The implication that all programmers love their job is as easy to disprove as other professionals not loving theirs. Providing you have some control on the development of your own skills I think any job can be satisfying. Don't use this love as an excuse for poor pay. Price yourself to show how much your are worth.


I didn't say that I'm not happy with what I get paid. And it wasn't an excuse at all. Just the opposite. I wanted to show why the people saying that "medicine is paid fairly compared to programming" are wrong.

I wanted to debunk the myth saying that medicine is the holy grail of professions. It is not. It's overrated, over-regulated and over-idolized. It's quite like the music industry. And it has to change, but changing it will be much more difficult than changing music industry.




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