Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc.
If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.
Why is it crucial if it's just a "5 second google search"? And not every doctor is dealing with serious life threatening illnesses, just like not all developers are working on bootstrapping their uber for cats with Angular 2 and pouchdb.
Because you can't google every single symptom. And sometimes the symptom is only mentioned very briefly in passing. And sometimes the patient is hiding the symptom. And sometimes the important piece of information isn't a "symptom".
So, you need to have these in your head so that you can connect the dots to "I thought it was X, but new data Y suggests it might be Z. I need to go push on abdomen, put stethoscope to stomach, right now while patient is sitting in my office." A good example of a non-symptom that would go into your diagnosis--patient just got divorced and started dating again ... hmmm, STD's are probably back in the probability pool again, might want to check for one given the other symptoms.
Where computers are useful, but, sadly, we don't have good implementation is spotting localized trends. If one person comes down with Karposi's Sarcoma, that's an anomaly. If 10 people come down with it, that's a problem. It would be good to have databases with data from multiple doctors so that we could let the computers spot those things.
Not every illness is lethal, for most of them you can just make it worse. Even less requires quick decision. Also, software evolves and scales much quicker than humans which makes our industry less standardised.
> That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.
In my world, there is a risk assessment which defines if we have time to research, test, etc. or just fix it on the go, because it is not a big deal if it occurs. In other cases we have a cold sweat and dead silence during deployment, don't we?
Not sure why doctors don't look after their patients. Is it because there is no incentive to? If they do bad diagnosis that means the patient comes back and the doctor gets more money. As long as they don't get sued there's really no harm to the doctor.
As a software engineers we are incentivized to perform well. A crappy system means time spent debugging issues, money lost for our employer. We also take pride in building good systems so we can take that experience to the next company and get s higher wage or position.
As it is, we can't even seem to find a program that can analyse an ECG better than an overtired and exhausted resident at 4 am, which is really quite a low bar to cross.
So, let's take heart attack diagnoses in emergency rooms--a fixed procedure laid down by following statistics is WAY better than human judgement.
Generalized abdominal pain--computers aren't so good. There are a lot of possibilities and most of them are about equal. The doctor is more likely to tease out the problem over time through conversational randomness.
Some obscure genetic disease--a computer is going to be FEROCIOUSLY better than a human. A computer can keep all of those .00001% options in mind as tests and diagnoses rule out the far more common problems until the low-probability things pop up into statistical relevance.
Also, it may surprise you, but there are many highly experienced and extremely capable programmers that didn't study computer science in college. Filtering those people out because they can't answer programming trivia questions is, at best, hugely short-sighted.
It's called being flexible and able to learn, and it's the single most important thing you're supposed to get out of your formal education.
Bittorrent is a great example. All the pieces had existed for a while, but Bram Cohen put them all together into one place. After that, lots of people created other BitTorrent clients. However, without that first, smart person, it wouldn't have appeared.