Programmer now, gained a law degree in a previous life. Know lots of folks who studied medicine.
The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects cover alone renders this impossible, and furthermore I'd argue it's pretty insulting to insinuate that Computer Science is somehow more difficult in this regard.
While I can't speak fully for medics, a law degree "hardly scratches the surface" as you put it either.
Medical school will teach you the basic science and theory and give you basic clinical experience, one still needs to complete a 3 to 7 year residency in the field one wants to practice in. Then there are fellowships that one may want to do if they want to specialize even further.
It's definitely not the case that you learn everything you need to know in school.
> The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects cover alone renders this impossible
You seem to be an example of a programmer that can be good and proficient in many different fields, languages, and scopes. You don't really see that in law or medicine. Doctors can't jump around from orthopedic surgeon to psychiatrist to dermatologist. And it's very uncommon (at least for lawyers under 60 or so) to be both a corporate lawyer and a litigator.
As giobox mentioned, the sheer size of the domains of law and medicine all but require doctors and lawyers to specialize. That's certainly true to some extent with computer science but it doesn't seem to be quite as strong in that field.
The magnitude of knowledge needed to push a company to become public or undergo a merger, to litigate a divorce with children in custody, to defend an individual in a murder trial, or to litigate an aboriginal rights claim is substantial and there is very little overlap between them.
The issue isn't the regulatory requirement for competence - it's that the fields of specialization require years to become decent in.
But I will say one of the MAJOR things that I LOVE about programming is its relative lack of artificial and social barriers. In psyche, med, law, science: even if i am good enough to pick something up in 6-12 months, or even if I have already been studying or been experienced in said field (say because I have a family member who has been surreptitiously teaching me or bringing me along on the side), there is an inescapable time, money, and social barrier that is effectively immutable.
I can't REALLY do law/medicine without running them in serial, paying the fixed costs of time/money for both (which almost no one has), and I can't fast-track through either or leap-frog students or peers of lesser ability. And god help you if, half-way through, you then think that something in chem/physics might be interesting and applicable. Or if you have the insight/ability to say: i think i'd learn more over there (well too bad, these are the requirements for the program and this is the course structure and this is what you need to do to get your practicing certificate...and except in exceptional circumstances, that's even if you had someone in a position of authority who would agree with you).
Those barriers have not yet been established effectively in programming. Sure, some people tried earlier to establish things like certification and structure, and we're now starting to see the germination of university degrees in arbitrary specializations, and that force will always be there, but few people take them comparatively seriously. The barriers to entry are low (you could almost always even just pirate some software to get started and install it on relatively cheap generic hardware). And if you want to apply it to different fields, you quickly find the barriers aren't generally from the computing/programming side, but from the social/structural barriers inherent in those fields in our society.
Now to be sure, we get the downside of this too: cranks, frauds, used-car-salesmen, agile coaches, wannabes, fads, marketing, etc.
But they don't stop me learning for my own ends, and if i ignore them they have no effect on what I can learn for myself once I pass the relatively low barrier of stable employment and income and basic hardware. And my knowledge makes me more employable and more attractive.
Whereas there is no way I can participate or do the same with engineering, medicine, or law etc without effectively cancelling my life and/or desires in other fields.
And whereas my knowledge and self-direction make me immediately more employable and desirable NOW and at all times in the future in programming, i have huge sunk, upfront, and opportunity costs for several years to participate formally in each of those other fields.
That's why in most countries lawyer candidates are required to do mandatory legal internships. And even after becoming a lawyer, you need to gain a lot of experience before you can be trusted to practice law without the supervision of an experienced lawyer.
Why in the world would that be insulting and who is it insulting to? If anything it's a reflection of how immature the industry is and how computer science degrees have minute overlap with software engineering.
It’s insulting to diminish the legitimate achievements of other people through unjustified comparison, in particular when doing so results in the elevation of the person doing it.
There is no objective criteria by which we can state computer science is a more difficult field than law or medicine. To imply that is therefore offensive, and people are not “immature” just because they react to offensive things by being insulted, even if you believe they shouldn’t feel insulted.
I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question describing a bunch of popular database platforms and choose whichever looked best after thinking about it for a few minutes, and that outside of extreme circumstances (>terabytes of data, distributed over an actually unreliable network, other exotica) almost any option would work well enough.
Which is to say, programming is complicated but it's not very precise. Compare to mechanical engineering, where if you use the wrong steel your bridge will fall down; or to medicine, where if you prescribe the wrong drug someone might just die. So while there's lots that's useful for a programmer to know, if they don't know it they can get by alright almost all the time, and it's really hard for their managers to tell the difference. (Which is also why we can get away with not having a "programming school" beyond a handful of required courses for a CS degree.) So it's hard for this to seem like a very effective barrier to entry.
Dereference the wrong pointer and the rocket blows up. Forget a memory barrier and the robot brain gets corrupted memory and sees human life as an impediment to paper clip maximization. Forget to zero out some memory in a goto: cleanup section and suddenly there's a back door in a popular security library leaving machines to the whim of any curious script kiddie.
I know a lot of people aren't working on real time systems or encryption libraries that have the same level of significant consequences as what you're describing, but some are.
When you're starting from scratch, I think the bigger barrier isn't "where do I store this data", it's "what the hell is data"? Try to explain to a computer illiterate person that the latest Mariah Carey CD is just a really big number and you'll get a glimpse of this. The person who knows they can jump on Stack Exchange is already past the worst part of the learning curve.
And other times. I've been working in software for almost two decades. I ran into a particular data problem that I could describe but didn't know the name of (a la wizard of earthsea). So I couldn't search to see how others had tackled this.
Google and blogs and YouTube and stackoverflow have pushed the boundaries of knowledge. You don't need to know exactly how to do something (for many kinds of tasks) but you do need to know what it is called, and how to adapt what you find on the net to your situation.
That said, it's often a great resource.
And you're the reason why I have to mop up poor performance because someone decided to use MongoDB for highly-relational data.
[1] Well, not me in particular! I know the important things and only use SE for looking up trivial details, of course. But maybe not everyone agrees with me which is which...
The reason is that software systems are at another level of complexity.
The Space Shuttle is often given as an example of the most complex machine every built, with more than 2.5 million parts. The Airbus A380 has about 4 million parts.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-complex-machine-ever-bu...
The Linux Kernel, not necessarily the most complex software ever written, has nearly 10 million lines of executable code, over 12 million with comments, scattered over 36,000+ files.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-are-in-the-Linu...
Google's back-end cluster and services are frequently given as the most complex software existing.
The full LoC in Debian GNU/Linux has been estimated as 324 million as of 2009. This is the stable archive, which includes somewhere between about 30k to 70k individual software packages (I'd have to do some digging to see what the count was for the stable release as of 2009).
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111281/exploding-am...
I used to do that but I got burned more than a few times.
These days I do a bunch of research - sometimes days, including tracking down obscure blog posts about obscure issues, reading issue trackers and spiking code. Can feel like a waste to begin with but it's saved me from some very dark places.
I would not trust stack exchange or stack overflow for a technology recommendation ever.
I think the biggest barrier in programming is just how abstract and alien it is, cognitive load can be enormous. Try to teach engineer about materials or steel liquation or semiconductors - it might be abstract or complex but at least it is dealing with real life physical processes.
With programming it is whole different galaxy. Like explaining pointer arithmetic to someone who just started learning CS. Or recursion, or asking someone to rotate tree in their head - there is a huge chance it will simply BSOD them. Programming is much more close to theoretical physics or maths than engineering.
It's even more elementary than that, I think. I've encountered lots of intelligent people who lack any sort of diagnostics skills - absolutely essential for being a programmer.
Things like.. the landline is broken. Well, then, get another phone, plug it in and see if it works. If it does, then it's the phone we need to look at, if it doesn't, we need to move further up the line.
It frequently boggles my mind how many people struggle with simple elimination, experimentation, and narrowing down to resolve problems, and I'm not sure such people could become developers without this ability.
There are are also formalized methods of teaching how diagnostics. And training on how to teach it. So yes, you can teach a monkey how to teach another monkey to do X.
That feedback loop from student to teacher, is similar to a problem that you tried to fix, and it still doesn't work. You then need to adapt, just as the teacher monkey would need to when the student monkey did not understand what was being taught. How you adapt to the input from that feedback can not be taught, because the particular feedback that one will receive in the future cannot be predicated (for complex troubleshooting etc).
Sorry for bad monkey examples. :)
Between learning to program and learning to practice law, once you get past your chosen programming language's syntax and a few core CS concepts - learning to program is much easier.
I have the feeling that a lot of people can believe they have learned to program while all what they did is to go past their chosen programming language syntax and grasped a few core CS concepts.
That's quite a low barrier to entry, but if that's what people mean when they hear the word "programming", then I'd argue that Software Engineering would be a better name for the field we're here comparing with practising law.
Programming education is totally ad-hoc and you can be a great programmer even with a degree in agriculture.
Yes, do consider.
In many, many cases the appropriate answer is "whatever stack you're familiar with".
In maybe 10% of cases the answer will boil down to technical requirements and you'll need familiarity with "Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..."
And that's where the bimodal distribution comes from.
> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught
I don't know a lot about the law.
But if you think that MDs are not "self-taught" in the same way bootcamp graduates or CS graduates are "self-taught", you should talk to an MD some time.
> The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.
+1024
I have said quite a few times that the best CS program is one where you learn how to learn without being spoon fed. In fact, I know a couple great programmers who were _not_ CS (one studied econ; the other, physics), and they similarly learned how to learn without being spoon fed.
I chose to avoid computer science degrees because in those days, in the late 90's, it was pretty much 80-90% math classes. I don't regret getting a degree in a totally different discipline: it turns out learning philosophy, history, linguistics, writing, etc. etc. was far useful to me as a person (and, arguably, a worker) than some boring math classes ever would have been.
Have comp sci curriculums improved in that time? Given that job interviews these days last 4-8 hours, require group approval and whiteboarding in front of an audience, I would argue, NO. Obviously, no one trusts the degree.
Most professional programmers would put in more hours of hands on programming in a months work.
You could add another layer to what you are saying as do you want to build apps? platforms? or enterprise line of business software? if so you need to know entirely different stacks. Then you need to know what is important to being "good" at the chosen stack.
This is just a long winded way of agreeing with you, there are vast amounts of knowledge required to "make it". Most importantly you cant ever feel like you know enough and stop trying to learn. I took about 12 months off from stretching myself and now I feel 3 years behind...
Continuing with the example from the article: law and medicine are also hard. Try teaching those to the same set of people.
> Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge.
Programmers are not at all unique in their need to understand significant domain knowledge. Essentially every knowledge-based field, including those with licensing barriers to entry, also have this requirement (and arguably to a greater extent).
> And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.
Lawyers and doctors must also keep current with their field and the industry in general. If anything, the degree to which they must keep up with their respective fields seems to be a difference of degree when compared to software developers, not of category.
I don’t think any of this difficulty is the reason why programming enjoys high salaries, because (circling back to the article’s thesis), it isn’t distinct from other fields with higher barriers to entry in that respect.
Law and medicine also trend towards bimodal compensation.
There is an enourmous earnings difference between the top echelon of lawyers and all the other lawyers.
Same thing for specialist surgeons.
And yet there are a lot of examples of companies that got it wrong, picked objectively-shitty options, and still succeeded massively and then had the money to pour into cleaning up the resulting messes.
There's countless options, but they don't seem to matter as much as people believe. As much as it would be nice to think Lisp is a superweapon and it's easy to replicate Paul Graham's stories, that's not what's happening in the market.
There's an interesting split the OP discusses that seems to largely be a B2C vs B2B thing. With a few exceptions at the high end, many of the winners in both of these spaces aren't determined by "purely better technology" but by other things. However, in the B2B space, battles can be won much more easily on the strength of salespeople and business strategy, whereas in the consumer space, it requires more skilled implementation of ideas - great UX doesn't require technically great programming, but it requires competent execution of the original idea, in a way that a medical records system sold to a hospital administration board doesn't.
And they typically have to pay enormous sums of money to hire the talent required to clean up.
This is large part helps create the bimodal compensation model.
There are plenty of apps out there today which support millions of users but didn't choose the most optimal database, wasn't well architected, and has mountains of sloppy technical debt.
And that is only half the job. You also have to practice, a lot.
I think "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" is about right http://norvig.com/21-days.html
You can learn academic computer science, or know a lot of trivia about programming and computers, but without years of dedicated practice it doesn't translate into actual productivity.
Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.
The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.
While there are specialisms, such as game development or embedded development, most programmers are expected to be generalists. You may find yourself needing to write networking code, and there's a whole bunch of knowledge that goes along with that. Or, many programmers end up having a working knowledge of cryptography.
Sure, almost anybody can learn JavaScript or Python, and write code, but learning a programming language is only 1% of the job.