TITLE: The Difference Between Medicine and Being a Doctor Is Like ...
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 03, 2022  9:00 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 Morgan Housel's recent piece on
<a href="https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/trying-too-hard/">
   experts trying too hard</a>
 includes a sentence that made me think of what I teach:

<blockquote><em>
 A doctor once told me the biggest thing they don't teach in medical school
 is the difference between medicine and being a doctor &mdash; medicine is
 a biological science, while being a doctor is often a social skill of
 managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating
 effectively, and so on.
</em></blockquote>

 Most of the grads from our CS program go on to be software developers or
 to work in software-adjacent jobs like database administrator or web
 developer.  Most of the rest work in system administration or networks.
 Few go on to be academic computer scientists.  As Housel's doctor knows
 about medicine, there is a difference between academic computer science
 and being a software developer.

 The good news is, I think the CS profs at many schools are aware of this,
 and the schools have developed computer science programs that at least
 nod at the difference in their coursework.  The CS program at my school
 has a course on software engineering that is more practical than
 theoretical, and another short course that teaches practical tools such
 as version control, automated testing, and build tools, and skills such
 as writing documentation.  All of our CS majors complete a large project
 course in which students work in teams to create a piece of software or
 a secure system, and the practical task of working as a team to deliver
 a piece of working software is a focus of the course.  On top of those
 courses, I think most of our profs try to keep their courses real for
 students they know will want to apply what they learn in Algorithms, say,
 or Artificial Intelligence in their jobs as developers.

 Even so, there is always a tension in classes between building foundational
 knowledge and building practical skills.  I encounter this tension in both
 Programming Languages and Translation of Programming Languages.  There are
 a lot of cool things we could learn about type theory, some of which might
 turn out to be quite useful in a forty-year career as a developer.  But
 any time we devote to going deeper on type theory is time we can't devote
 to the concrete languages skills of a software developer, such as learning
 and creating APIs or the usability of programming languages.

 So, we CS profs have to make design trade-offs in our courses as we try to
 balance the forces of students learning computer science and students
 becoming software developers.  Fortunately, we learn a little bit about
 recognizing, assessing, and making trade-offs in our work both as computer
 scientists and as programmers.  That doesn't make it easy, but at least we
 have some experience for thinking about the challenge.

 The sentence quoted above reminds me that other disciplines face a similar
 challenge.  Knowing computer science is different from being a software
 developer, or sysadmin.  Knowing medicine is different from being a doctor.
 And, as Housel explains so well in his own work, knowing finance is
 different from being an investor, which is usually more about psychology
 and self-awareness than it is about net present value or alpha ratios.
 (The current stock market is a rather harsh reminder of that.)

 Thanks to Housel for the prompt.  The main theme of his piece &mdash; that
 experts makes mistakes that novices can't make, which leads to occasional
 unexpected outcomes &mdash; is the topic for another post.
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