You guys must be KIDDING me! Lmfaoroft, still laughing!

I am presently studying and learning Medicine with human beings in a "teaching hospital", and also studying and learning I.T with "textbooks/materials in my bedroom".

Atleast am not dead yet- So, pls stop bullshitting my sense of reality.

As a certified systems engineer (MCSE) and CCNA, I will tell you that computing is very interesting.  I never knew anything about computing during my undergraduate studies in Nigeria.  But I felt and knew the importance of learning computing when I did my postgraduate studies in UK.  I had to rely on other people to type my assignments and even mt thesis.  I felt very much intimidated by the computer.  I therefore felt that it was a big challenge for me to learn IT.  First I started with some basics such as word processing, excel and access and went on to do PC maintenance and support.  Then I did a bit of Visual Basic programming.  I was more than amazed at the rate I enjoyed all these courses and how fast I passed all the exams.  Having got the necessary background and confidence, I then decided to go professional and take on the more difficult exams.  I had to make a choice between doing programming or networking.  After due consideration, I decided to take on networking as I felt that programming would require my looking at the monitor for several hours every day.  Then I considered that my sight is not very good and sitting on the computer and looking at the monitor several hour every day could worsen my sight problem.  So I decided to go for networking.  I combined my training for MCSE with my lecturership job in London.  I was able to complete the course and all my exams within six months.  I then went on to do Cisco (CCNA) and later qualified as Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). I also passed ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence).

On the other hand I cannot stand the sight of blood and generally dislike working in a hospital environment.  Hence studying medice is completely out of the way for me.  All I can say is that no profession is harder than the other.  It all depends on a person's choice and inclination.

IT is harder than Medicine

kayci_d77:

Medical Doctors stop reading once thy have been employ to give injection to patients,  if IT engineers like me stop reading, my ppl, you will still be using Nokia 3310 instead of BlackBerry, Ipad and Ipod, by now , Ordinary HIV they cant even find the cure for it

Wow that cow dung wrapped with toilet paper that u re smoking is the ish 

IT requires u keep calculating n having a plan B even if plan A is gonna work but IT is interesting, u encounter new things each day.

none is hard cos whateva u set ur mind to do will be damn eazy

I.T. is harder. All the materials the medicine use are invented through I.T.

There's no way I.T is harder than medicine.
Actually, if you view I.T like some kind of video game it actually gets easier.
(especially configurations like routing and switching ; there's a definite pattern and the outcome is consistent)

As for Medicine, only the size of the books and those gigantic words; no thanks.
Then diagnosis: Working with devices in I.T, you can recreate the problem (in most cases  ) apply possible solutions but
troubleshooting a human being and resolving the issues ? ?  he he.


(P.S : in the poll, how can you have "both" ?  Na wa.  and ppl actually voted for both are harder? ? ? ?)

If you are in IT and you think it is difficult, it is probably not for you. Likewise, if you are a doctor and you think medicine is difficult, it is probably not for you. Essentially, making comparison is worthless when dealing with two fundamentally different professions. In learning, two factors are important; nature (cognitive potential) and nurture (pure hard work). If you have the intellectual attributes to be a doctor, it is not difficult. Likewise, if you have the intellectual attributes to be a programmer, then it should not be difficult. Hence, not everyone who is good at IT can be good at being a doctor and vice versa. There is a segment of people that can be good at both.

Having said all these, medical training is lengthy, rigorous and requires absolute dedication. So, there may be more obstacles to cross and any person no matter how intellectually gifted can fail at any of the obstacles that is required before you become a good doctor. Remember, the first degree [MB;BS) in Nigeria is just the beginning of learning how to be a good physician.

Financial reword is irrelevant in this topic.

Disclosure: I am a doctor.

For sure IT is harder. I didn't pay anybody to teach me that dogwoyaro will cure malaria.

well u can do without medicine but i think [b]IT [/b]is complex

There is a very challenging branch of IT we are overlooking which is security, it can consume your life span. when I was preparing for my CCNA exams as an undergraduate, I often go on a reading marathon with some medical students and they could not stand my stamina. I usually go for 12-14 hours at a stretch and they get exhausted.
They confronted me and wanted to know about IT. When I moved into Computer security, my neighbors thought I have gone mad because I sleep two hours daily and glued myself to my laptop for about a year. In medicine you have to be diligent and consistent, but in IT you have to be smart and creative.

medoski:

There is a very challenging branch of IT we are overlooking which is security, it can consume your life span.

LMAO.
I.T is a life-long profession.
Yea, I.T security is not easy at all; the I.T security guys (enterprise level) in my work place all behave like weirdos.
It can drive a full grown man insane in the membrane.


@medoski : if you read I.T couses without ample practicals (virtual or real instance hands-on exercises) you may find it labourious.
With hands-on its not so hard and you will be able to answer questions you havent even read about that way.

Doctors don't invent medicines, pharmacists do.
Doctors don't even diagnose intrusively, medical lab scientists and radiologists do.
Doctors don't invent medical equipment, biomedical engineers do.

An IT/programming guru does ALL of the above in IT. He/She writes machine level codes: firmware and BIOS.
To do deep stuff, they don't even use IDEs because they need to design something that works across different programming languages (cross platform).
They brainstorm and create things all their lives.

Doctors only do peripheral diagnosis and issue prescriptions.

How can anyone even compare the two?

Medicine is never like IT,,, there is no CTRL+ALT+DEL button,,, u messing with peoples lifes,, how is that easy,, Hell yeah medicine is very hard and there are so much subspecialities in medicine thats crazy,,, it takes 7 years to train a neurosurgeon here in US and thats after 4 years of medical school, thats just 11 years and they have to go for training every 10 years, what u talking about IT, i cant believe we are making this assumption here,, there is a reason why society pays them more than IT professionals,,oh yeah, IT jobs are being moved to India and other asian countries. DELL, HP. IBM. all their IT departments are all based in india to save money.
Medicine is a broad speciality with up to 30 different subspecialities. When u making this comparism, remenber, u are dealing with people's life. u cant switch to version 2.1 or download updates or fix bugs. When the heart stop beating, shes gone. U can only perform an autopsy to know what went wrong. There is so much we dont know in medicine or how our body works, its crazy. calm down people.
There is a reason medicine is called a Noble profession

Wao what a comparism, Smartness is relative in this sense. IT like Maths involves logic and lots of thinking. Medicine requires lots and lots of painstaking sacrifice. (at least for the good doctors). It actually depends, but to study medicine you would need to be a good reader,

Misleading title. IT is not programming.

The only part of IT remotely brain racking is programming and a lot of people run away from it.

networking or security is not in any way challenging thats why u see a lot of folks jumping into these areas

Even though programming is very challenging i don't think it is as hard as Medicine.

One reason could be because you can self teach yourself programming but i have never seen any self tot doctor

I see some ppl on this forum saying that an error in IT (programming) does not have severe consequences as does in Medicine. Could you imagine what would happen if there was a critical systems failure in mid-air on an Air Bus A380 (capacity 500 passengers) due programmer error on the software that controls the on-board computer systems. Or what would happen if a nuclear warhead malfunction due to a software failure ? I think it all depends on which areas of IT you are talking about, in sensitive areas such as aviation, military etc, there is no room for errors.

Going back to the topic , I would say both are hard depending how you view them. Medicine is serious stuff considering you are dealing with human life.

On the other side, IT ( programming ) is serious stuff too and in addition ( if you are into stuff like programming ) you need to understand lots of things/processes in other professions to be able to develop a software to help them do their jobs, so in effect as an IT professional ( programmer), you will be looking into Medicine a bit ( to be able to develop software to help doctors), banking and finance ( to be able to build applications for the banking industry) etc, so this makes IT even more harder. Just writing a piece of code is not good enough to call yourself a programmer, you need to also understand the business of the people (Doctors,Engineers, Accountants etc) you are trying to help

Everything is hard for Africans.

Hmmmmmm,

Very technical sentence. As an IT professional, i am tempted to support the motion but as a learned chap i would say there are no empirical facts to prove or disprove this theory. Both fields are very vast and technical.

This is my sincere opinion.

Physics is the hardest,

E = Mc2 = Hiroshima bombing (Blast, Heat wave, then radiation, doctors and IT people go fear)

I am an IT Person and I will rather give it to medicine, IT is just too straight forward to me; once you understand the fundamental. IT is just like a computer game, once you understand the basis, getting to the end might take a whole lot of time but you would get there. Each stage of IT programme brings a fulfilment and joy to the programmer, but I don't think medicine is like that, to me, it is somehow difficult, it takes alot of difficult study time with no assurance; IT also takes alot of study time but there will be assurance at the end of the tunnel.

candylips:

The only part of IT remotely brain racking is programming and a lot of people run away from it.

networking or security is not in any way challenging thats why u see a lot of folks jumping into these areas

, wrong, not only programming involves brain racking, enterprise IT security and enterprise networking are nightmares, there are always many ways bad guys can hack your system which u have to be constantly on your toes guarding against.

candylips:

Even though programming is very challenging i don't think it is as hard as Medicine.

One reason could be because you can self teach yourself programming but i have never seen any self tot doctor

, true, very true

Back to the topic, i have been a programmer for over 7yrs and it has been fun all the way, there have been challenges, but you get past them, and what more, without losing a single life.

paulo882:

I see some ppl on this forum saying that an error in IT (programming) does not have severe consequences as does in Medicine. Could you imagine what would happen if there was a critical systems failure in mid-air on an Air Bus A380 (capacity 500 passengers) due programmer error on the software that controls the on-board computer systems. Or what would happen if a nuclear warhead malfunction due to a software failure ? I think it all depends on which areas of IT you are talking about, in sensitive areas such as aviation, military etc, there is no room for errors.

On the other side, IT ( programming ) is serious stuff too and in addition ( if you are into stuff like programming ) you need to understand lots of things/processes in other professions to be able to develop a software to help them do their jobs

true, very true


Generally, medicine at the MBBS level is tougher than IT, but IT on a life-affecting level as embedded systems for time-critical systems in mass deployments is a no-failure-allowed area

Let me ask all that says medicine is harder than IT: When you were in senior secondary school, was biology more difficult than Mathematics and Physics? Speak the truth!

I will like to correct some misconception about IT. Most people that call themselves IT professionals are more of an advanced users of IT infrastructer and not the creator of 'IT '. Imagine having to write the code to implement the windows server 2008 or creating code that implements the ZFS on a solaris box where You have to do some mathematically complex stuff and 'explain' it to the dumb thing in an easy to understand way. IT can be quite complex if you look at the overall system that makes it up. But the job function has been so much abstracted and organised that in 30 yrs it has achieved what other fields could not achieve in a 100yrs. I am Physicst and I can tell u that thanks to IT there wouldn't have been a way to understand huge data coming from the large hadron collider.

Medicine is also an equally difficult subject to master.It takes time to build the momentum but after you start you can run smoothly with little effort. I can tell you this cause my grandfather was a pharmacist and @ 90 yrs of age he can still 'diagonise' and prescribe the drugs to use for an aliment . Try doing that in IT say Programming or even networks . I can tell by the time you are 90 they will be programming with Z# or ErlanDrupal, more elaborate architecture will have sufficed So in IT it is easy to build momentum and become a user. I want to respond to a post that downplayed the Networks as being an easy field. Imagine you are working with google where there are so many clusters serving clients and different people with varied knowledge are also trying to attack your network. Then you will know it is not about CCNP but more about creativity and intelligence.

Medicine is tough. IT is tough. But If you my biased self : I wouldn't study medicine for all the tea in china. I don't like people complaining about their problems to me everyday and showing me their 'internals' I prefer to understand machines and how to protect those babies . Doctors welcome to te digital revolution.
ps: Maybe one day an intelligent system will be programmed to replace doctors Maybe .

Medicine is harder. This may be a biased answer 'cos I'm a doctor. But when I was in school the brainy students ended up in science class and the brainiest of the brainy ones ended up studying Medicine - as it usually has a high cut off point. You can argue that this has to do with it been competitive but methinks it is because it aint moin moin to study . Just try figuring out what a brain surgeon does !

persist:

ps: Maybe one day an intelligent system will be programmed to replace doctors Maybe .

very true, there will no need for medical doctors, we will only require medical researchers  

abeg i'm surprised anyone is even asking this question, do you know how long it takes for someone to become a medical practitioner? meanwhile you have kids who don't even have a college degree who are i.t. practitioners - it doesn't matter what field, it's possible to find a 17 yr old who is very familiar in some i.t field (and the person doesn't even necessarily have to be brilliant in maths either)

oh and by the way i'm into I.T. not medicine

It all depends on your perspective and inclination like most peeps here have said.

I am married to Medical Dr. She has her 1st degree in Biochemistry from a Nigerian University.

Then went on to do Pre-Med here in the U.S. all the while juggling school and kids. Just as I was going to think hurray respite is here, She passed the MCAT and got admitted into Baylor Medical School and our life and money was not the same for over four years. She got up some nights and Didn't even know what She was reading but with prayers and a strong determination She's pulled through and now starting to reap the benefits but mehn it was H-A-R-D I lie not. Sometimes I'm scared to compute all the Years She's spent studying to become and O & G.

Hrm. Certainly as far as qualifications to enter the two fields goes, IT is a lot easier than medicine. You don't even need to study computer science in college to do IT. You can major in English (or some other field having nothing to do with technology) and later switch to IT after purchasing some books from O'Reilly or something (And even that is overkill, for most areas of IT, no more than a high school education is needed.)

Obviously, the prerequisites for practicing medicine are a lot higher and thus the quality/competence of your average doctor is a lot higher than that of your average IT pro (at least, in my opinion.)

With that said, the top-end software engineering guys (the guys at Microsoft, Google, and the like) imo are of pretty excellent quality and can match up with anyone in the world.