Nigerians sha.
Must something be 'harder' than the other?

Programming can never be more difficult than medicine. Intellectual ability is not even the core skill required for medicine, though it is essential.
Apart from being studious and committed to research, you need to be mentally and emotionally stable, able to perform under a lot of pressure, make quick and risky decisions, and even be physically in optimum condition. If you're not good with your hands, for example, how much of a good surgeon would you be?

I would even go tongue in cheek to say that most Nigerian 'programmers', particularly the ones on this forum, are not skilled beyond PHP, Java, or some of the 4GLs like Visual Basic or similar technologies. You can shoot me if you please.

lol AJ. i respect Surgeons a lot.

like u said both require different skillsets so i wouldn't say one is 'harder' than the other

With this thread, i notice doctors or even medical students don't even see any need to participate in this crazy motion. They are prolly doing their shift, resting at home after a hard day's job, or don't even have time to laze around on some online forum gisting crap.

Example is the guy whose wife studied O & G in the U.S - It was her hubby that replied for her and i guess if she was to say something about what she thinks, y'all will keep shut and put your not too long I.T tails between your legs.

Doctors ve got lots on their minds and in their lives to deal with. That's why most good doctors are the quiet type. I see Nigerian programmers as very lousy and quite unreasonable.

zeeko:

I see Nigerian programmers as very lousy and quite unreasonable.

what gives u that impression

The reality is that every profession has its degree of difficulty. I still stand on my point that trying to compare the degree of difficulty in one profession to another is systemic route to saying one is essentially better than the other. I can still remember back in High School when science students had the notion that we were better than those in the arts (commerce students were even seen as losers) and this was based solely on one assumption - sciences are more tedious than the arts.

I'm sure many of us here are aware of how the line between medicine and Information Technology has become blurred to the point that both industries depend on each other to thrive. Many doctors today (I'm probably talking about societies where things work the way they should) cannot perform their duties without the full support of innovations within the IT sector. Likewise, the driving force within IT to come up with many technologically aided medical innovations has a lot to do with the knowledgeable and hardworking medical practitioners who continue to deal with intricate medical issues that are ultimately brought to the attention of the IT sector for simple but effecient technological solutions. Thus, this drives home the point that these two professions, as far as co-dependency is concerned, cannot exist in isolation.

@ blackweaver - I know our people, the moment we start measuring the degree of difficulty, we are getting into the realm of "which is more superior" and trust me, we've been indoctrinated into that ideology within our culture.

Going back to my previous post, I dare anyone to tell me that a doctor has it more difficult than a bricklayer (but if we were to apply our Nigerian upbringing, we all know what the unanimous answer will be). Every profession is unique in it's own way and trying to go on an expediction to discover which is "harder" will only amount to the denegration of one at the expense of the other.

It is high time we buried the mentality that one profession is essentially "more difficult" than the other. Believe me, progressive societies are where they are because they learned to abandon that mindset a long ago and have come to realize that every profession, no matter how "unskilled" it may seem, needs to be celebrated.

No clue why this thread is even going on. Your average IT professional is in no way, shape or form comparable intelligence/talent/salary-wise to your average doctor.

That should be a big hint.

Funny how a poster, bashr, who claimed to have studied medicine in the states and how anyone could do medicine, hasn't replied the query on the medical school he attended. Only on nairaland. psh!

zeeko:

With this thread, i notice doctors or even medical students don't even see any need to participate in this crazy motion. They are prolly doing their shift, resting at home after a hard day's job, or don't even have time to laze around on some online forum gisting crap.

Example is the guy whose wife studied O & G in the U.S - It was her hubby that replied for her and i guess if she was to say something about what she thinks, y'all will keep shut and put your not too long I.T tails between your legs.

Doctors ve got lots on their minds and in their lives to deal with. That's why most good doctors are the quiet type. I see Nigerian programmers as very lousy and quite unreasonable.

I agree with your posts but you know the sentences in bold are just your own personal stereotypes. Maybe the doctors you've met were quiet, some can be chatty. It's actually a good skill - being able to communicate, esp. for a pediatrician, makes the kids more comfortable. I think your comment is just a typical naija mentality  Being quiet has nothing to do with anything.

I am a programmer and a doctor's son. I can assure you that though I admire both fields, I dont see any reason why we should compare. Nigerians have this habit of useless/senseless competition.

I nearly became a doctor(besides the "inheritance" mentality) because of the studiousness I observed. Programmers may not deal with life but doctors do. The room for error is lower. You can program from a reference manual or do google copy and paste but the day you are wheeled into a theatre to be treated by a doctor whose source of knowledge is YouTube, run for the hills (even with anaesthesia in the system).

If only we programmers could gain encyclopedic knowledge of our chosen languages, techniques and frameworks the way doctors do we would be so so great. I daresay if Nigerian programmers (myself included) read half as much as the average medical student, this country would be a giant in the IT field.

That said, there are few fields in this world where Davids can kill  Goliaths like in IT. There is no other course that possesses the freedom of thought, applicability, creativity and dynamism like the IT field. Ever met a freelance programmer? thats one of the most entrepreneurial human beings you will be priviledged to meet (besides insurance agents, bank marketers and jewelry sellers). The emphasis on logical thought and detail also make disciplined IT people relatively versatile and rational.


It is a fact that while people worship doctors (go to a village and see how NYSC doctors live large), every one admires a true IT genius. there's just that aura of being with a "hallowed one" when in contact with such PC magicians.

The moral: lets not compete but learn from each other. Let the doctor learn our understanding of abstract structures and use it to improve the science of medicine and let us gain the academic practices of the doctors and use it to become true greats within our own field.

@ kodewrita - I think that sums it up. Nuff said

who do people typically refer to as geeks. Docs or IT guys

@kodewrita medicine will soon move to a level where doc learn new technique over d net. What then is the whole idea about telemedicine all about?

lekside44:

@kodewrita medicine will soon move to a level where doc learn new technique over d net. What then is the whole idea about telemedicine all about?

Soon? already being done in countless places. It still requires IT because While the doctors make use of it to achieve their own ends, IT (as service providers) will still play a role.

medical career is borin for me and ties me down , i find IT more exciting though challenging cause you have to keep making breakthroughs to be relevant. am very adventurous so medicine is not just my thing.

ekubear and chiogo , i first attended a caribbean medical school which is easier to enter then transfered back to american school. (na the koko these days).

i have been working on an IT project ,nairalander will be the first to see it when am done.

lekside44:

@kodewrita medicine will soon move to a level where doc learn new technique over d net. What then is the whole idea about telemedicine all about?

^-- That SGU one people always go to?

IT imo is boring and not that interesting. I dunno, it depends on what specific area you are working on. But by and large, monkeying around with code is pretty dull and tedious.

eku_bear:

^-- That SGU one people always go to?

IT imo is boring and not that interesting. I dunno, it depends on what specific area you are working on. But by and large, monkeying around with code is pretty dull and tedious.

Only if you never create anything of note. True masters of any art do not find it boring. A sure sign that you need a different career is a feeling of tedium at even simple tasks.

^-- Fair point. But how many people here realistically have created software of note? Say, software that is used by 1000s of others or is a mainstream solution for a problem?

How many here are "true master's"? Fraction is very small.

Ultimately, that is the point. . . your typical IT professional adds a lot less value than your typical doc.

just to clarify. programming is just a part of IT. its not the whole thing.

JAMB motors along nicely on the back of so many web admins. So many companies in nigeria including our banks run on IT and our lives nowadays depend more on IT than we think. There are those in IT who create new things and there are those who keep the new/old stuff running. Its the same as in medicine. there are researchers and there are surgeons/practitioners.

It depends on the point of view.


however,there's a scary question for myself and other IT people. If WW III happened and all the electricity vanished, how will we survive? doctors can just team up with their pharmacist friends and get right to it but we would be out of a job!!! scary.

eku_bear:

^-- Fair point. But how many people here realistically have created software of note? Say, software that is used by 1000s of others or is a mainstream solution for a problem?

How many here are "true master's"? Fraction is very small.

Ultimately, that is the point. . . your typical IT professional adds a lot less value than your typical doc.

If we were talking about societies that were driven by hi-tech, one could even say maybe IT professionals add a lot of value. Not Nigeria where the government functions manually, and IT is still regarded as some kind of fringe science by the general populace.

In fact, only the private sector, especially the MNCs, derive any value from IT in Nigeria. Even the value there is debatable. In my company, there are expensive finance and ERP applications deployed, and you still find that the company has to hire virtually an army of accountants, work very late processing invoices manually, and generally do all their reporting from Excel.

It's only in Nigeria that people lift up their shoulders and say 'I'm an IT man', like it was some sort of chieftaincy title. My brother'in-law in the US specialises in a not so known area of medicine. He actually built software by himself, using Visual Basic, to aid his clinical processes.

We need to change the way we look at all these things. Mind you, I have functioned as an IT person in the past, so I'm not bad-belleing them, just saying my own.

bashr4:

ekubear and chiogo , [b]i first attended a caribbean medical school [/b]which is easier to enter then transfered back to american school. (na the koko these days).

Well, that explains it. But don't tell me it's easy to get into a medical school/study medicine in the States. You obviously transferred for a reason.

Smh. Next you'll have a guy who did his degree in CS from some 3th tier US school and is working tech support at Best Buy diss the medical profession 

All I gotta say is that if any of ya'll have relatives who are intelligent/talented enough to pursue either career, likely you'll pack them off to medical school. Should be enough to tell you which is a better career.