[sheepmullet]

> Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented

The key difference is in the medical world safety has been a primary concern from day one.

I.e. There has always been a high level of professionalism.

That is not true in the software world.

Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a rush job of this surgery and it will probably work out fine.

I've seen devs happily check in shoddy work just to be finished hundreds of times in my career.

[sgift]

> Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a rush job of this surgery and it will probably work out fine.

Imaging right now. No problem. Humans are humans. Humans sometimes do rush jobs. Or are overworked. Or stressed. Maybe they have private problems, so their mind isn't 100% on the task.

Your suggestion that doctors are all professionals and wouldn't do such things is actually the exact opposite of the medicine professions conclusions: Humans make errors. Doctors, software developers, we all. And what helps to fix these things are better tools and allowing other people to check something (see above, nurses training to question doctors is exactly for this problems).

[Turing_Machine]

> Imaging right now. No problem.

Same here.

While some argue that the medical malpractice system has been abused, I don't think anyone argues that genuine malpractice doesn't exist. It happens all the time. As you say, doctors are human beings, and sometimes they get lazy, careless, or overworked.

[sheepmullet]

> Imaging right now. No problem. Humans are humans

> Your suggestion that doctors are all professionals

I'm saying the level of professionalism displayed by doctors is way above the average level of professionalism in software development.

I've worked in QA and have had dozens of developers blatantly lie to me.

How many doctors routinely lie and deliberately mislead their coworkers or their patients? 20%? 30%?

I've been a hiring manager and have interviewed hundreds of software developers and a huge proportion have misrepresented their actual skill set.

How many surgeons will claim they are experts in X surgery when in truth they sat in on an X surgery once while in med school?

What proportion of doctors knowingly push suboptimal solutions because it looks good on their resume or because they personally find it interesting?

[maxxxxx]

"I've seen devs happily check in shoddy work just to be finished hundreds of times in my career"

From my experience a developer who does everything the correct way and takes his time do so has no chance of surviving in most companies. There is a lot of pressure from leadership to get things done quickly even if quality is compromised.

[blub]

I don't know about that... Doctors famously didn't even wash their hands between patients.

In fact many still don't. The best practices and process-oriented thinking seem to not be uniformly spread.

I'm also reading Normal Accidents by Perrow and what he says about nuclear safety up to the 80s (that's when the book was published) is scary.

My thoughts: our safest endeavours look and feel safe, but they are still more failure-prone than one would assume and making them safer is incredibly hard because of social, technical and human issues exhibiting hidden coupling - system issues.

[ZeroGravitas]

In an article about Medical safety I read they mentioned the numerous (!) times that someone got the wrong leg amputated, and at least one of the medical staff in the room knew that it was the wrong leg but were scared of being targetted for abuse if they publicly corrected their superiors.

This doesn't fit my personal definition of "professionalism".

[sbergot]

This an interesting article about medical processes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

The gist of it is that introducing a checklist for bloodline infection prevention had an enormous impact on survival. It was still difficult to introduce the process.

[tempodox]

You don't seem to know much about the history and evolution of medicine.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Your comment is correct but getting downvotes (including mine) because of its tone / manner of statement. Don't say "You don't know anything about X", say "You don't seem to know about X, here are examples A, B, C... etc."