Medicine versus Computer Science: Business Paradigm Parallels?
Part I
The practice of medicine has been around as long as man has had maladies to some extent. Most "maladies" in those days were, of course, primarily fatal. I'm not particularly interested in these times though. Instead, let's start out circa 1900. Physicians began to develop theories about how the body functioned. The accepted principle that the body was essentially composed entirely of four body humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile seemed suddenly inadequate. So called "modern" medicine was being born about the time that phlebotomy was suddenly labeled quackery.
Until the mid twentieth century, physicians, it's safe to say, were exclusively what we now refer to as general practitioners (do we still have those?). The physician, as a general practitioner, was the ipso de facto expert and acme authority on the body and it's still mysterious function. Herald the palpable exponential explosion of medical knowledge since then.
An inflated knowledge base propagates diversification of specialization. Naturally, the basic medical knowledge is taught to all physicians but hence physicians are encouraged to specialize in an ever increasingly narrow field of practice. Through the practice of a specific field, it is in the human potential to gain experience and become increasingly proficient in that field. No single doctor can realistically expect to be sufficiently proficient in more than a single specialization - the overwhelming body of basic knowledge - which continues to grow - is simply too great.
The prevalence of "dynamic-knowledge" careers is definitely in the majority in a knowledge and technologically based society. There are exceptions of course. Learn to butcher a bovine, teach mathematics, or structurally engineer a building and one is pretty much set for life. [Note: rich pure&simple,as always, never intends to intentionally denigrate or calumniate any person or profession. If I naively did here, please excuse my ignorance; simply "feed me"] I.E. In the specific case of the structural engineer, while "tools" may advance in quality and efficiency, the underlying mathematics remain constant; apply a stress moment to a beam and the beam has to be so-in-so size to accommodate it. Period.
Part II
Lets repeat the lineage from "Part I". In 1946, the first general purpose computer was born. The electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC)*. Strangely, although computers themselves became more sophisticated, not much changed in the world of programming said computers other than as above, a markedly diminutive advance in "tools". At the end of that day, you still had one "programmer" solving one potentially automated solution in the contemporary computer language of the day - FORTRAN.
rich pure&simply arrived on the programming scene in about 1978 and not much had changed. Of note, DEC had a text formatting tool called Runoff which would eventually become HTML and ultimately the internet.
Once more, flash forward to 2003.
This concept becomes a bit more personal now. And that is one of employment.
In the world of automation, I've been privy to three distinct generations. There was the mainframe and dumb terminal phase. Then came client-server. And finally internet technology (IT). Just as in the case of the medical world, the so-called "computer expert" is no more. If one states, "I'm in computers", that just is an inadequate amount of information nowadays with regard to actual job description. Just as in the medical profession, the "computer expert" has become specialized in an increasingly narrowly defined niche.
Businesses, at the least the profitable ones, tend to select a carefully defined "solution" and stick with it. Kind of a "If it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Changing fundamental technological solutions has become a pricey affair. Being on the so-called bleeding edge technologically can frequently have huge deleterious consequences due to fact that software tools produced by the likes of Microsoft are increasingly hurried to market these days - converting the role of the customer into the alpha/beta tester at the customer's expense and harangue.
In part, due to the reluctance by employers to change "solution" platforms for reasons already described, invites the "computer professional" to change jobs in order to stay au courante as it were.
I won't for a moment say that experience in the field of computers is not a legitimately tangible resource but this is where the medical and the computer science paradigms diverge. While the way in which physicians investigate, study and interpret the human body have certainly changed through the years, the human body itself has not changed. Not so computers and computer technology.
When one leaves the "day in and day out" of a given technology, a person generally forgets its specifics. Not the technology itself but more the nuances and intricacies of that technology or specific tool therein. So basically the strengths or employability of that computer professional are centered around what he or she is currently involved in. For example, the people-soft software that one was involved with a mere five years ago has suddenly so significantly evolved as to be virtually unrecognizable by a professional who was professionally imbedded in it in as little as five years ago. Nothing in said professional's resume is in fact viable previous to a five year's period. And that fact simply reinforces the notion of one's own niche - that which one is involved with right now.
Companies these days have very little regard for their employees' knowledge capital because that knowledge capital becomes obsolete very quickly and thus those that are somewhat expert in current technology can be had for entry level salaries in most cases. The potential employers desire only those that are an "expert" at whatever technological "solution" to which they currently adhere and that opens the potential employment opportunity to a select minority - those in other jobs adhering to the same solution. I feel that in no other professional field does the market so selectively specialize that employment opportunities become so few because of the nature of the ever changing beast that is the computer industry and accompanying software suites. That's why I'm so depressed right now. My head hurts. I'm going to kill myself now - or go surfing - one of the two.
*It was 10 feet tall, occupied 1,000 square feet of floor- space, weighed in at approximately 30 tons, and used more than 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 18,000 vacuum tubes. The final machine required 150 kilowatts of power, which was enough to light a small town. Nowadays, this sort of gargantuan lives on a single chip.
11:41:39 AM 
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