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This is true for any field, including medicine.

Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to understand how mitosis works, etc...

The same is also true in finance. People who do model equity index volatility don't remember at all how to derive the equation for put-call parity.

In each of these fields there are people who study each of the fundamentals, and then there are people who do more routine "code monkey" work in a narrow area - think chiropractor or vanilla stock trade execution.

Programming is not unique.




> Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to understand how mitosis works, etc...

A psychiatrist has to obtain an MD degree before they can start to study their chosen specialty. There's a reason for that: before you can treat a psychiatric illness, you have to be able to eliminate all other possible causes for the condition. I for one would not want to be treated by a psychiatrist that couldn't distinguish bipolar disorder from brain cancer.


> chiropractor

I'm not sure that this example is making the point you wanted to make. There's a reason we have Docotors/Pharmacists/Physios and don't reply on Chiropractory / Homeopathy. It's because we want to get better.


I'm a homeopathic programmer. I fix huge terrible consequential bugs by adding lots of similar small diluted bugs.


Haha. Fixing an off-by-one error by adding an off-by-10^-10.




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