The square peg problem
14 min read
Every cohort has a version of this conversation: someone with a decade of clinical practice sits across from someone with a computer science degree and half their age, and assumes the comparison runs one direction.
The comp sci cohort has a real advantage, and it is smaller than it looks
They are faster with syntax. They have already built things with a keyboard, so the tools feel less like an obstacle. That is a genuine head start in the first semester, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours.
What the clinical cohort has that does not show up on a syllabus
You know what breaks in practice. You know that a beautifully designed order set fails the moment a busy nurse has eleven seconds to use it. You know which workarounds a workflow will generate before it ships, because you have lived inside workflows that generated them. This is not a soft skill footnote, it is the actual constraint that most systems fail against.
The pattern, stated plainly
Systems built by people who never touched the workflow they are automating tend to be technically correct and operationally wrong. The square peg cohort, the ones who came from the ward, the pharmacy, the clinic floor, are disproportionately the ones who catch this before launch, not after.
What to do with this if it is you
Stop treating your clinical background as the thing you are behind despite. It is the thing the comp sci cohort spends years trying to acquire secondhand, through shadowing and stakeholder interviews, and you already have it. Learn the syntax. Keep the instinct. Do not trade one for the other.