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Couple of points:
1. Medical Industry deals with living patients, and each of us has a (slightly/largely?) different response to the same treatment (because of a variety of factors - genetics, lifestyle, habits, stage of ailment, etc.)
2. Because of this different response (complications in extreme cases), the type and duration of treatment are likely to be different for each patient.
Therefore, a fixed-price model may not always work.
Can we compare this with a bug-fixing type of software project, where the type and criticality of bugs is unknown; where a Time & Material pricing model is more suitable? (comparing an ailment to a bug/set-of-bugs).
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Amarnath S wrote: Therefore, a fixed-price model may not always work.
That's a load of nonsense. Software development also deals with unknowns and yet they still price better than that.
There's nothing preventing them from doing flat rates or rates by procedure even if it's more then one procedure. And there's certainly nothing preventing them from knowing how much a procedure would cost regardless if it needed to happen to or not. There's no honest or transparent billing schedule and it's on purpose.
Amarnath S wrote: Can we compare this with a bug-fixing type of software project, where the type and criticality of bugs is unknown; where a Time & Material pricing model is more suitable? (comparing an ailment to a bug/set-of-bugs).
Clearly, you've never hired anymore or a vendor. You may want to think a bit more about what you're saying.
To this point though, time and material is at least comparable to a fee schedule for unplanned procedures, if you're trying to quantify the unknown. And that can be priced by procedure. The vast, vast majority of procedures and ancillary procedures are known however. Which means, you have at least two options for upfront billing models.
Also, side note, time is what rookies do, but that's irrelevant.
There is zero reason why people cannot give an estimation or fee schedule upfront. Regardless of whether or not that fee schedule includes time or not. Zero. No real vendor does that. One that's actually in business instead of just spouting theory online.
Jeremy Falcon
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Fair enough.
I can only write from my experience, and that too, in India; cannot tell about other places.
- I was hospitalized in 2021, and they initially said 3 days of hospital stay. And we paid the appropriate amount (i don't have medical insurance). But the stay extended for 6 days, and the amount doubled. This is what I meant by non Fixed Cost.
- While working, the neighbouring office was an Offshore Development Centre, in India. There were about 100 people working of fixing OS bugs, some of them kernel type of bugs, for a Unix flavour. The centre ran for about 8 or 9 years, and was run on a T&M basis.
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There's nothing preventing anyone from having a fixed cost per day for a hospital stay. Doesn't matter if you stay 3 days or 30 days it's simple addition. Hotels do it all the time. There's also nothing from knowing the price of a primary or secondary procedure before it's performed. The time simple fact is they don't want to tell you upfront so you can't shop around.
Jeremy Falcon
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In India, the prices of primary and secondary procedures (both diagnostic like CT, MR, Ultrasound, etc. and treatment like surgeries, etc.) are told upfront, in most big hospitals (of course exceptions are there where hospitals lose their human touch and become crassly commercial, but they are exceptional cases).
And further, there are a number of Government run hospitals and charitable ones (professionally run), where even angioplasty and bypass surgeries are done at highly concessional rates.
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That just gives more credence to my point... it's completely possible. Over here in the US, they don't even give us that info. It's a just sign here and we'll charge whatever we want later on.
Jeremy Falcon
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Perhaps the lesser prevalence of medical insurance in India makes hospitals to state upfront the diagnostic / treatment expenses, to the patient. Because a significant percentage of people use personal funds for healthcare, and need ball park estimates.
However medical insurance is gradually increasing, and maybe after 50 years, the situation in India may become like US.
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They do it because they can. No one does comparison shopping or gets multiple quotes before going in for emergency surgery. The best anyone does is to ensure that the hospital & surgeon are in their insurer's network.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Thanks for the intelligent reply, Daniel. Some peeps can't see outside the box they live in, ya know. 
Jeremy Falcon
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US Medical Industry.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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Doctors, lawyers and consultants are all similar.
You pay regardless of if they fail or succeed.
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Questions
Is it Maintained?
Do you look for it or just explore the code?
What do you do if it is not there?
Is the code documenting itself good enough?
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(nervous laugh) Hahahahaha deep breath Hahahahaha!!!
When I'm going through undocumented legacy code, I write code comments worthy of a 1st year college student.
If there are function comments, I'll check them, add missing parameters comments and stuff like that.
We lost many, many years of expertise (retirements) in a short amount of time; so there is a lot of documentation going on.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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similar boat to you with retirements and a vast change in staff
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Never trust documentation. There is no guarantee the last developer updated it when they changed the code. You can read it as a guide. So trust, but verify.
Hogan
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ditto Snorkie Going on 40 yrs of reading, writing, editing code, both mine and others.
Could not agree more.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I hate that, and it's why I lean toward not commenting, and expressing intent through code, wherever I can.
Comments are a curse, even if they're sometimes necessary.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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There is a reasonable balance between documenting something and the overly detailed documentation that is likely to get out of date. I like the "here is a new thing and here is the general pattern of how it works" type of documentation. Code comments are reserved for "I know this is stupid, but users." And references to Kelly Clarkson to make the other devs laugh when they read my code. We have to have some fun around here.
Hogan
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In code reviews, I tell the developers to remove all comments except ones that explain _why_ we needed to do something. The _what_ should be evident from reading the code. The worse comments are ones that only re-phrase the name of the class or method.
I deal with 30 year old code that is still being updated and maintained. You can tell lots of different programmers had their hands in the pot and not all of it is good code. For the first 20 years, no code reviews were done. I'm the last person on the team with more than 3 years experience (I have 24 years) on this codebase. If I leave, then they would be so lost in a lot of areas of the code. There is no way we could document all of it at this point.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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This is my preference as well. Syntax can be googled, internal business process and reasoning cannot.
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MarcusCole6833 wrote: Is it Maintained?
Legacy code or not, if the code is updated the docs for it should be updated.
MarcusCole6833 wrote: Do you look for it or just explore the code?
It should be a part of the code. jsdoc or doxygen style comments should be littered all throughout the code. There should also be READMEs in the project. No point in having to hunt down an external resource that would only get stale.
MarcusCole6833 wrote: What do you do if it is not there?
Ask why it's not there with the original devs. If I'm now responsible for said legacy code and if there is some documentation somewhere then I'll try and add it to the project.
MarcusCole6833 wrote: Is the code documenting itself good enough?
No. This goes back to the age old "what makes a good comment" issue. People that say code is always self-documenting are just wrong. They've never worked with other humans and certainly was never a professional dev.
What makes a good comment? Not stuff like this:
let x = 5;
Well no duh. That is self-documenting and obvious, but stuff like this always isn't:
const average = [...simpleMovingAverage(sample, range)].pop()?.actual ?? 0 as Price;
const band = standardDeviation(sample.map((x: Market) => x.close), true).actual * deviations;
Not everyone maintaining the code may know off the top of their head the note about how something should be implemented. One could argue RTFM, but let's be realistic... people maintaining code do not Google every last line of code. Also, there may be no well-known manual for some things.
It's easy for someone to "fix" it and break it and even get past a PR. So, when you do something that may be considered unusual or haphazard or just only known by a select few having a comment should present to make it explicit. As such, I don't consider code always self-documenting in the real world.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Ask why it's not there with the original devs. If I'm now responsible for said legacy code and if there is some documentation somewhere then I'll try and add it to the project.
The original devs are all retired
(lol, not joking).
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Quote: People that say code is always self-documenting are just wrong. They've never worked with other humans and certainly was never a professional dev.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I've lost count of the number of arguments I've had about this. I've also lost count of the number times I've gone into my own code after some time and silently thanked Earlier Me for comments like
//Outputs have to match previous provider, so yes, converting this number to text here is correct and
I used to often include links to Sharepoint documents in comments. Stopped doing that after a company "rationalised" their document storage (euphemism for moved to different provider and did not migrate all documents)
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CHill60 wrote: I've gone into my own code after some time and silently thanked Earlier Me for comments like
Same
Jeremy Falcon
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These are strange times, we got some young developers who were told by their teacher at the local school that documentation was not necessary, said teacher seems to be a follower of the "code should be self documenting" doctrine.
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