A surgeon has 4 years of undergraduate education, 4 years of medical school, and a 5 year residency, learning to operate (pun intended) with other equally highly trained specialists, many of whom are peers, like anesthesiologists, not merely support. The comparison was already dubious when Brooks made it for operating systems programming. Setting up a comparison with the average "I don't use anything I learned in my CS degree, lol" coder wrangling a chorus of hallucinating stochastic parrots is a bonkers level of hubris from techbros.
Most surgeons don't use anything they learn in medical school or residency either. It's usually their last 2 - 4 years (depending on whether they did a fellowship) that is useful in their day to day job. E.g. an eye surgeon doesn't need to know how to read an ECG
