The challenge in the US is that the best and brightest increasingly have no interest in entering the medical profession. The debt, crazy years of minimum income, all to let an insurance company admin dictate your every move and while more and more physicians become a labor pool for PE healthcare tracked with metrics fit for warehouse workers (edit: and that’s not OK in a warehouse either). All to earn a decent income but no longer the top of the market. A decent mid-level developer or tech executive makes more than nearly all physicians. No sane top performing talent would dive head first into that mess.
There are exceptions of course but when my brother was considering medical school he visited about 10 different top physicians to seek input and advice and nearly all said if given a Time Machine they wouldn’t do it all over again. That was a real wake up call.
If you go into medicine as a business entrepreneur and build a successful medical business then there’s opportunities for one to still taste some of the glory of the medical profession that once was. Outside that it’s basically a reasonably well paid life of indentured servitude. Yes you’re “helping people” but that only carries you so far which is why so many just burn out and leave.
Massive reform is needed but the powers that be between the AMA and insurance companies seem unlikely to let that change happen unless it’s forced on them by Congress, and that too seems unlikely for now. Something more alike to an apprenticeship model where one grows up from EMT, to nurse, to physician fits the current business model much better than trying to preserve the old world “Officer vs enlisted” model where folks enter the profession directly as officers (physicians).
Yes, poorly worded on my part. Wasn’t intending to suggest it was ok to do that to a warehouse workers either, just that this is how physicians are being treated today (but neither is OK).
"decent mid-level developer or tech executive makes more than nearly all physicians"
That's no where near true for a mid level developer or most tech execs or most senior developers. If you exclude faangs a top developer doesn't make as much as a doctor.
You need to consider the economic cost of delayed earnings, which is massive for the physician, and the higher pay later typically doesn’t make up for the massive debt and low pay early on. It’s not just about a point in time salary sizing contest. Earning little to nothing early in one’s career creates a massive net worth void to fill.
Physician lifetime earnings counting for delay, and debt… normal investment, etc: 8.5-10m. Software engineer median is much lower. About 6.5m. Specialist and high end varies greatly. Median doctor is earning 2x a SWE (130k vs 250k).
People on HN vastly overestimate SWE pay as an industry, biased by FAANG as we are :).
Lifetime earnings of 6.5M is more than lifetime earnings of 8.5M if the 6.5M is front-end loaded and the 8.5M is back-end loaded and starts with a 0.5M hole.
It's the difference between compound interest working for you vs compound interest working against you.
I accounted for that when I modeled it. I explicitly added investment start and compounding. A thing to remember: a physician is delayed yes but their higher income lets them much more heavily invest as their income often exceeds life expenses by a lot more than median swe.
> and the higher pay later typically doesn’t make up for the massive debt and low pay early on.
It does, actually.
Physicians have high early career earnings. It’s not like grinding your way up the ladder until you get paid a lot.
Developers only make more if you only look at the very top end. Like a Stanford grad who goes straight to FAANG earning $200K the day after they graduate.
If you need to start accounting for those things you might consider adjusting for the risk of getting laid off as a tech worker .... I'd imagine it's far higher than for a medical professional.
I agree, but it’s amazing how many times I’ve heard variations of this repeated as truth.
Developer compensation talk always gets biased toward top companies and high cost areas. The median developer or even top 10% developer isn’t living in the Bay Area working at FAANG, but that’s what gets talked about.
> Developer compensation talk always gets biased toward top companies and high cost areas. The median developer or even top 10% developer isn’t living in the Bay Area working at FAANG, but that’s what gets talked about.
That's what should be talked about in comparison to doctors. A FAANG position is comparable to the level of effort, competition, and accomplishment involved in becoming a doctor.
On the other hand, the "median healthcare professional" (counting only those requiring a college education) is a registered nurse, and that's the healthcare profession most comparable to the median developer in education, competition, and income.
I'd say the highly paid specialties are more comparable to senior positions in FAANG.
Both made it through the first filter (admission to medical school/being hired at FAANG), then succeeded so well in the early stages (med school/junior employee) that they were chosen for those coveted positions.
That's because the process to have any chance in the competition to become a doctor is arduous and there's no consolation prize.
If you aspire to work at FAANG and fail you can be a software developer somewhere else. If you aspire to be a doctor and aren't admitted to med school, those years of education, volunteering, shadowing, test prep, etc. are fairly useless.
And even if you succeed, the hours are as bad as can be and the pay isn't much better than FAANG. It's not a logical choice unless you really want it, while software dev is (was?) a great career choice even if you don't care about software.
For all these reasons, a lot of people are filtered out long before applying to med school.
You’re making my argument for me. The percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t is higher than the percentage of people actively trying to become doctors.
It’s more selective. So comparing FAANG salaries to the average doctor salary isn’t useful. To find something equally selective, you’d need to pick a higher paid subset of doctors.
Here's why that's a silly comparison: the percentage of people on the general election ballot for US President who don't make it is lower than the percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t make it. Does that mean US President is less selective? Obviously not, because that's the last of many filters for President and there are essentially no filters before "I'll send a resume to FAANG".
In the same way, there are many filters before filling out a med school application.
Anyway I can't see any way anyone could believe the "median software developer" writing CRUD web pages or in-house apps is comparable to the average physician.
I disagree with this. It's more like "Doctor at the Mayo Clinic" or Johns Hopkins.
I live in a capital city of 60,000. Unemployment 4.5%, median household $79,000. Here, you're not seeing >$150K in IT unless you're a Director, or more likely a VP level employee.
Conversely, I drive by multiple homes that are being built or were recently built by physicians living in the area that are in the $2M range (our median home price in the area is just under $530K.
You can't say "the subset of one thing compared to the spectrum of another", because testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional") are not generally clearing high six digits even at FAANG (well, Netflix maybe, which is an outlier of an outlier).
I frankly don't. Here we have a discussion that is predominantly about software engineers, and as a subset of those, those who are employed at FAANGs...
... and they're variably being compared to physicians, specialists, "median healthcare professionals" (whatever that means).
I'm more breaking up that these comparisons... don't really make a lot of sense, the way many of the arguments here are going.
Seems like this discussion is predominantly about physicians. It is about "The darker side of being a doctor"
But this being a forum for software engineers, the discussion naturally has a lot of content about that group. And many average software engineers, with a bit of amusing hubris, apparently think they are roughly comparable to physicians.
(Actually, they may be in terms of raw intelligence. You don't have to be a genius to become a doctor. But on average they aren't in the same league in terms of work ethic and dedication.)
I think the problem is that physicians are self-selected to be highly intelligent and driven individuals. Med school is not at all a walk in the park, and is very competitive.
You cannot compare the median physician who endured the years of grueling med school and residency to an average developer. FAANG is probably a more apt comparison.
It is unfortunately true. Sr/Staff making a tech salary outearns all but the most specialized doctors. Even if you exclude FAANG that's true (other companies have to offer FAANG salaries to get FAANG talent).
You have to be living in a VHCOL to get that, but if you make >$300k TC you are outearning most doctors.
> You have to be living in a VHCOL to get that, but if you make >$300k TC you are outearning most doctors.
Damn really? Years ago I saw a post of someone asking for advice. They had been offered two positions on in SF at ~$500,000 another in Minnesota at $300,000. Granted they were an anesthesiologist, but a few years back I met a doctor in a bar (lol) and they were telling me you can clear half a million as a GP if you're willing to work in rural states with a big shortage.
ER docs, of whom I know many in my town, with a median city household income of $79K, median home price of $529K, are all in a range of $300-500K. Anesthesiology, $600K+.
> Anesthesiology, $600K+.
Good $DEITY. To me that one number explains the entire state of the USA's health system. An anaesthesiologist is a life and death job, but it isn't a complex one compared to say an air traffic controller. In a competitive market, the amount paid to both wouldn't be too much different.
There must be one mother of a guild protecting anaesthesiologists supply in the USA. Where I live, the governments (ie the people who are supposed to represent the other 99.999% of people who aren't anaesthesiologists) ruthlessly crush such behaviour in any profession that lets it become a real problem. We've fired most airline pilots and imported them, live without electricity for a while, imported doctors from anywhere and everywhere until the medical admission boards got the hint.
The USA really needs to get itself a decent democracy, where the pollies actually represent the people who elected them.
From <a href="https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/blog/healthcare-insights/healthcare-insights-how-medical-debt-crushing-100-million-americans" rel="nofollow">https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/blog/healthc... :
> as many as 66.5% of people who file for bankruptcy blame medical bills as the primary cause.
That doesn't happen in most countries. If most Americans are happy with their health care coverage, I'd say most Americans don't know what good health coverage looks like.
Even the LLM's are bitten by this. I was discussing what sort of capital was needed for retirement, and I asked how about $X million. The LLM's reply was "that doesn't work if you get an expensive medical emergency". I scratched my head for a bit, then prompted: "reminder: I don't live in the USA". The LLM then apologised for it's mistake, and we moved on.
Yea; not even close in the USA. There are exceptions like SV high-salaried tech jobs compared to pediatrician, but generally MDs make much more than software engineers and similar.
"nearly all said if given a Time Machine they wouldn’t do it all over again. That was a real wake up call."
And do they have experience working any other job as a comparables? The question you ask is the equivalent of saying do you think there are better jobs out there? Being a doctor is about the lowest risk job you can get if you are smart and capable. You get high status in society, excellent paycheck and on net are helping people.
The dropout rate and the suicide rate are not, however.
I know a doctor and a couple PAs and RNs who have left the profession. The US medical industry is horrible to everyone involved, except the hospital and insurance profits.
Many of the largest health systems and insurance companies are non-profit. There are literally no profits, no shareholder returns in those organizations. But the facilities are beautiful and some employees very well paid.
NONE of the functioning health systems and insurance companies in the US are non-profit.
Non-profit is a common misnomer, more correctly (in the US) called "Not for Profit", a legal term that doesn't forbid profits at all. It only prevents owners from taking profit-based payouts. AFAIK, it doesn't even prevent threshold-based bonuses for C-Suite employees.
Basically, it prevents shareholders in the corporation.
Also, people are not aware of their skill sets. A lot of doctors I know think, just because they were "smart" in school, that if they had gone into, for example, tech or finance, they would have become a CEO. But you can tell they don't have the skill set for business. I mean, they can't even run a medical office with 8 employees well, and they think they could run a business with 100K people. The office is a mess, the records are sloppy, the appointments are 2 hrs. behind, they don't pay the staff well, the receptionist is rude, the photocopied forms are barely readable. Yet they think they would be inovating like Jeff Bezos.
Something like 17 out of the best 20 jobs by median pay in the U.S. are physicians, just various subspecialties. I guarantee you that people in medicine are incredibly driven and bright. You're just not exposed to them and the training they go through.
I'm not here to defend the AMA but they have very little power over the lives of working physicians. While they do define the CPT code system used on most insurance claims they don't control which procedures are authorized or how much anyone gets paid. The real abrasion has come from health system administrators imposing additional rules and paperwork that waste physician time without doing anything to improve care quality.
> A decent mid-level developer or tech executive makes more than nearly all physicians.
I’ve had access to various compensation data products and I’ve done hiring at distributed companies across dozens of US states. This is not true unless you’re defining “decent mid-level” as working for FAANG. Conversations about developer comp always get skewed toward the top end for top 5-10% devs, with the median numbers being a lot lower.
> If you go into medicine as a business entrepreneur and build a successful medical business then there’s opportunities for one to still taste some of the glory of the medical profession that once was.
I don’t know what you mean by “glory of the medical profession” if your definition of achieving it is… not being a medical professional?
Are you just talking about the money and social prestige that comes from being wealthy? The medical professionals I know didn’t go into the career because they wanted to maximize salaries. The days of becoming a physician primarily to seek money and social status are dwindling because there are better ways to make a lot of money where you get to sit at a desk and write emails, and honestly that may not be a bad thing. Let those people go be lawyers and finance bros or mediocre product managers.
Yes anyone who thinks engineers (HW or SW) are all paid amazingly needs to start taking in the wages of contractors too when calculating averages. Even many engineers working at FAANG HQs are lowly paid, abused contractors, making $50k-$80k.
I know personally of one big famous tech firm that has QA devs making literal minimum wage, because they are contracted from an outsourced firm. But 100% of those people's work is directed by and exclusively for the big tech firm so like all contracting it is an obvious paperwork scam to just mistreat their workers.
If this was true competition for med school spots would be a lot lower. On the contrary it's getting harder: you now basically need a 4.0 to get in.
Some of the best and brightest definitely are getting discouraged, I too have similar personal anecdotes from my daughter's peers. But anecdote does not necessarily correspond to data. Competition for spots is the data.
> burn out and leave.
Here the data definitely supports your argument. Doctors are leaving the industry at far younger ages than they did in the past.
Thanks for the link. Am I reading the article correctly. There are about 24K medical school students and 50K medical school applicants so that means almost half of the applicants are accepted into medical school? That seems a bit high?
I mean, this is not what the article is about though.
What the author of article is describing is just bureaucracy ever expanding (anyone who’s worked at the same place for a decade knows that bureaucracy rarely gets better), mostly decided by mediocre admin people who have never heard of Goodheart’s law. Bureaucrats loves KPIs, shitty average metrics (because distributions are hard to understand for bureaucrats for some reason), and generally does not have to field the consequences of their actions (notably because they don’t measure them!).
What I think your underlying point is: it's no longer seen as the most straightforward pipeline path to high salary, career stability, social status, and dating prospects. I'm not convinced it's true (or not true) that this is fading, but I think that's the core of the matter you bring up. I also suspect that this varies significantly from country to country. I.e. it's central to US and Canadian MDs, but less so in other places.
> The debt, crazy years of minimum income, all to let an insurance company admin dictate your every move and while more and more physicians become a labor pool for PE healthcare tracked with metrics fit for warehouse workers (edit: and that’s not OK in a warehouse either). All to earn a decent income but no longer the top of the market. A decent mid-level developer or tech executive makes more than nearly all physicians. No sane top performing talent would dive head first into that mess.
Ok but the writing is on the wall for that mid-level developer. He'll get laid off next week and replaced with an AI agent or dirt cheap offshore team.
To what end though? Safer meaning you have line of sight on employment? What kind of life is it where you have work but no life? I ask these as the husband of an internist who has been practicing for over 10 years. It’s a fucking grind. We’re 40 now and both of us are looking at her job and asking is it really all worth it?
It's definitely not OK for warehouse workers either. Because we can't retain workers or hire new ones that leave every week, our baseline pay was raised $1.65 to a whole $20/hr while the competition pays more still. We had a suicide hotline poster at the security building exit that's no longer there. We have a propped up emotional well-being support hotline and website poster that gets knocked down every night.
I can't stress this enough: a percentage of executive bonuses should absolutely go toward employee bonuses to boost morale especially if everyone's end goal is automation.
My nephew is in his final year of urology residency, finishing next May. He regularly gets offers of signing bonuses of $1 million to join practices all over the country. The supply/demand ratio in his specialty is insane.
Addendum: not just him; all his fellow residents get the same offers. The 5-year-long residency (after 4 years of medical school & 4 years of undergraduate college) produces about 350 urologists/year in the U.S.
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
There are exceptions of course but when my brother was considering medical school he visited about 10 different top physicians to seek input and advice and nearly all said if given a Time Machine they wouldn’t do it all over again. That was a real wake up call.
If you go into medicine as a business entrepreneur and build a successful medical business then there’s opportunities for one to still taste some of the glory of the medical profession that once was. Outside that it’s basically a reasonably well paid life of indentured servitude. Yes you’re “helping people” but that only carries you so far which is why so many just burn out and leave.
Massive reform is needed but the powers that be between the AMA and insurance companies seem unlikely to let that change happen unless it’s forced on them by Congress, and that too seems unlikely for now. Something more alike to an apprenticeship model where one grows up from EMT, to nurse, to physician fits the current business model much better than trying to preserve the old world “Officer vs enlisted” model where folks enter the profession directly as officers (physicians).
zinodaur · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe no one should be tortured by those metrics
recursivedoubts · · focus · HN ↗
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
pjc50 · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but: that's an even narrower elite group than doctors.
ipaddr · · focus · HN ↗
That's no where near true for a mid level developer or most tech execs or most senior developers. If you exclude faangs a top developer doesn't make as much as a doctor.
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
bitexploder · · focus · HN ↗
People on HN vastly overestimate SWE pay as an industry, biased by FAANG as we are :).
sebmellen · · focus · HN ↗
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
It's the difference between compound interest working for you vs compound interest working against you.
bitexploder · · focus · HN ↗
robocat · · focus · HN ↗
I still don't know what my own objective function is.
bitexploder · · focus · HN ↗
robocat · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
It does, actually.
Physicians have high early career earnings. It’s not like grinding your way up the ladder until you get paid a lot.
Developers only make more if you only look at the very top end. Like a Stanford grad who goes straight to FAANG earning $200K the day after they graduate.
boelboel · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
Developer compensation talk always gets biased toward top companies and high cost areas. The median developer or even top 10% developer isn’t living in the Bay Area working at FAANG, but that’s what gets talked about.
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
That's what should be talked about in comparison to doctors. A FAANG position is comparable to the level of effort, competition, and accomplishment involved in becoming a doctor.
On the other hand, the "median healthcare professional" (counting only those requiring a college education) is a registered nurse, and that's the healthcare profession most comparable to the median developer in education, competition, and income.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
The FAANG equivalent of being a doctor are select professions that pay a lot.
Comparing Bay Area salaries to the median across the country is the second fallacy.
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
Both made it through the first filter (admission to medical school/being hired at FAANG), then succeeded so well in the early stages (med school/junior employee) that they were chosen for those coveted positions.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
If you aspire to work at FAANG and fail you can be a software developer somewhere else. If you aspire to be a doctor and aren't admitted to med school, those years of education, volunteering, shadowing, test prep, etc. are fairly useless.
And even if you succeed, the hours are as bad as can be and the pay isn't much better than FAANG. It's not a logical choice unless you really want it, while software dev is (was?) a great career choice even if you don't care about software.
For all these reasons, a lot of people are filtered out long before applying to med school.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
It’s more selective. So comparing FAANG salaries to the average doctor salary isn’t useful. To find something equally selective, you’d need to pick a higher paid subset of doctors.
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
In the same way, there are many filters before filling out a med school application.
Anyway I can't see any way anyone could believe the "median software developer" writing CRUD web pages or in-house apps is comparable to the average physician.
FireBeyond · · focus · HN ↗
I live in a capital city of 60,000. Unemployment 4.5%, median household $79,000. Here, you're not seeing >$150K in IT unless you're a Director, or more likely a VP level employee.
Conversely, I drive by multiple homes that are being built or were recently built by physicians living in the area that are in the $2M range (our median home price in the area is just under $530K.
You can't say "the subset of one thing compared to the spectrum of another", because testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional") are not generally clearing high six digits even at FAANG (well, Netflix maybe, which is an outlier of an outlier).
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
Where are testers and tech writers the median (50th percentile) jobs in IT?
FireBeyond · · focus · HN ↗
... and they're variably being compared to physicians, specialists, "median healthcare professionals" (whatever that means).
I'm more breaking up that these comparisons... don't really make a lot of sense, the way many of the arguments here are going.
leereeves · · focus · HN ↗
But this being a forum for software engineers, the discussion naturally has a lot of content about that group. And many average software engineers, with a bit of amusing hubris, apparently think they are roughly comparable to physicians.
(Actually, they may be in terms of raw intelligence. You don't have to be a genius to become a doctor. But on average they aren't in the same league in terms of work ethic and dedication.)
Kokouane · · focus · HN ↗
You cannot compare the median physician who endured the years of grueling med school and residency to an average developer. FAANG is probably a more apt comparison.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
If you want to compare FAANG engineers to doctors the most accurate comparison is to the top 10%.
Those developers are almost all concentrated in extremely high cost of living cities as well.
Physicians also get special loan programs, better insurance rates etc…
SR2Z · · focus · HN ↗
You have to be living in a VHCOL to get that, but if you make >$300k TC you are outearning most doctors.
the__alchemist · · focus · HN ↗
yilomap · · focus · HN ↗
Damn really? Years ago I saw a post of someone asking for advice. They had been offered two positions on in SF at ~$500,000 another in Minnesota at $300,000. Granted they were an anesthesiologist, but a few years back I met a doctor in a bar (lol) and they were telling me you can clear half a million as a GP if you're willing to work in rural states with a big shortage.
FireBeyond · · focus · HN ↗
rstuart4133 · · focus · HN ↗
There must be one mother of a guild protecting anaesthesiologists supply in the USA. Where I live, the governments (ie the people who are supposed to represent the other 99.999% of people who aren't anaesthesiologists) ruthlessly crush such behaviour in any profession that lets it become a real problem. We've fired most airline pilots and imported them, live without electricity for a while, imported doctors from anywhere and everywhere until the medical admission boards got the hint.
The USA really needs to get itself a decent democracy, where the pollies actually represent the people who elected them.
SR2Z · · focus · HN ↗
If you are complaining and what "the people" want, you have to understand that they are actually pretty well taken care of in the US.
rstuart4133 · · focus · HN ↗
> as many as 66.5% of people who file for bankruptcy blame medical bills as the primary cause.
That doesn't happen in most countries. If most Americans are happy with their health care coverage, I'd say most Americans don't know what good health coverage looks like.
Even the LLM's are bitten by this. I was discussing what sort of capital was needed for retirement, and I asked how about $X million. The LLM's reply was "that doesn't work if you get an expensive medical emergency". I scratched my head for a bit, then prompted: "reminder: I don't live in the USA". The LLM then apologised for it's mistake, and we moved on.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
the__alchemist · · focus · HN ↗
boringg · · focus · HN ↗
And do they have experience working any other job as a comparables? The question you ask is the equivalent of saying do you think there are better jobs out there? Being a doctor is about the lowest risk job you can get if you are smart and capable. You get high status in society, excellent paycheck and on net are helping people.
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
I know a doctor and a couple PAs and RNs who have left the profession. The US medical industry is horrible to everyone involved, except the hospital and insurance profits.
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
Non-profit is a common misnomer, more correctly (in the US) called "Not for Profit", a legal term that doesn't forbid profits at all. It only prevents owners from taking profit-based payouts. AFAIK, it doesn't even prevent threshold-based bonuses for C-Suite employees.
Basically, it prevents shareholders in the corporation.
jimmydddd · · focus · HN ↗
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
sebmellen · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
I’ve had access to various compensation data products and I’ve done hiring at distributed companies across dozens of US states. This is not true unless you’re defining “decent mid-level” as working for FAANG. Conversations about developer comp always get skewed toward the top end for top 5-10% devs, with the median numbers being a lot lower.
> If you go into medicine as a business entrepreneur and build a successful medical business then there’s opportunities for one to still taste some of the glory of the medical profession that once was.
I don’t know what you mean by “glory of the medical profession” if your definition of achieving it is… not being a medical professional?
Are you just talking about the money and social prestige that comes from being wealthy? The medical professionals I know didn’t go into the career because they wanted to maximize salaries. The days of becoming a physician primarily to seek money and social status are dwindling because there are better ways to make a lot of money where you get to sit at a desk and write emails, and honestly that may not be a bad thing. Let those people go be lawyers and finance bros or mediocre product managers.
Schlagbohrer · · focus · HN ↗
I know personally of one big famous tech firm that has QA devs making literal minimum wage, because they are contracted from an outsourced firm. But 100% of those people's work is directed by and exclusively for the big tech firm so like all contracting it is an obvious paperwork scam to just mistreat their workers.
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
Some of the best and brightest definitely are getting discouraged, I too have similar personal anecdotes from my daughter's peers. But anecdote does not necessarily correspond to data. Competition for spots is the data.
> burn out and leave.
Here the data definitely supports your argument. Doctors are leaving the industry at far younger ages than they did in the past.
camel_Snake · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.aamc.org/news/medical-school-enrollment-reaches-new-high" rel="nofollow">https://www.aamc.org/news/medical-school-enrollment-reaches-...
rawgabbit · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
I used to enjoy this blog:
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medschoolhell.com/archives/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch...
This dude hated US medical school and it shows. I can't blame him, either.
> the powers that be between the AMA
AMA is working to keep salaries high. That's the only reason why this profession is still attractive. Probably unwise to change that.
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
thatfrenchguy · · focus · HN ↗
What the author of article is describing is just bureaucracy ever expanding (anyone who’s worked at the same place for a decade knows that bureaucracy rarely gets better), mostly decided by mediocre admin people who have never heard of Goodheart’s law. Bureaucrats loves KPIs, shitty average metrics (because distributions are hard to understand for bureaucrats for some reason), and generally does not have to field the consequences of their actions (notably because they don’t measure them!).
the__alchemist · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
yilomap · · focus · HN ↗
Ok but the writing is on the wall for that mid-level developer. He'll get laid off next week and replaced with an AI agent or dirt cheap offshore team.
The doctor seems like a safer choice now.
butterandguns · · focus · HN ↗
DeluluDon · · focus · HN ↗
I can't stress this enough: a percentage of executive bonuses should absolutely go toward employee bonuses to boost morale especially if everyone's end goal is automation.
bookofjoe · · focus · HN ↗
bookofjoe · · focus · HN ↗