I don't care how much someone other than me makes.

I care that you're so insensitive that when you're told that medical professionals are burning out en mass you think money makes up for it.

That's so incredibly lacking in both empathy (they're human beings) and utility (they're medical care providers) that I can't reconcile it with any good-faith viewpoint on the world. So I have to assume it's trolling and should not be amplified.

Some jobs are hard and extremely strenuous. The least we can do is pay very well for them and make sure that anyone doing the job is well informed of the risks, is a consenting adult, is making the choice freely and not under coercion like threat of being fired.

Very good pay is absolutely an “upside”.

The personal and emotional attacks against OP are totally unwarranted.

What you are interpreting as personal/emotional attacks, are people shocked and responding to OP's lack of empathy and disregard for human beings and our hospitals being staffed with overworked emotionally drained people, which affects us all but the OP is shifting the focus to, well at least some workers are making 10,000 more.

I mean, I guess some people just need that spelled out to them due to their lack of ability to empathize.

That’s not what OP said.

“I care that you're so insensitive that...” is not taking the most generous interpretation of OP’s comment and is absolutely a personal attack. It is not conducive to productive discussion.

Nurses are being paid more. We can feel free to make an argument for why that doesn’t matter without personal insults.

That may not be what OP said directly but by prioritizing pay and following it up with

Lmao what's wrong downvoters? Don't like being told that nurses are making more than you?

... that is certainly what OP communicated!

Well you did amplify it by commenting on it...

I don't really get why the other comment was so bad though. And it sounds like you're saying a better thing to do is just quietly feel empathy and express some vague generic words of acknowledgement. Which will inevitably be followed by promptly forgetting about it and going back to our normal lives, like 99% of us reading this thread will do. What good does that really do?

And what harm does it really do to discuss/debate different aspects of this situation, and learn more details about what's going on?

I think a lot of the anti-mask crowd uses a lot of arguments rooted in sociopathy and the assumption that people should only care about themselves: “it only kills the old”, “it’s only a problem if you have a preexisting condition”, “the nurses are making more money anyway”, “we need to sacrifice some people for the economy”, etc.

Please do not misconstrue me or my ideas as being part of or sympathetic to the "anti-mask" crowd or as an endorsement of sociopathic thinking. The "crappy unit tests" part was an attempt at humor which I expected more people to get around here.

He said, "on the upside". In no way did he detract from the work they are doing.

I also don't get the downvoted.

It’s not a useful contribution: overwork is always a problem and especially important in healthcare where it’s not “our project launches late” but “someone died due to error or lack of attention”.

It’s also misrepresenting the few who can travel with the much larger group who can’t take those gigs - especially important when you consider what life is like for anyone with kids right now. Put in HN terms, do your 80 hour weeks get better if you learn that some consultants are temporarily billing $500/hour?

Nurses get paid hourly in most(?) places including generous overtime. Most professions get frequently overworked with little extra for that increase. Do you feel just as bad publicly for those folks as you do for nurses?

As it happens I do but that's also irrelevant: you aren't required to sort the list of problems in descending order and ignore everything but the first one. In the context of a conversation about nurses, it doesn't add anything to start “what about!” tangents.

What they’re paid is not irrelevant. There was basically a nationwide discussion on providing hazard pay to nurses at the onset of all this.

Solving the pay issue doesn’t mean the other issues don’t exist, but it is definitely important and noteworthy progress.

It's getting downvoted because it comes off as "Yeah, but..." which absolutely detracts.

Money absolutely makes up for it.

I used the soldier example because we as a society have decided that their PTSD and other burn-out is compensated by medical-care, and the money / benefits that the military pays you. One usually knows the serious risks of developing PTSD from being a soldier before entering. We do the same for Police Officers, and it's for these reasons that cops end up so well paid in many places.

The medical field is similar. We pay them more as a way to compensate them for the utility they bring to the world despite the risks associated with their job.

If I am lacking in empathy, than so is the rest of the world, and my particular instance of this "lack of empathy" is tiny compared to others.

If anything, we should celebrate that market forces are giving mistreated nurses a way out. I think that if anything, we should be very happy that market forces are giving disgruntled nurses a way to stick the finger to their shitty hospital management ("Oh, you won't let me have new PPE? Fu*k you I quit and I'm taking a job that pays 10x as much...")

But with both the soldier and the doctor/nurse, there is an expected status quo for work vs compensation.

A soldier is aware that the US has been a state of low-level conflict, with sporadic bursts of intensity, since 9/11 (or before). Even in a state of peace, there are dangerous deployments (anecdotally, almost every retired Marine I know has some sort of permanent injury from training - most are of the annoying variety - surgically repaired knees - but some are worse).

A pandemic the likes of which we haven't seen for a century is a change in that status quo for medical providers. It also brings a level of work and stress that simply isn't sustainable, regardless of compensation. A human simply can't sustain 80 hour weeks, no matter how much we pay them. Nobody wants to be stressed out all day long because their patients are being even more moronic than normal (see also: South Dakota nurses who deal with COVID-deniers who are literally dying of COVID).

I come from a largely nursing-based family.

Yes, the choice of going into nursing is largely a strategic choice, much like other life-long decisions (going to high school, going to college, getting a house. going into nursing, etc. etc.). In fact, a huge part of the calculus is knowing that US Citizenship is offered to nurses at higher rates (due to the nursing shortage).

Ironically: being a doctor is not a strategic choice despite making more money. You need to sacrifice another 10-years of your life in school and additional training, and going into virtually any other field will result in more money in most situations. Especially if you become a general practitioner: the most needed doctor (but the one that is paid the least).

Run the numbers of 10-fewer years of 401k savings in your youngest years as a 20-year old... as you go through additional schooling + residency. There's not a lot of money to be had here.

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So you have a point: money, citizenship, and more are offered to nurses and doctors. Because the roles are important and a lot of people (fortunately) agree that the role is important.

But that's not really how nurses / doctors think on the day-to-day level. They usually are thinking "Patient X doesn't listen to me. X would be in a better situation if they did Y".

Doctors / nurses can easily make more money by selling unnecessary prescriptions / unnecessary surgery / etc. etc. That's just the position of trust that they're in. The fact that they usually DONT do that is due to a sense of duty and Hippocratic oath. Doctors / nurses, if placed in a "pragmatic capitalist" setting, aren't to be trusted actually. Its due to culture and soft-reasons (a sense of duty. A sense of morals, a sense of ethics) that they remain ethical.

Not all doctors/nurses are ethical. But the vast, vast majority of them are ethical. Seeing things in a "greedy pure capitalist" way in the profession is grossly frowned upon. Because most people don't really see doctors / nurses as an adversary offering health services. A doctor / nurse is someone who is there to help you when you need help.

> are now routinely making 5-10K a week [...] That's far better money than most soldiers (or even FAANG engineers) make

That's not an unusual amount of money to make at L5 after a few years, and unlike the traveling nurse position, it's not temporary.

That being said, I'm glad to see hospitals competing on actual worker safety, hopefully this will encourage hospitals to have sustainable stocks of PPE in the future.

L5?

Likely referring to "level 5" at Google: http://levels.fyi/

I think your comment sounds a bit belittling to the work and hardships the nurses have to endure for the payment. In my book it is rather adequate.

I'm not sure how to relate having people die on you while being apart from your family to writing unit tests. It may be not intended to sound that way

The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT.

They are desperate.

> The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT.

I think it's more along the lines that it's probably cheaper to pay you time and a half given hospital IT pay compared to paying qualified nursing staff to do the same.

I'm not qualified to do anything 'medical', this is all stuff they would have CNA's do for as cheap as possible.

Most roles aren't the kind making that money. A few making big money does not make up for what's happening to the rest. And travel roles are weird/tough in other ways too.

I've got a nurse friend with significant autoimmune issues who can't quit her job because she needs the health insurance - she works in the ER of a rural hospital in the Midwest making ~$45k/year. She's absolutely inundated with Covid patients right now and is risking her life every minute that she spends there.

Some random traveling medical professionals making good money in no way absolves the rest of the country's apathy toward this scourge.

Nothing to do with nursing per-se, but de-coupling employment from health insurance would be a good thing. I realize that there are lots of other complicated issues with regard to health care and health insurance but I can't think of any other service that is so tightly coupled to your employer.

Some reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/

Yep, 100% agree.

If you've ever worked in a small organization (~50 employees), it's amazing how much money, time and energy is spend on health insurance. Every single HR person in the country needs to be an expert on these esoteric insurance edges or you get taken for a ride and your employees and balance sheet suffer.

Physicians do.

I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think physicians are very much the minority of healthcare providers. I think it's one physician per many nurse, CNA, PT, OT, ST, etc. Specifically because docs are so expensive.

>or having to write crappy unit tests is far smaller.

don't know about you, but I'd much rather write crappy unit tests than be exposed to infectious patients 8 hours a day.

>On the upside, traveling nurses are now routinely making 5-10K a week

That's an upside? That some folks are making more money? While others are seriously ill, die / can't see family and etc?