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).