Do people commonly think that? It's all supply and demand, and very stochastic at that.

Not to necessarily knock nurse pay, it is a common route to a middle and even upper-middle class life.

One thing I notice is the amount of "brainwashing" that goes on in this industry - and please please this is not to say nurses and teachers are fooled - more that "hey you are in a glorious profession so talk of compensation will only cheapen it so toil away". Still very weird. Given how unions are not squashed for N and Ts Id have thought there may have been more room for better bargaining. Especially if the COVID season did nothing to improve their appreciation I am worried very little else might!

Well to be fair the hospitals are the same people who have been complaining that they can't get enough qualified nursing staff for the past 15 or 20 years.

Nurses and teachers are more important than me, a programmer. I was reminded of this when my state put me in the last vaccination group. Yet because of supply and demand, but also the potential for companies to earn from software and the vagaries of stock compensation, that programmers often can earn much more. I want all people to earn a living wage, especially those other "essential" but hopefully not continuing to be disposable workers in grocery stores and other underpaid jobs like food preparation and the people that take care of senior citizens - they need health insurance, a living wage, time off, respect. In other countries than the US it's much better for them, perhaps we'll get there during our current 'new new deal' phase in the US.

Yes, but we also have to price things for overall societal benefit.

If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people.

I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.

If those hours were redeployed in such a way that people still had decent jobs, sure... but a lot of what we programmers do has a much less positive impact on other people and their jobs.

Definitely. I think wealth consolidation remains a huge problem, somewhat driven by automation, somewhat driven by other factors.

I'm curious, what do you think the compensation for being a nurse should look like?

Yes, it's built right into our language: we say someone "earns" their wage.

OP didn't actually mention compensation as a pain point.

Sorry I should have been clearer. I think implicitly I was referring to compensation too. My (possibly naive) line of thinking is that companies are getting away with this "abuse" due to a high supply which in turn is fueled by low wages?