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.
https://www.aamc.org/news/medical-school-enrollment-reaches-...
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.
People on HN vastly overestimate SWE pay as an industry, biased by FAANG as we are :).
It's the difference between compound interest working for you vs compound interest working against you.
I still don't know what my own objective function is.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
Where are testers and tech writers the median (50th percentile) jobs in IT?
... 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe no one should be tortured by those metrics
I used to enjoy this blog:
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.
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.
Yes, but: that's an even narrower elite group than doctors.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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).