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.

Maxxing your income is a foolish optimisation.

I still don't know what my own objective function is.

Whatever you want it to be. You can change it any time you want.

Tautologically if you know what you want to change it to.

The median physician definitely earns more than $250K as well.