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Re:The darker side of being a doctor by FireBeyond on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @02:42PM (#49820583)
I disagree with this. It's more like "Doctor at the Mayo Clinic" or Johns Hopkins.

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).

Re:The darker side of being a doctor by leereeves on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @04:38PM (#49822220)
> testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional")

Where are testers and tech writers the median (50th percentile) jobs in IT?

Re:The darker side of being a doctor by FireBeyond on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @05:22PM (#49822781)
I frankly don't. Here we have a discussion that is predominantly about software engineers, and as a subset of those, those who are employed at FAANGs...

... 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.

Re:The darker side of being a doctor by leereeves on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @10:37PM (#49825532)
Seems like this discussion is predominantly about physicians. It is about "The darker side of being a doctor"

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.)