* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale. Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw." Yeah, but real estate agents take a 2-6 week class at their community college. Doctors go to school for an average of 12 years and end up with an average of $200k in student loans. It's a little harder to switch careers when you've dropped that much on your education.
What I dislike is this style of journalism where the storyteller tries to tart up the anecdotes with meaningless numbers in an attempt to make them seem more significant. Meaningful numbers would be nice; meaningless numbers just distract you and dilute the directness and frankness of the stories.
Reading a story like this is like having a conversation with a day trader: they are anxious to impress you with their detailed knowledge of the up-and-down movements of randomly-walking lines on charts, but they barely know what their favorite company's product is or who its customers are.
As actual evidence goes, this is typical innumerate newspaper crap.
* "20% of lawyers experience depression sometime in their careers." As compared to... what? In my anecdotal experience, for physicists this number is closer to 80%. For software engineers... well, let's just say that PG is one of the most happy and successful ones I know of, yet he claims to have been pretty depressed as a Yahoo employee.
* "Law firms have a 20 to 30 percent annual turnover in associates." As compared to... what? What's the equivalent number for software engineers, dental hygenists, grade school teachers? How have all of these numbers changed over time?
* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale." Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw.
* "The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003."
This sentence deserves it's own special multi-paragraph gripe. First, as usual, we must ask: compared to what? What percentage of the job applicant pool do these numbers represent? Could these just be fluctuations in the population of recent college grads? Are they correlated with the state of the economy? If someone doesn't go to med school, where do they go? The article deploys anecdotes to suggest that they've all gone into Web 2.0 companies and Wall Street... are there statistics for that?
Despite his best efforts, the author of the article has presented some data with an interesting anomaly... which he then utterly fails to explore! Why did the number of med school applicants dip in 2003? My own hypothesis is that this is the ghost of the dotcom boom... folks who started school during the boom avoided hard stuff like organic chemistry in favor of classes in HTML and check signing and Maserati selection, and that depleted the pre-med population. But it'd be nice to look at the evidence.
Studying the dip in 2003 is particularly important because this article may suffer from the same problem: anyone want to bet that, assuming that the legal and medical professions really have been shrinking in relative terms, the leftover people have been going into real estate, and real-estate-fueled banking, and the cashing of giant real-estate-related checks? Anyone want to guess where all those people are going next, now that the bubble is collapsing? Law school!