Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…
> Physician salaries are the only ones that do not grow relative to inflation Spoken with the true conviction of a position of privilege, and blinded by the very same. (No pun intended.) Hint: The majority of U.S. citizens have it worse than you.
The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
231–240 of 377 posts
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've no doubt the stress of your work is immense and the constant threat of litigation (and the expense of the insurance to fight it) can be overwhelming. As a recipient of multiple eye surgeries (I had strabismus as a kid), I am grateful for competent professionals like you. But I think you buried the lede. In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks.…
> But I think you buried the lede. > In retrospect, I've concluded that the real problem they faced is they'd built a life dependent on a physician or surgeon's income. They were told they were building a castle, but instead they built a prison. The fact is, you just can't spend enough money to truly escape the stresses of your work, but you can certainly spend enough money to become shackled to it. I don't know why…
> There's just no reason to do the job when you can get the same compensation working remotely in tech.
Same compensation. That’s the unique qualifier that was chosen. That’s certainly not no indication.
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've no doubt the stress of your work is immense and the constant threat of litigation (and the expense of the insurance to fight it) can be overwhelming. As a recipient of multiple eye surgeries (I had strabismus as a kid), I am grateful for competent professionals like you. But I think you buried the lede. In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks.…
The grass is always greener in another profession, and my problems are always uniquely bad :)
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#234There is also planning of hospital bed shortages through certificates of need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need anti kickback laws are also a double edged sword. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_Law But in the end, the usa has the healthcare system where doctors want to work and rich patients want to be treated given an option of any country.
The rich people I know in the US do have an option of getting their healthcare from any other country, and that is what they often do.
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
This needs explanation. If there is such an extreme shortage of talent, why can't doctors demand better terms, e.g. shorter hours?
They can, just not alone. If they were to unionize in sufficient numbers, there would be nothing to do but meet the demands. But “unions are bad” is the prevailing belief in the US, not to mention the huge amount of efforts that companies and the government go through to suppress them.
Some physicians working as employees of large provider organizations are unionized. The government doesn't do anything to suppress this. Rather the opposite.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27949...
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never worked for a FAANG company, or anything close, and can usually not get in the front door at any "prestigious" company. In my last round of interviews nearly all startups/small companies I talked to where offering 200k+ for remote senior engineers. It's not hard to break 200k remote as a software engineer. If you're not there I highly recommend you start looking around, even in this market, rather than si…
Do you make 300k? You said it was “easy to get” so surely you’re above that?
Again it's pretty standard anywhere in tech right now, startup or otherwise, to get 200k base + equity. Technically most startups I've chatted with also offer 300k+ TC... but that assumes the equity component eventually becomes liquid.
Around 200k base is very easy to get anywhere right now, and getting larger than that is a factor of how liquid your equity is. If you join a publicly traded company you should easily be able to get 200k base + 100k/year of RSUs
And to be clear: I'm talking about Senior Engineer level in the US. Most of these roles I've looked at are remote so the NY/SV part is not necessary.
edit: your profile says you work at a FAANG so this should be old news for you.
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#237Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…
I've no doubt the stress of your work is immense and the constant threat of litigation (and the expense of the insurance to fight it) can be overwhelming. As a recipient of multiple eye surgeries (I had strabismus as a kid), I am grateful for competent professionals like you. But I think you buried the lede. In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks.…
There's no law that you have to live a rich lifestyle. Part of that may be feeling the need to maintain the class status that you were born into, and that you expect your kids to be born into. Case in point, my friend came from a working class background.
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#238Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…
> That said, is anyone hiring an ophthalmologist with CS and Math degrees? As someone who recently transitioned to a tech role, I'd urge you to focus on applying to companies related to your existing fields (ophthalmology, medicine, surgery, and their derivatives) who happen to be seeking SWE's, rather than general tech companies. Especially Series A, B, C startups. Look up all the companies that make your equipment…
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like we are going too far. Central planning in presence of hostile adversaries unrestricted by any ethical systems failed. And by what measures has “free market” has proven itself as successful? You can come up with your measures of success and others will propose measures of shortcoming. Others will even dispute the claim the American-led west is anything different from a centrally planned set of cooperating…
Central planning, in this context, is not the same as political philosophy. So be careful not to conflate the two. Central planning does happen in free-market economies all the time, at various levels. An HOA for example is a hyper-local example of central planning. The larger the scale the stronger the lever, and hence the more variable the result. The "free market" brings all kinds of its own oroblems of course - I…
It takes a huge amount of "Central Planning" for our economy to function - as its fundamentally based on the concept of delayed gratification.
Those concepts are very very similar. Any American that has worked and budgeted towards any financial goal should be able to see that for what it is... essentially the same thing.
Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Critics of mostly free market systems generally base their argument on a comparison of wealth levels in such systems. They implicitly assume (or don’t care) that in a planned system the total wealth would be the same, just distributed differently. There is little evidence to support this.
Correct. Moreover, if you shift the goalposts (wealth is no longer/can’t be primarily defined by a balance in a bank account) then society will adapt and create different wealth constructs to make up for it. So, you’ll have the government caste with nicer perks and opportunities, and then everyone else from there on down.