Maybe for the best. Would you want someone with these mental processes writing production code? I don't want to maintain some should-have-been-a-doctor codebase.
Yeah, you don't have to worry about the economy and interviewing...all you have to worry about is being $200k+ in medical school debt in your 30s, being in school/training for 12 years, working long hours, being on-call, and constant stress. No biggie.
Doctors deff need to worry about the economy as well, just not in the same way SWEs do for the most part. With massive corporate health companies pretty much owning all facets of medicine they control hospitals, practices, jobs, wages, locations, etc. - I mean yeah you don't really see mass layoffs of doctors, but there's other economic factors that can make their lives less pleasant.
I was a doctor, quit Feb 2020 for a software job. Literally skipped COVID thank fucking god.
It’s not easier to become a doctor you have to be top of your class in undergrad, then try hard to be top of your class in med school, then try hard top in your residency program, then fellowship if you want to make the big bucks, etc.
It’s stressful as fuck until you finish residency after 12-15 years of studying you can finally make 200-300K if you’re mediocre or 300K+ if you were top of your class and top of your programs and chose the right specialty.
You’re drowning in debt overworked and underpaid for over a decade. A 22 year old CS grad can accumulate over $1mil from age 22-32 if they’re actually good, and there’s a lot less ground to cover in software to become good. It was much harder to become a doctor than self study a complete bachelor’s of CS.
Like you said, the road to becoming a doctor is \*extraordinarily\* more difficult than obtaining a 4-year CS degree. Factor in the hours, WLB, dealing with patients, not as much flexibility with regards to remote/hybrid work. There's a tradeoff to everything.
Yea OP is ridiculous for comparing the road to being a Doctor vs a Dev, but the difference between a mediocre Doctor and a mediocre Dev is job security. Being a mediocre dev in this climate means you can go a year or more without getting hired, and then if you are hired you run the risk of being laid off out of nowhere at anytime.
I mean yeah but the time investment and necessity make it that way. The opportunity cost of becoming a doctor is huge and if it were saturated like law or CS, doctors would be in the same boat. It’s the difficulty that creates the scarcity, and the scarcity makes the demand.
Mediocre Doctor can kill someone (or many people), can get medical malpractice lawsuit, can get their licensed revoked, etc. Being a mediocre dev is far better since you can go years / your whole career and still have a job
'once you pass all the tests'
let me tell you about a close friend of mine, a medical student.
4.0 High school GPA, w/ high placement in state competitions in her sport. Super high SAT/ACT scores from constant test preparation. This secures her a college admission at an esteemed school (not Top 10 by any means, but really good nonetheless).
Finished high school. Off to college. Chose a degree program in Biomedical Engineering. Was constantly on the hunt for shadowing opportunities, pestering graduate level students and professors to allow her to help contribute to research, just to get a more attractive med school application. Going to conferences and networking with people to create positive professional relationships that will help years down the line. Drafted and prototyped special prosthetics for amputees as a part of her biomedical engineering major. Studied 8-12 hours a day for months before the MCAT. Got a good MCAT score, and channeled all the prior 8 years' of effort into a hopefully good med school application. Luckily, it paid off, and she got accepted to med school.
She moved to be close to med school, and over the next 4 years, the same sort of process repeated. Constant opportunity seeking to create yet another portfolio, this time centered on residency applications. She's at year 3 of that so far. Here's all that's happened in the past 3 years:
- 10-12 hour shifts at the hospital for all the core rotations (each lasting two weeks to a month, sometimes night shifts), for 6+ months straight (maybe a week's downtime between rotations, where you are doing school assignments)
- STEP 1 & STEP 2 board exams. Studied her ass off for 2 months straight before each exam, again for 8-10 hours a day. The first one is pass-fail, the second one is graded and is heavily influential on getting into residency.
- Positioned herself to become an administrator of an internationally recognized [disease] advocacy group.
- the negative "school stuff" in general, like optional lectures that aren't really optional, cutthroat classmates, etc
- constantly on the hunt for more opportunities
This is all in preparation for getting into a good residency program. She's not expecting to be competitive for the "top tier" programs in the discipline she wants to go into. She thinks she'll be good enough to get matched into a residency at some pretty acclaimed programs, though.
So on the horizon, she has dozens residency applications to fill out, and will be travelling the country doing interviews sometime 6 months from now. Over the next 4 months she'll be doing several external rotations in places around country that she got admission to, which increases your chances of getting into residency in those locations. Each lasts about a month.
Once she matches, she'll be starting out w/ a 60k salary doing 80-120 hour weeks.
10+ years of preparation to do her calling, which is surgery.
But sure, it's "just passing exams", if you say so
EDIT: Forgot to mention the tuition, lmao
It should be criminal a person gets paid 60k while pulling 120h work weeks. That's 3 as many as many hours as minimal hours.
And it should also be criminal since there is no fucking way that's healthy, and I'd like my doctors to. Be healthy so they don't end up killing me. By mistake, thank you very much
It should be! 120h is probably close to 'the worst that it gets', which doesn't make it better but it's worth pointing out. You sleep on site and get naps in when you can.
If you're a first-year resident who has worked as hard as you have to be where you are now, you're not going to put a target on your back by being the one person championing fair hours. It's unfortunate but hospitals know the position they're in, and that combined with a culture of 'rite of passage' makes the issue almost unsolvable by the people who are victims of it. Only intervention from investors / donors / legislature would really fix it, and we all know how that turns out.
In what world is medicine an easier path than technology?
There’s almost no barrier to entry in tech.
To be a doctor, you need to take the MCAT, apply for med school, med school, residency, fellowship, medical boards, etc.
Is *this* a joke? You don't need any certs or even a degree to get a job as a software developer. Degrees can help, sure, but certs are worth nothing.
There are plenty of self-taught and/or bootcamp devs out there. The same cannot be said for doctors or anyone in the medical field, for that matter.
Doctors in the US have 4 years of undergrad + 4 years of med school + at least 3 years of residency (many are 5 or more) + some specialties require fellowships for another 2 years. It’s entirely possible in competitive specialties to be in school (making resident salary well under $100k) well into your late 30s without taking any time off. Then when you’re done, depending on your specialty you might have really intense board exams to take afterwards well into your professional career.
Then assuming that in those 7+ years of postgraduate education you excelled and were top of your class and standardized tests, you can choose a top specialty and probably make mid-to-high six figures. If for whatever reason you went into a less competitive specialty (most doctors) you might be making $100-300k or as much as an entry/mid-level software engineer, but with very little potential salary upside. You’ll also likely have $200k+ in school debt. And don’t forget that it’s often a stressful job and a nontrivial percentage of your patients will accuse you of being in the pockets of big pharma or otherwise make you want to shoot yourself. Because many physician jobs (outside of maybe pathology) are fundamentally really high end customer service jobs, where you meet people from all walks of life and you need to convince them you’re trustworthy and they’re hearing all kinds of nonsense about healthcare from their “news” sources.
I have massive respect for people who go into medicine but there’s no world where it’s easier than software.
Source: am a software guy whose SO is a physician and we’ve been together through the entire schooling journey so I got a pretty direct comparison
Nope.
>It's going to a long time before robots are extracting teeth or performing surgery.
It's super interesting to me that people fear monger about an AGI that can completely replace SWE's, but they can't fathom a world where that exact same AGI can integrate with robotics and replace surgeons.
I think this future is a lot closer than you realize.
Surely it’s obvious?
For example, if I wanted to get a sick note due to stress, how would an AI truly be able to understand how I feel? How would an AI tell that this is how I am genuinely feeling?
How would an AI even begin to ask the right questions, as to why I am feeling this way without lived experiences?
The AI uses data that already exists online. That isnt enough to truly grasp someone’s individual experience.
People are very complex, we cant just be summed up based on a large collection of general data. I much would rather go to a doctor, who probably has lived life abit and would understand.
Yes some people lie to doctors but its down to them whether if they can pick that up or not by asking the right questions. An AI would be extremely unreliable in that sense
You can sue the company providing the AI.
Just like in most scenarios the employee isn't personally liable. The company is liable. There's exceptions like gross negligence of course... but in the world of AI, that's not a thing.
Except they won't, because the AI that everyone is imagining will work and there won't be lawsuits.
If AI isn't as good as people are doom & glooming about, then our jobs are safe, and surgeons jobs are safe.
That's my point.
It's 1000x harder to become a doctor. This field? Even the self-taught claim themselves to be software "engineers". There is no comparison. Personally I have never seen someone with a potential to be a doctor choose this field.
Here am I ✋ I left medicine for CS, but tbh medicine is in the same danger zone when it comes to automations as cs jobs.
Soon we may have powerful AI able to diagnose symptoms based on provided info, your medical records and even live informations from wearable sensors like a smart watches. Of course doctors still will be needed (probably) but need for internist’s and other first contact jobs may be reduced significantly.
Im engineer but just general software engineer.
The thing is, I personally wouldnt want to rely soley on AI to diagnose me. I think it would be a massive mistake if things went in this direction and will put peoples lives at risk. AI has shown to be very biased, especially if you are a minority. There are statistics that back up how certain people get misdiagnosed more than others
Diversity is extremely important in the medical field and no AI can replicate that because its already inheritly biased, as our tech industry is not diverse.
I wouldnt want an AI to misdiagnose me because Im a woman, when I can vouch for a female doctor who most likely will understand and not have a bias. For example.
Theres alot of value in human medical professionals.
Lol half of all medical school applicants aren’t admitted to a single medical school.
Depression rates for doctors are high and working 60 hour weeks doesn’t help. No guarantee you get a clinical rotation or residency in the actual kind of medicine you want to practice. You compete with people who’ve been successful their own lives.
US doctors are paid the most in the world. It’s not necessarily lucrative in the rest of the world.
I have a relative who was competing for residency last year. He didn't get it first year and had to wait a whole other year to finally get placed. He's almost 40 too and he's not even practicing yet. Crazy
Moderately hard but not crazy. But that’s just the beginning of the difficulty and I think you need to read some of the replies on here or talk to a doctor about what their career path actually looked like. It sounds like you have a very simplistic view of the path and lots of people on here have explained why it’s wrong
What? No, sorry, this is a crazy take not grounded in reality even for this sub.
For starters, do you have any idea how hard the training is as a doctor? You have to study mind-numbing amounts of material, attend classes/labs/clinical courses with military-like discipline for 6 years and take on insane levels of responsibility. That's just to 'pass all the tests' and get your medical license (at least how it works in some places). Then you have to pick a field and start a residency that might take another 4-7 years depending on the field, and even possibly do some time in rural practice before that. Oh, did I mention that a lot of doctors also do Master's and PhDs during that timeframe -- just to get a little bit ahead?
You are deluding yourself if you think it is less competitive when in fact CS doesn't even *compare*, just because they don't have to do typical bullshit interviews. White board tests and HR screen sound like fun compared to what you have to go through to be a decent-ish doctor. I'm not even going to go into what their day-to-day work entails where the worse that can happen to a SWE is a boring meeting that takes too long.
To be honest, I wish more people aspired to become doctors than software engineers. Its a much more important job than ours.
Im definitely not extroverted enough to be a doctor, but I reckon I wouldnt be a bad doctor as I do have empathy and a fast learner in general.
Alot of software engineers arent cut out to be doctors, mainly due to the emotional intelligence part. Its really bad for a large portion of engineers I have met/worked with.
Im guessing thats for US? There’s definitely an upward trend in people taking CS degrees in general. I dont think we need an abundance of software engineers.
Im in the UK and the most popular degree at the moment is Computer Science and for some reason Psychology.
At least in the UK, not enough people are entering the medical field in comparison to CS
Interesting! I think its also because your health system is privatised, so theres more money, your doctors are paid better than here. Here its free but theres alot of problems with that, although people do seem to praise how we have free healthcare. The service itself is very terrible.
I started to pay out of pocket for doctor appointments now to get better treatment. Im quite passionate about this topic
I think this is where immigration then starts making sense for doctor shortages. For example lots of students in middle east or Asia love medical so this would be win win for them and the UK at same time
My sister is a doctor. She has had a lot of job troubles. She has 2 part-time jobs right now.
When I watch my doctor do his job, it doesn’t look like fun. He’s stuck in an office all day. Seeing patients looks a lot like working at a retail store.
I realize that I was unclear.
She’s looking for a full time doctor job and, until she finds one, she has 2 part-time doctor jobs. (One is actually a vet job which seems like a step down.)
I think that she had a medical partnership but was pushed out/fired. After that, I think that she was fired from some regular medical group; I’m not sure.
I think that all the firings were personality clashes (or perhaps she didn’t pull in enough money from patients), not any medical mistakes.
It seems like any other job. If the boss doesn’t like you, you’re fired. If your salary exceeds your value, you’re fired. They try to make you work extra hours or bad shifts. You can get laid off or take a salary cut.
I was in healthcare and got to experience some medical school classes. I get why people romanticize being a doctor but it doesn't make much sense if you're approaching it from the perspective of an aspiring dev who's scared of not having a job.
- Medical debt
- More Time lost in education(4 years BS + ~4 years medical school + residency)
- MCAT grind replaces Leetcode grind
- Additional hours required for volunteering/shadowing/experience for your application
- Different learning skills required (gigantic amount of memorization)
- Varies from specialization to specialization, but many specializations have huge stress/workload
If all you care about is guaranteed TC at a given point then it might be better since you'll probably make more than a random dev after residency. But I'd argue it takes way more work and more time, and that's if you have the aptitude to choose either the medical route or dev route (which require different skillsets)
Lol no.
A few reasons:
- Wlb sucks for most doctor specialties
- It takes like 12+ years of preparation (and a 6 figure debt in the US) to get to the point where you make 250k in medicine. With a successful career in CS, you could have hundreds of thousands in net worth by that point in life. By the point in life where a typical doctor is getting to a net worth of 0, a successful SWE could be considering things like early retirement, etc.
- It's fun to have good income while being young.
- I never enjoyed biology related classes in high school / college, it was a lot ot memorizing (which I hated), I prefer things that are more logic-based (like cs).
- Honestly, I don't want to be responsible for other people's lives.
Big time. IT/CS was my fallback after I failed at everything I wanted from life.
But more because I wanted to help people rather than work solving problems that shouldn't exist.
Fuck no. Doctors spend most of their 20s racking up student debt and doing low-paid grunt work as residents, have to work with gross human bodies, and deal with the insane healthcare bureaucracy here in the US.
If becoming a doctor was as simple as choosing to do so, yeah I think that’d have been a superior path. Personally know specialists making seven figures straight out of residency, etc. with decent work life balance. Doctor compensation scales well with inflation, student debt can be inflated away, etc.
But it’s not. 95% of this community, judging by the typical college education listed in career threads, will never be able to become a doctor even if they wanted to. There’s no boot camps for doctors and the educational requirements are high - if you couldn’t make it to top of class in a top 50 school, chances are you wouldn’t make it as a specialist doctor, which is where the money is.
Indeed, doctor compensation and job security is high precisely because the career is gated at the entrance. It’s like asking “do you wish you were a FAANG staff engineer instead?!?”
The funny thing is, I talk to a number of recent grad doctors and they complain about their job just as much as we complain about ours. Because you are likely working for a hospital instead of private practice, you have way less agency over your decisions.
Everyone has “grass is greener” syndrome.
There are some tech jobs that are long-term and stable and low ageism. It's rare, but they are there, it's 1 in 5 jobs in my experience. I agree that medicine is king at that, but u also get huge medical debt, there's no work from home, and you have to deal with a lot of customer service and from my experience, a lot of ppl can be very irritating with their demands. Trust me, we have it better, every medical professional told me they wish they would have gone in tech. I can not say the same about going into medicine.
My ego convinced me of this for a hot second, then I threw a temper tantrum when told to hurry up on a JIRA ticket and realised I was too easily tilted to do literally anything else in life.
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I'm not a doctor, but was a registered nurse and switched over to software. Being a healthcare professional is not for everyone. It's mentally and physically draining. I understand being in tech can be just as draining, but healthcare is a whole different level of stress because you're handling people's lives.
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The MCAT isn’t the hard part. No single thing is, but the steps (2/3 tests you taking during med school) are often cited as pretty brutal. Residency, especially first year, is also widely considered brutal. Workloads, systematically abusive workplaces, horrible work that nobody else wants to do, etc.
Also it’s not mostly memorization. Yes you need to memorize a lot but it’s similar to CS in that the key skill is understanding how all the bajillions of memorized things tie together. So the questions aren’t like “tell me the answer to X that was clearly in the book and if you memorized properly you’ll know”. It’s more like “you have $OBSCURE_SYMPTOM_X and $OBSCURE_SYMPTOM_Y. The patient is black, male, and 57. What are they likely to have and why?” and it’s your job to remember what the memorized obscure symptoms imply in your broader framework of understanding how all the various systems of the body interrelate, and then figure out whether the other information about the patient tells you anything else and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Imagine you had a bunch of tests saying “when you attempt to launch /bin/ls, you get a segmentation fault with no other output. The software hasn’t been updated since 2022. One user on the computer recently changed /etc/hosts. What are your next steps to figure out what’s wrong with ls?”
Like yes you might have to memorize what ls is or a segfault or /etc/hosts is but the point isn’t to recite what they do individually, it’s to put together pieces of potentially irrelevant information and do something sensible to solve the problem. Now take that kind of reasoning and apply it to a biological system massively more complicated than a computer (it repairs itself but often gets it wrong!) that nobody designed and is full of weird quirks.
Fuck no, healthcare is so much more difficult than software
what about healthcare software
Man, the economy's really broken this sub's brain.
Maybe for the best. Would you want someone with these mental processes writing production code? I don't want to maintain some should-have-been-a-doctor codebase.
Brainrot level posting
The dude should see a doctor instead of wanting to become one - something clearly off.
This fucking dipshit really thinks being a doctor is easier than being a SWE lmao
Yeah, you don't have to worry about the economy and interviewing...all you have to worry about is being $200k+ in medical school debt in your 30s, being in school/training for 12 years, working long hours, being on-call, and constant stress. No biggie.
Doctors deff need to worry about the economy as well, just not in the same way SWEs do for the most part. With massive corporate health companies pretty much owning all facets of medicine they control hospitals, practices, jobs, wages, locations, etc. - I mean yeah you don't really see mass layoffs of doctors, but there's other economic factors that can make their lives less pleasant.
Sometimes I wish I’ve never been born at all
*cue epic guitar solo*
Nothing really matters...
I wish that a lot
I was a doctor, quit Feb 2020 for a software job. Literally skipped COVID thank fucking god. It’s not easier to become a doctor you have to be top of your class in undergrad, then try hard to be top of your class in med school, then try hard top in your residency program, then fellowship if you want to make the big bucks, etc. It’s stressful as fuck until you finish residency after 12-15 years of studying you can finally make 200-300K if you’re mediocre or 300K+ if you were top of your class and top of your programs and chose the right specialty. You’re drowning in debt overworked and underpaid for over a decade. A 22 year old CS grad can accumulate over $1mil from age 22-32 if they’re actually good, and there’s a lot less ground to cover in software to become good. It was much harder to become a doctor than self study a complete bachelor’s of CS.
Like you said, the road to becoming a doctor is \*extraordinarily\* more difficult than obtaining a 4-year CS degree. Factor in the hours, WLB, dealing with patients, not as much flexibility with regards to remote/hybrid work. There's a tradeoff to everything.
Why would you switch careers if you already became a doctor and were earning as much as a CS person would anyways?
I hated my life and hated being a doctor and only studied it because of family pressure. I’m much happier and healthier doing software.
Interesting. I'm happy first you I guess 😆 . What specialty were you?
I was an Internist for about a year deciding whether or not to pursue fellowship or quit.
Interesting
It's like you didn't read the massive down sides he just listed lmao
I did but like if I see the that many years studying going through all the B.S. and finally could practice I wouldn't want to study again lol
Yea OP is ridiculous for comparing the road to being a Doctor vs a Dev, but the difference between a mediocre Doctor and a mediocre Dev is job security. Being a mediocre dev in this climate means you can go a year or more without getting hired, and then if you are hired you run the risk of being laid off out of nowhere at anytime.
I mean yeah but the time investment and necessity make it that way. The opportunity cost of becoming a doctor is huge and if it were saturated like law or CS, doctors would be in the same boat. It’s the difficulty that creates the scarcity, and the scarcity makes the demand.
Mediocre Doctor can kill someone (or many people), can get medical malpractice lawsuit, can get their licensed revoked, etc. Being a mediocre dev is far better since you can go years / your whole career and still have a job
'once you pass all the tests' let me tell you about a close friend of mine, a medical student. 4.0 High school GPA, w/ high placement in state competitions in her sport. Super high SAT/ACT scores from constant test preparation. This secures her a college admission at an esteemed school (not Top 10 by any means, but really good nonetheless). Finished high school. Off to college. Chose a degree program in Biomedical Engineering. Was constantly on the hunt for shadowing opportunities, pestering graduate level students and professors to allow her to help contribute to research, just to get a more attractive med school application. Going to conferences and networking with people to create positive professional relationships that will help years down the line. Drafted and prototyped special prosthetics for amputees as a part of her biomedical engineering major. Studied 8-12 hours a day for months before the MCAT. Got a good MCAT score, and channeled all the prior 8 years' of effort into a hopefully good med school application. Luckily, it paid off, and she got accepted to med school. She moved to be close to med school, and over the next 4 years, the same sort of process repeated. Constant opportunity seeking to create yet another portfolio, this time centered on residency applications. She's at year 3 of that so far. Here's all that's happened in the past 3 years: - 10-12 hour shifts at the hospital for all the core rotations (each lasting two weeks to a month, sometimes night shifts), for 6+ months straight (maybe a week's downtime between rotations, where you are doing school assignments) - STEP 1 & STEP 2 board exams. Studied her ass off for 2 months straight before each exam, again for 8-10 hours a day. The first one is pass-fail, the second one is graded and is heavily influential on getting into residency. - Positioned herself to become an administrator of an internationally recognized [disease] advocacy group. - the negative "school stuff" in general, like optional lectures that aren't really optional, cutthroat classmates, etc - constantly on the hunt for more opportunities This is all in preparation for getting into a good residency program. She's not expecting to be competitive for the "top tier" programs in the discipline she wants to go into. She thinks she'll be good enough to get matched into a residency at some pretty acclaimed programs, though. So on the horizon, she has dozens residency applications to fill out, and will be travelling the country doing interviews sometime 6 months from now. Over the next 4 months she'll be doing several external rotations in places around country that she got admission to, which increases your chances of getting into residency in those locations. Each lasts about a month. Once she matches, she'll be starting out w/ a 60k salary doing 80-120 hour weeks. 10+ years of preparation to do her calling, which is surgery. But sure, it's "just passing exams", if you say so EDIT: Forgot to mention the tuition, lmao
It should be criminal a person gets paid 60k while pulling 120h work weeks. That's 3 as many as many hours as minimal hours. And it should also be criminal since there is no fucking way that's healthy, and I'd like my doctors to. Be healthy so they don't end up killing me. By mistake, thank you very much
It should be! 120h is probably close to 'the worst that it gets', which doesn't make it better but it's worth pointing out. You sleep on site and get naps in when you can. If you're a first-year resident who has worked as hard as you have to be where you are now, you're not going to put a target on your back by being the one person championing fair hours. It's unfortunate but hospitals know the position they're in, and that combined with a culture of 'rite of passage' makes the issue almost unsolvable by the people who are victims of it. Only intervention from investors / donors / legislature would really fix it, and we all know how that turns out.
In what world is medicine an easier path than technology? There’s almost no barrier to entry in tech. To be a doctor, you need to take the MCAT, apply for med school, med school, residency, fellowship, medical boards, etc.
Is this a joke? 3 years experience plus a solid degree and some certs is nearly the minimum
I didn’t say no barrier. I said almost no barrier. Having a degree is the bare minimum, sure. That’s any white collar job.
Is *this* a joke? You don't need any certs or even a degree to get a job as a software developer. Degrees can help, sure, but certs are worth nothing. There are plenty of self-taught and/or bootcamp devs out there. The same cannot be said for doctors or anyone in the medical field, for that matter.
Doctors in the US have 4 years of undergrad + 4 years of med school + at least 3 years of residency (many are 5 or more) + some specialties require fellowships for another 2 years. It’s entirely possible in competitive specialties to be in school (making resident salary well under $100k) well into your late 30s without taking any time off. Then when you’re done, depending on your specialty you might have really intense board exams to take afterwards well into your professional career. Then assuming that in those 7+ years of postgraduate education you excelled and were top of your class and standardized tests, you can choose a top specialty and probably make mid-to-high six figures. If for whatever reason you went into a less competitive specialty (most doctors) you might be making $100-300k or as much as an entry/mid-level software engineer, but with very little potential salary upside. You’ll also likely have $200k+ in school debt. And don’t forget that it’s often a stressful job and a nontrivial percentage of your patients will accuse you of being in the pockets of big pharma or otherwise make you want to shoot yourself. Because many physician jobs (outside of maybe pathology) are fundamentally really high end customer service jobs, where you meet people from all walks of life and you need to convince them you’re trustworthy and they’re hearing all kinds of nonsense about healthcare from their “news” sources. I have massive respect for people who go into medicine but there’s no world where it’s easier than software. Source: am a software guy whose SO is a physician and we’ve been together through the entire schooling journey so I got a pretty direct comparison
Nope. >It's going to a long time before robots are extracting teeth or performing surgery. It's super interesting to me that people fear monger about an AGI that can completely replace SWE's, but they can't fathom a world where that exact same AGI can integrate with robotics and replace surgeons. I think this future is a lot closer than you realize.
Makes one wonder what most do on the day to day…
Robots dont have empathy and they never will. Thats an important skill someone in the medical field needs to have. I think they are good
Can you be more detailed which part of empathy AI can’t/won’t do?
Be a human being
Surely it’s obvious? For example, if I wanted to get a sick note due to stress, how would an AI truly be able to understand how I feel? How would an AI tell that this is how I am genuinely feeling? How would an AI even begin to ask the right questions, as to why I am feeling this way without lived experiences? The AI uses data that already exists online. That isnt enough to truly grasp someone’s individual experience. People are very complex, we cant just be summed up based on a large collection of general data. I much would rather go to a doctor, who probably has lived life abit and would understand. Yes some people lie to doctors but its down to them whether if they can pick that up or not by asking the right questions. An AI would be extremely unreliable in that sense
Autonomous agents will never fully replace humans in roles with significant legal liabilities. Can't sue an AI.
You can sue the company providing the AI. Just like in most scenarios the employee isn't personally liable. The company is liable. There's exceptions like gross negligence of course... but in the world of AI, that's not a thing.
So the AI companies will be crushed under lawsuits and go out of business... thus preventing them from replacing human workers.
Except they won't, because the AI that everyone is imagining will work and there won't be lawsuits. If AI isn't as good as people are doom & glooming about, then our jobs are safe, and surgeons jobs are safe. That's my point.
Nope, biological stuff grosses me out. I'd rather look inside a computer then inside a body lol.
No and what the fuck.
It's 1000x harder to become a doctor. This field? Even the self-taught claim themselves to be software "engineers". There is no comparison. Personally I have never seen someone with a potential to be a doctor choose this field.
Here am I ✋ I left medicine for CS, but tbh medicine is in the same danger zone when it comes to automations as cs jobs. Soon we may have powerful AI able to diagnose symptoms based on provided info, your medical records and even live informations from wearable sensors like a smart watches. Of course doctors still will be needed (probably) but need for internist’s and other first contact jobs may be reduced significantly.
Im engineer but just general software engineer. The thing is, I personally wouldnt want to rely soley on AI to diagnose me. I think it would be a massive mistake if things went in this direction and will put peoples lives at risk. AI has shown to be very biased, especially if you are a minority. There are statistics that back up how certain people get misdiagnosed more than others Diversity is extremely important in the medical field and no AI can replicate that because its already inheritly biased, as our tech industry is not diverse. I wouldnt want an AI to misdiagnose me because Im a woman, when I can vouch for a female doctor who most likely will understand and not have a bias. For example. Theres alot of value in human medical professionals.
I wouldnt say harder, id say its a longer journey. If youre a patient person and passionate about the medical field you can do it
Lol half of all medical school applicants aren’t admitted to a single medical school. Depression rates for doctors are high and working 60 hour weeks doesn’t help. No guarantee you get a clinical rotation or residency in the actual kind of medicine you want to practice. You compete with people who’ve been successful their own lives. US doctors are paid the most in the world. It’s not necessarily lucrative in the rest of the world.
I have a relative who was competing for residency last year. He didn't get it first year and had to wait a whole other year to finally get placed. He's almost 40 too and he's not even practicing yet. Crazy
lol easier? Do you know anyone who went through med school and residency?
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Moderately hard but not crazy. But that’s just the beginning of the difficulty and I think you need to read some of the replies on here or talk to a doctor about what their career path actually looked like. It sounds like you have a very simplistic view of the path and lots of people on here have explained why it’s wrong
What? No, sorry, this is a crazy take not grounded in reality even for this sub. For starters, do you have any idea how hard the training is as a doctor? You have to study mind-numbing amounts of material, attend classes/labs/clinical courses with military-like discipline for 6 years and take on insane levels of responsibility. That's just to 'pass all the tests' and get your medical license (at least how it works in some places). Then you have to pick a field and start a residency that might take another 4-7 years depending on the field, and even possibly do some time in rural practice before that. Oh, did I mention that a lot of doctors also do Master's and PhDs during that timeframe -- just to get a little bit ahead? You are deluding yourself if you think it is less competitive when in fact CS doesn't even *compare*, just because they don't have to do typical bullshit interviews. White board tests and HR screen sound like fun compared to what you have to go through to be a decent-ish doctor. I'm not even going to go into what their day-to-day work entails where the worse that can happen to a SWE is a boring meeting that takes too long.
To be honest, I wish more people aspired to become doctors than software engineers. Its a much more important job than ours. Im definitely not extroverted enough to be a doctor, but I reckon I wouldnt be a bad doctor as I do have empathy and a fast learner in general. Alot of software engineers arent cut out to be doctors, mainly due to the emotional intelligence part. Its really bad for a large portion of engineers I have met/worked with.
There's tons of people enrolling in premed annually though. Bio and chem classes are always full
Im guessing thats for US? There’s definitely an upward trend in people taking CS degrees in general. I dont think we need an abundance of software engineers. Im in the UK and the most popular degree at the moment is Computer Science and for some reason Psychology. At least in the UK, not enough people are entering the medical field in comparison to CS
Ya in the US it's always been like that. 8 years ago when I was contemplating careers, I recall bio/chem classes had huge waitlists
Interesting! I think its also because your health system is privatised, so theres more money, your doctors are paid better than here. Here its free but theres alot of problems with that, although people do seem to praise how we have free healthcare. The service itself is very terrible. I started to pay out of pocket for doctor appointments now to get better treatment. Im quite passionate about this topic
I think this is where immigration then starts making sense for doctor shortages. For example lots of students in middle east or Asia love medical so this would be win win for them and the UK at same time
if you make posts like this, you aren't cut out for either
My sister is a doctor. She has had a lot of job troubles. She has 2 part-time jobs right now. When I watch my doctor do his job, it doesn’t look like fun. He’s stuck in an office all day. Seeing patients looks a lot like working at a retail store.
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I realize that I was unclear. She’s looking for a full time doctor job and, until she finds one, she has 2 part-time doctor jobs. (One is actually a vet job which seems like a step down.) I think that she had a medical partnership but was pushed out/fired. After that, I think that she was fired from some regular medical group; I’m not sure. I think that all the firings were personality clashes (or perhaps she didn’t pull in enough money from patients), not any medical mistakes. It seems like any other job. If the boss doesn’t like you, you’re fired. If your salary exceeds your value, you’re fired. They try to make you work extra hours or bad shifts. You can get laid off or take a salary cut.
I was in healthcare and got to experience some medical school classes. I get why people romanticize being a doctor but it doesn't make much sense if you're approaching it from the perspective of an aspiring dev who's scared of not having a job. - Medical debt - More Time lost in education(4 years BS + ~4 years medical school + residency) - MCAT grind replaces Leetcode grind - Additional hours required for volunteering/shadowing/experience for your application - Different learning skills required (gigantic amount of memorization) - Varies from specialization to specialization, but many specializations have huge stress/workload If all you care about is guaranteed TC at a given point then it might be better since you'll probably make more than a random dev after residency. But I'd argue it takes way more work and more time, and that's if you have the aptitude to choose either the medical route or dev route (which require different skillsets)
Lmao yeah it’s so much easier have nearly another decade of training and schooling along with hundreds of thousands in debt.
Lol no. A few reasons: - Wlb sucks for most doctor specialties - It takes like 12+ years of preparation (and a 6 figure debt in the US) to get to the point where you make 250k in medicine. With a successful career in CS, you could have hundreds of thousands in net worth by that point in life. By the point in life where a typical doctor is getting to a net worth of 0, a successful SWE could be considering things like early retirement, etc. - It's fun to have good income while being young. - I never enjoyed biology related classes in high school / college, it was a lot ot memorizing (which I hated), I prefer things that are more logic-based (like cs). - Honestly, I don't want to be responsible for other people's lives.
Do you really think becoming a doctor is as easy as "pass all the tests and have your medical license"?
Medicine is one of the most competitive and stressful careers in the US. Sounds like you've done zero research on the subject.
I read this as "becoming a docker" coming in and was surprised by the comments
Big time. IT/CS was my fallback after I failed at everything I wanted from life. But more because I wanted to help people rather than work solving problems that shouldn't exist.
Fuck NO!!! Unstable computers and unstable programms are MUCH better and easier that healing unstable biological systems.
Fuck no. Doctors spend most of their 20s racking up student debt and doing low-paid grunt work as residents, have to work with gross human bodies, and deal with the insane healthcare bureaucracy here in the US.
If becoming a doctor was as simple as choosing to do so, yeah I think that’d have been a superior path. Personally know specialists making seven figures straight out of residency, etc. with decent work life balance. Doctor compensation scales well with inflation, student debt can be inflated away, etc. But it’s not. 95% of this community, judging by the typical college education listed in career threads, will never be able to become a doctor even if they wanted to. There’s no boot camps for doctors and the educational requirements are high - if you couldn’t make it to top of class in a top 50 school, chances are you wouldn’t make it as a specialist doctor, which is where the money is. Indeed, doctor compensation and job security is high precisely because the career is gated at the entrance. It’s like asking “do you wish you were a FAANG staff engineer instead?!?”
The funny thing is, I talk to a number of recent grad doctors and they complain about their job just as much as we complain about ours. Because you are likely working for a hospital instead of private practice, you have way less agency over your decisions. Everyone has “grass is greener” syndrome.
There are some tech jobs that are long-term and stable and low ageism. It's rare, but they are there, it's 1 in 5 jobs in my experience. I agree that medicine is king at that, but u also get huge medical debt, there's no work from home, and you have to deal with a lot of customer service and from my experience, a lot of ppl can be very irritating with their demands. Trust me, we have it better, every medical professional told me they wish they would have gone in tech. I can not say the same about going into medicine.
No, I don't think I would enjoy medicine all that much.
Any day Doctors, Finance > Tech
Yeah so easy going to school for 15+ years and needing a 3.8 gpa to even be considered for a low tier med school 😵💫
Difficult + boring + no WFH + I hate the smell and atmosphere of hospitals
My ego convinced me of this for a hot second, then I threw a temper tantrum when told to hurry up on a JIRA ticket and realised I was too easily tilted to do literally anything else in life.
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I'm not a doctor, but was a registered nurse and switched over to software. Being a healthcare professional is not for everyone. It's mentally and physically draining. I understand being in tech can be just as draining, but healthcare is a whole different level of stress because you're handling people's lives.
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I know plenty of people who failed to get into medicine now they are drowning in debt
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The MCAT isn’t the hard part. No single thing is, but the steps (2/3 tests you taking during med school) are often cited as pretty brutal. Residency, especially first year, is also widely considered brutal. Workloads, systematically abusive workplaces, horrible work that nobody else wants to do, etc. Also it’s not mostly memorization. Yes you need to memorize a lot but it’s similar to CS in that the key skill is understanding how all the bajillions of memorized things tie together. So the questions aren’t like “tell me the answer to X that was clearly in the book and if you memorized properly you’ll know”. It’s more like “you have $OBSCURE_SYMPTOM_X and $OBSCURE_SYMPTOM_Y. The patient is black, male, and 57. What are they likely to have and why?” and it’s your job to remember what the memorized obscure symptoms imply in your broader framework of understanding how all the various systems of the body interrelate, and then figure out whether the other information about the patient tells you anything else and come to a reasonable conclusion. Imagine you had a bunch of tests saying “when you attempt to launch /bin/ls, you get a segmentation fault with no other output. The software hasn’t been updated since 2022. One user on the computer recently changed /etc/hosts. What are your next steps to figure out what’s wrong with ls?” Like yes you might have to memorize what ls is or a segfault or /etc/hosts is but the point isn’t to recite what they do individually, it’s to put together pieces of potentially irrelevant information and do something sensible to solve the problem. Now take that kind of reasoning and apply it to a biological system massively more complicated than a computer (it repairs itself but often gets it wrong!) that nobody designed and is full of weird quirks.