
Forget Silicon Valley, It Still Pays More to Be a Doctor in America - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/which-u-s-jobs-pay-the-most-top-ten-professions-by-salary
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0xB31B1B
These comparisons are too coarse. I make more money as a line level eng in big
tech than my wife who is a surgeon at a well respected hospital with a hoity
toity pedigree. I have always made more than her, my path has caused me to
incur much less debt, and I work about 60% of the hours that she does. In 10
or 15 years, she might make more than me or we might make about the same
depending on the career track I decide to take. She is in the top 2% of her
field pedigree/track wise and the real benefits accrue after 10 years or so of
being an attending. At that point, you can consult, be an expert witness in
court cases, direct a medical program etc. If you aren’t in the top echelons
then you’re ceiling is going to be 300-400k unless you get a deal at a rural
hospital desperate for your services.

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strikelaserclaw
working at FAANG and making 300k tc is like 5-10% of engineers even in
America, your experience certainly isn't true for the run of the mill
engineers. Top 5-10% doctors probably pull in close to a million.

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C1sc0cat
I seem to recall reading a comment on hn a few months ago about over hearing
(at the gym) a transplant surgeon trying to recruit his friend saying that he
could get several mill per year.

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Ididntdothis
That sounds about right. I sometimes deal with surgeons through work and also
through someone close to me and these surgeons seem quite wealthy considering
the types of cars and houses they are talking about. Must be way into the
millions.

there is also no ageism so they have a secure career for almost as long as
they want.

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rb808
One big advantage that doctors and lawyers have is that their careers easily
progress as they get older, they continue to get paid more and have excellent
job security. A 50 year old lawyer or doctor is making bank where no one wants
to hire a typical 50 year old developer.

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newen
I think the difference is that there are so many more software engineers. That
is, there is no doctor equivalent of a typical 50 year old developer that no
one wants to hire because those doctors were filtered out through med school,
residencies, etc. You're left with a few highly skilled set of doctors. While
there is no such filtering process for software engineers and you're left with
a large number of people of varying skills. A highly skilled 50 year old
software engineer is still very hireable.

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jdavis703
The title of this article talks about Silicon Valley but then uses national
numbers. There are very few software engineers in the Bay Area making only
$110,000 a year. If they want to talk about tech that's fine, but this
includes programmers working at insurance companies in Tulsa, which isn't
exactly the image that comes to mind with "Silicon Valley."

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mountainofdeath
Still though, on a cost-of-living adjusted basis, it works out the same. The
other day someone asked me if a $100k offer at WalMart in Bentonville,
Arkansas was a good offer. The effective purchasing power is well over $200k
in Bay area dollars, not to mention the lower tax burden.

Granted, there is huge opportunity cost living in Arkansas.

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akhilcacharya
Do Tesla’s cost half as much in Bentonville? What about MacBook Pros or
student loan payments?

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faceplanted
No, but food and rent cost far less, meaning you can buy more Teslas and pay
off more of your loans.

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akhilcacharya
The math doesn’t add up. Food isn’t uniformly half as expensive and rent is
only a limited percentage of your take home. A 1k apartment vs a 4K apartment
is a yearly difference of $36k, not $100k.

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hellisothers
This. 10 out of 10 discussions I have around this topic with people looking to
move out of the Bay Area results in the other party realizing money isn’t
going to net out in their favor.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
A doctor in the US is someone who has gone through 4 years of undergraduate
college, 4 years of medical school, and 3 years of residency.

In addition, getting into medical school is pretty difficult, so they have to
be among the best students in undergrad.

Now let’s compare an somewhat analogous software engineer. Someone who has
gotten a bachelors degree from a good college graduating near the top of the
class. They now have 7 years of experience in their job. A possible equivalent
of the competition for getting into medical school might be landing a job with
FAANG.

Looking at levels.fyi, it seems that such a person would be making from
250-350K, which is comparable if not greater than an internal medicine or
family practice doctor with a lot less stress and much fewer work hours.

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MuffinFlavored
> Looking at levels.fyi, it seems that such a person would be making from
> 250-350K, which is comparable if not greater than an internal medicine or
> family practice doctor with a lot less stress and much fewer work hours.

Is that $250k-$350k exclusively in hyperinflated areas of the country? What
would a FAANG developer be making in Miami, or Iowa?

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mountainofdeath
I've heard near-FANG companies pay roughly 75% of what the expected value in
Silicon Valley would be in places like Denver or Austin. A deep discount for
sure but with the added benefit of far lower cost-of-living and tax burden.
Facebook and Google are unique in that the majority of their engineers are in
high cost-of-living areas, so they pay the same amount for the relatively
small numbers of engineers working outside of the major offices.

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bluedino
Wouldn't "fixing" healthcare cause a big reduction in not just doctors
salaries but the amount of profits doctors offices make

Not sure how much they ding my health insurance company for when I got in for
a ten minute visit and see the doctor for maybe 5.

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arcticbull
Yeah, and that's okay. Nobody's owed compensation at a specific level, and
moving forward, medical professionals would be more public servants than rock
stars. That's not to say they'd be paid badly, Canadian doctors under the
single-payer model make $250-500K CAD and have much lower expenses as
malpractice insurance is socialized too.

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tryptophan
I vote we go after software engineers next! We won't earn as much, but hey, we
will be able to feel good about being public servants. Its always easy to
throw others under the bus... Look at what happened to the education
profession. It used to be good, but its slowly been getting worse and worse.
Now its generally the C students that go into education.

> That's not to say they'd be paid badly, Canadian doctors under the single-
> payer model make $250-500K CAD

Only because if they got paid less, they could move 50 miles south and get
paid 2x.

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arcticbull
If you can make a good case for socializing software engineering, then I'm all
ears, but I've yet to hear a good one. The difference is that a software
engineer doesn't control directly the life or death of another, and doesn't
provide a service we all need to maintain basic function and that of society.
Health care should be a human right, some letters on a screen less so.

> Only because if they got paid less, they could move 50 miles south and get
> paid 2x.

That sounds like a market would exist regardless, does it not? Canadian
physicians have little interest in working in the US because they want to
serve people based on their needs and not sentencing them to death based on
their inability to pay. There are serious moral issues doctors in America are
payed handsomely to ignore.

The interesting thing is you're arguing against your own interests here.

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juanbyrge
Those salary numbers are nation wide. In silicon valley alone, software
engineers will make much more on average than doctors.

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reallydontask
This seems like a very click baity article.

I've only skimmed the article, but it seems it's looking at median salary. I'd
guess that Silicon Valley salaries are on the high end of the income
distribution for the positions so likely to be higher than GPs

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akhilcacharya
That’s the problem with wanting “typical” numbers. Amazon range TC numbers
_are_ common.

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SubparUser
I'm a little confused on the goal of this 'analysis'. It appear that time
spent in school/school cost isn't even considered. I'm not that familiar with
bloomberg articles so I can't speak to their normal quality, but this seems
like a filler article

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SubparUser
Now that I noticed that this is aimed at young professionals in an effort to
guide their career choice, this article seems even more disingenuous.

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obliviousonions
I'm a sophomore in college right now. A couple of my friends chose to do Pre-
med, and I'm majoring in CS. Nearly everyone in my CS classes will graduate
with the degree, and get offers as software engineers. However, the people
doing Pre-med are stressing like crazy, taking nearly double the amount of
classes I am, and still might not get into medical school. And don't forget
residency after that. Obviously the debt from 8 years of school is going to be
much more, not to mention the emotional impact of all that stress and school.

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mountainofdeath
I noticed something when I graduated a few years ago that only became more
true as I started looking at hiring new graduates. People that would have
normally gone the PreMed/PreLaw/Investment Banking route are changing majors
half-way to CS. The students changed from easygoing hacker types to hyper-
competitive types.

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achenatx
My GP is leaving medicine. She doesnt make that much and the hospital is
dictating her hours like a fast food employee. GPs make in the mid 100K range.
I have several relatives that are physicians and they still work long hours,
maybe 60+ hours a week, are on call some holidays, weekends, nights etc. They
do love their work.

I went to an MD PHD program for 5 years before dropping out (for the dot com
boom). My dream was to develop systems that would create custom cures for
infectious diseases. Take a sample of the virus/bacteria, drop it into the
machine, and custom antibodies are created for the particular strain. I
realized that medicine changes so slowly and you are essentially a mechanic
for the human body. As a physician you have a specialty and will likely be
doing the exact same thing for the rest of your life.

As a physician you are servicing people as a developer you are building
things. Tech is rapidly changing and for me is way more fun. You can reinvent
yourself to a totally different technology or field every 5 years. You can
start a company in just about any field with a development background to make
much more than a physician can make.

I started my own consulting practice and overall I believe was a much easier
and interesting path than medicine would have been.

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rmah
She should start an urgent care clinic in an underserved, but not totally
economically depressed region. She will almost certainly earn multiples more
than she made on salary.

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jandrewrogers
From the same article, the median CEO makes $190k, which is considerably less
than what I think most people assume -- slightly more than 3x the median
household income. Note that for the purposes of government statistics a CEO is
running a thousand person company, it is not the "CEO" of a 20-person startup.
That pay seems low for the amount of stress and responsibility that job
entails.

It is good to be a software engineer.

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astura
No shit the average doctor makes more than the average programmer (though a
Silicon Valley programmer is going to have a higher compensation than average
- which makes this article even more stupid, because it uses national numbers
on salary to make a generalization about Silicon Valley salary).

But becoming a doctor is a _lot_ more difficult, expensive, and takes much,
much longer. Its much riskier. Getting into med school after the sunk cost of
an undergrad is far from guaranteed. Passing your boards and getting into
residency is not guaranteed and you may have to go into a different specialty
than you were planning on. By this time you've already given up 8 years of
earnings and have probably taken out loans in the six figures.

And if you graduate med school and don't like the work? Too bad!

Seeing a few friends go through the stress of the process, I wouldn't want to
do it myself. None of my friends got a residency right out of med school. The
other one of my friend decided to not go into med school at all after getting
a pre-med degree and instead go to nursing school.

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hombre_fatal
My family is full of people in the medical field.

They generally make more than I do. I work remotely on a beach at 30. They
cannot, or aspire to once they retire.

For my values and life goals, I prefer my compensation: freedom. Though they
get to wake up everyday to help people.

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Willson50
And work twice as many hours a week.

~~~
tzakrajs
And have massive personal liability that could much more easily leave you
unemployable and emotionally scarred.

~~~
seibelj
And start your career $300-500k in debt with the only option you possibly have
for paying it off is working as a doctor, even if you decide you don't like it
8 years into the program. You are now 100% handcuffed to the profession and
have 20 years of servitude ahead of you.[0]

[0] True story of family friend

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viscanti
There's also the opportunity cost of the years of additional schooling. Their
tech counterparts in the Bay Area are making six figures a year for several
years while doctors are racking up additional debt.

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notus
I make quite a bit of money without a degree and I work 30 hours a week as an
engineer. Doctor salaries are not much more than what I get already so I'm
failing to see how it pays more to be a doctor. I guess if all we're looking
at is total compensation then sure they make more than me, but I put in way
less effort to formal education and work way less.

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formercoder
Why are all of these articles on comp so wrong?

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astura
Can you elaborate on what is wrong about them?

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formercoder
They always just seem meaningless, for example:

What is a Computer and Information Systems Manager? What jobs does that cover?

Let's say maybe it's software engineers, why are we comparing doctors, who's
comp is all salary, to engineers, who can have 50%+ bonuses?

Law is a well known bimodal distribution. BigLaw pays $190k salary + bonus
straight out of law school.

Where are bankers and consultants? Post-MBA comp is $150k - $165k salary +
bonus.

The articles just never seem to align with what I've heard by word of mouth.

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rmah
Almost half of doctors in the USA are not on salary, they are partners in
their own practice.

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formercoder
Didn't know that - great point

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johnny313
Maybe a better source for physician salaries:
[https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2019-compensation-
overvie...](https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2019-compensation-
overview-6011286)

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astura
That link redirects to a login page.

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strikelaserclaw
if you study your ass off and work as many hours like doctors do, then i'm
sure you can make just as much money in big cities with tech jobs.

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sct202
They also have the distinct disadvantage of always being in the position of
making decisions that may kill someone.

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someguydave
Doctors make more because they have a government-enforced cartel preventing
competition for their jobs from other US citizens and also preventing
immigrants from coming to the US and claiming to be "doctors" without any
qualifications.

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ericfrenkiel
Yes, please tell this to the next doctor you see who saves your life or cures
your disease. /s

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someguydave
You are implying that they would be insulted. If they were insulted by the
implication, why do they accept government interference in doctor licensing?

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tbirrell
But its still easier to break into tech.

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xivzgrev
Did not read. Assumed article did not deduct malpractice insurance premiums
and student debt payments to reach conclusion.

