Doctors work longer mostly because you can't fire them unless they're negligent/incompetent (for various reasons including that most are self-employed/contractors either individually or as a group).
The only value the hospital places on seniority is that you know the local practice patterns so there's less of a learning curve as compared to someone ewer.
> Things change daily in both fields--new procedures, new findings--yet tech seems to have far more ageism.
We have continuing medical education requirements but the reality is most of medicine is designed to be easy and guideline based. Weird and wonderful stuff benefits from experience.
> Why is an older doctor so much more valuable than an older developer?
A 60 year old surgeon is still taking out an appendix, just with newer tools than when they were 30, for the same amount of money as a newer one. I would imagine an older developer would want to be more well-compensated and have career growth focusing on things like architecture or having a team but I defer to practicing developers for their input on why they're not valued.
When I interview at a new job as a very senior engineer (and relatively well known I in my area), I get to jump through 7 rounds of interviews where someone asks me the equivalent of medschool exam questions.
If I’m lucky my connections might let me whittle the interview rounds down to 5.
There may be 20 people in any given tech stack/industry who are valued the way my wife is by employers.
Interesting, are these in underserved areas? I just went through interviewing for a new job and despite being in an in-demand subspecialty with desperate employers the most I got was a dinner after the 2nd round interview but no one covered my travel. Do you mind if I ask what kind of physician she is? I clearly picked incorrectly.
> When I interview at a new job as a very senior engineer (and relatively well known I in my area), I get to jump through 7 rounds of interviews where someone asks me the equivalent of medschool exam questions.
> If I’m lucky my connections might let me whittle the interview rounds down to 5.
Why do you think that's the case? Is it a compensation issue or is there age-ism/an assumption that only a 25 y/o engineer can be "10x". I periodically see posts about the challenges facing older developers on HN but I didn't last long enough in tech to understand it.
I did not. I think I'm so conditioned to being treated poorly by hospitals I just assume I'm going to be taken advantage of but you're probably right and I should have asked.
Pediatric Emergency Medicine. All in cities large enough to have a children’s hospital, so basically minimum metro populations of 500k or so.
>is there age-ism
I’m sure there is, but not really at the principal engineer level from what I’ve seen. Mostly there’s an assumption that staff plus engineers will skew a good bit older.
I think the issue is that everyone cargo cults FAANG interviews. They get so many applicants that they can afford to treat very senior people like new grads, and that attitude trickles down to most other companies.
From what I observed early in my career, there was definitely a time when higher level engineers escaped the FAANG style hazing process. But slowly more and more companies have started putting everyone through the whole thing.
I’ve been at companies where leadership tried to force very well known engineers with decades of experience, hugely popular open source projects, multiple famous talks/blogs/podcasts etc… to do weed out take home assignments.
Interesting, pediatrics is so underfunded and poorly respected in Canada that I'm genuinely shocked (and pleasantly surprised) to read about a paediatrician not being treated like refuse.
Kudos to your wife though, that's a very challenging field and anecdotally my interactions with peds ER physicians have been overwhelmingly positive. They all seem to have a very well-developed sixth sense about when something is "off" despite many of their patients not being able to talk.
> They get so many applicants that they can afford to treat very senior people like new grads, and that attitude trickles down to most other companies.
Is it just during the interview process or do you find bias against older engineers in hiring decisions and the work environment as well?
It's also kind of challenging to tell an eye surgeon whom you are interviewing to do an eye surgery if you're really not sure he knows how to do it or not.
which would you take with you on a one way trip to a desert island?
that’s a meaningless question, it assumes their jobs are their siloed experience, and that nothing outside of job is real.
training. licensing. you can’t just go become a doctor. yes, there can be new doctors, cheaper, maybe better, maybe not. but the funnel is finite.
got a computer? or a smartphone? device with screen and input? with a little work, you’re gonna be writing code in no time. call yourself an engineer and mostly nobody gets mad that you have no license, no certification, possibly no degree. because none of that matters.
no, that isn’t capturing nuance, context, or detail. just the macro. it’s enough.
How long are we going to be there?
> It's interesting that places value seniority and experience so much more in medicine vs tech
I don't think the tech world devalues seniority as much as they despise people older than them and not of the same generation(ish).
All big generalities and of course don't fit every situation/company/person.
The lower barrier to entry that the developer has?
This is not true ?