Comment by peterbessman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterbessman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yeah... hackers are usually incredibly naive about compensation outside of their own world. For reference: http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2011...

Bottom line: here in the US of A, your average doc (most certainly NOT an outlier) is making between $150k and $350k. Put that in your VC-backed pipe and smoke it.

(Debt? Between $150k-$200k for 4 years of med school. Post med school training, in the form of residency and fellowship, runs anywhere from 3-12 years and pays around the $50k mark. Basically, nobody went broke by becoming a doctor.)

Which means, of course, that the outliers can do very well. I have a friend who's Dad is an oral surgeon in the Eastern Shore of MD (what might be considered the "boonies" by some). He clears about $750k/year for a 35 hour work week. llimllib's wife above is probably around the $250k mark in the ER/ICU. If that ain't coin...

Anybody who thinks that somebody left medicine for the money knows very little about medicine.

And that's to say nothing of big cities. $750k may be an outlier in Eastern MD, but it's not uncommon for specialists in NY or LA to clear $1M easily. True outliers can climb north of there.

Medicine is still an extremely reliable way to become everyday rich, if not outrageously so. It beats the pants off of corporate jobs, and it beats law on average (though law outliers tend to beat medicine outliers). It loses out to investment banking, but the lifestyle is far superior.

A smart person can do a lot worse than medicine.

I'm curious about those outliers. Are there any shared traits that can be identified?

Most are likely specialist surgeons -- neurosurgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons and going to pull in big money. The trade off is a (really) long residency, of course.

take an evening and go have drinks with some current med students / residents - here's what you'll hear (not from all, but from many): "Obamacare is killing my profession!"..."i should've gone to b-school instead"..."i could be working at GS but now i'm busting my ass for $50k"..."i'm getting screwed! this is sooooo unfair! how am i going to survive this debt?!"...so, the problem isn't that they don't make a great living - because they do. the problem is that they feel they're entitled to make as much as other 'smart people' (aka, their former undergrad classmates at princeton) in other professional careers like corporate law or banking - which they don't. they still make way more than 99% of the population, but those people don't matter as a basis of comparison. if you counter with, "...but, you're a doctor. you're not in it for the money - you want to help people, right?" you'll get an extremely exaggerated eye-roll and the conversation will end...so, in short - it doesn't surprise me at all that a doc is leaving medicine to chase $ in tech now that it's no longer cool to tell your cronies you work in finance... (there are many exceptions and God bless them but, I've personally run into too many self-righteous, woe-is-me med students to know what to do with...) - why do you think dermatology is such a competitive field? $$$$$$

Sounds like unworthy people who are just clamoring for status (which income is a proxy for) instead of figuring out who they are as individuals and what their life purpose is.

And, once Obamacare comes in, people who actually want to be doctors (and there are enough of them) will get in.

My wife's still a fellow, but you're right in the ballpark on the salary for residents and fellows. When she was an intern, we calculated her hourly wage at <$8.

You're low on your med school debt estimate, remember that loans don't just need to cover tuition, but living expenses too. Furthermore, many of her fellow not-yet-attendings are sitting on undergraduate college debt that has been deferred until they become attendings.

Nonetheless! Your overall point is totally valid. I've out-earned her for the past 6 years, but she'll even it out in about 2-3 years as an attending, and doctors frequently work well into their sixties.

(Also: Baltimore represent!)

Average student debt at time of graduation was $148k in 2010 I believe. Also, Baltimore represent!

There's also the part where you spend your 20's in med school/internship/residency. Hard to put a dollar value on that. There's obviously nothing inherently wrong with it, but it takes a certain kind of person. And you had better be damn sure you want to do medicine before committing to such a program.

What lucrative or otherwise worthwhile profession do you not waste your youth toiling away in? Other than trust fund custodian of course.

Good point. Even with a Bachelors in Computer Science, it can be hard to make the industry average until you have at least 5 years experience.

This. And resdency is not the life destroyer people make it out to be anyway. You can find plenty of single residents in the bars of Baltimore. Whatever the demands of their program may be, its not like they're spending a year on an aircraft carrier or whatever. There are certainly downsides to the gig, but the "overworked and underpaid" idea really needs a reality check.

Tech? You don't even need to go to college to be a successful software engineer. No matter how smart you are, if you want to be a doctor you have to do undergrad, med school, residency. 36 hour shifts, 100+ hour weeks vs working at Google. With tech you can work from anywhere, you can choose your risk/reward exposure, and if 10 years in you decide you hate it, you don't have a mountain of debt.

In medicine's favor I will say that the median income is probably higher, the median social status is much higher, you have a much better chance of directly making a positive impact on many people's lives, and you work in a field with a more balanced gender ratio.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com