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It's just a job. Nobody is being forced to go to work. If you don't like your job, or if you can't do your job, you can quit and get another job. This is Americ

It's just a job. Nobody is being forced to go to work. If you don't like your job, or if you can't do your job, you can quit and get another job. This is America. As long as people are griping and complaining instead of quitting we know we're in good shape.

dragontamer 6y ago
> Nobody is being forced to go to work. Your patients will die if you don't go to work. You're not "forced" to go in. But there's a strong sense of duty here. Its life-or-death. Nurses / doctors chose this profession because they want to save lives.
- michaniskin 6y ago
  Sure, there are pros and cons to going to work. That's why it's called work. Every job has them.
skim_milk 6y ago
This is one part of the problem though, I know someone in the hospital staffing industry and they have 28,000 open positions in America for skilled nursing alone even with the huge pay increases. Just hope you don't get sick in the next year. And besides, the job tree has stopped bearing its fruit because it is out of season and it's been picked dry already.
- michaniskin 6y ago
  So prices will go up. That's how we get other people to voluntarily do things for us. I don't see a problem there.
kristjansson 6y ago
Sure, but the terminal point of that logic is _an exodus of healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic_. Seems like something to avoid?
- michaniskin 6y ago
  Pay them more money. Simple.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    How much money do I have to pay you to get a nursing degree, quit your current job, and start helping out the pandemic? Serious question. Now that you have an idea of how much money that actually costs, do you understand why things don't scale the way you think they do? Even then, it will take you years to get the skills needed to be a nurse (and in ~1 year, thanks to the vaccine, the surge in nurses won't be needed anymore). What needed to happen is that you needed to start training to be a nurse 2 years ago, if we wanted you helping a hospital today. And that's assuming you're inclined to learn biological sciences and actually pass nursing school on your first try.
    - michaniskin 6y ago
      Nursing is not that complex. The bulk of the work can be offloaded on semi-skilled labor with on the job training. This is what the army does, it works fine. This is not rocket science here.
      - athriren 6y ago
        nursing is “not that complex” in the same sense that programming is “typing characters into a file”. my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covid crisis zone earning less than 60K a year. this is with a decade of experience in some of the top hospitals in the country. i think HN has a very California/New York view of nurse’s compensation and status. her previous hospital responded to covid by firing a lot of nursing staff (grandma’s couldn’t get knee replacements, but covid wasn’t super bad here yet so hospitals just shed resources only to need them again in two months). hospital administrations responded to the crisis by cutting staff, cutting pay, and increasing their own salaries, while taking months to procure PPE for their workers. at the height of the iraq war, it was a big news story that soldiers had not been receiving adequate protection and that some of the vehicle and personnel armor they had received was defective. if we want to make a war analogy, this is blackwater contractors getting paid millions to play at war games geared to the tits and barely ever leaving the green zone while the soldiers doing the real grunt work are getting shredded by mandatory redeployments with no leave and issued substandard gear. on top of that, covid has been functionally live clinical experimentation at mass scale. a lot of medicine has been made rote, so i think jaded people think it is just a big book of instructions. this pandemic was figuring things out live at runtime. the compassionate response to a massive crisis in healthcare worker morale brought on by burnout due to extremely fast paced, high risk, high stress, highly specified work conditions during a global pandemic is something like “i hope this can be managed so that care can continue to be delivered” and not “they should get a new job”.
pizza 6y ago
Trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of this comment that doesn't just imply tossing nurses from one abusive and under-appreciative hospital system gig to the next. If that was the case the people who we would have the privilege of calling our healthcare services would all just leave. Market collapse, if you will. Not exactly long-term thinking in the middle of a worsening pandemic.
- michaniskin 6y ago
  We don't have the power to toss anyone anywhere. They have the freedom to work or not work, or to change jobs, or any number of alternatives to working somewhere where they don't want to work. If a lot of workers quit then the wages (and prices) rise, and workers move from other jobs to do the higher paid ones. There is only a shortage of labor when there are wage or price controls imposed on the businesses by legislation.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    There's a shortage of labor because COVID19 grows exponentially, and there's no possible way we can grow our nursing / doctors labor pool exponentially in a few short months.
    - michaniskin 6y ago
      The type of work required to monitor covid patients can be done by semi-skilled workers for the most part. The army does this, it works.
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        Since this is similar to another reply you gave me, I'll just note that our discussion basically moved there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25213955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25213955

dragontamer 6y ago

> Nobody is being forced to go to work. Your patients will die if you don't go to work. You're not "forced" to go in. But there's a strong sense of duty here. Its life-or-death. Nurses / doctors chose this profession because they want to save lives.

michaniskin 6y ago
Sure, there are pros and cons to going to work. That's why it's called work. Every job has them.

skim_milk 6y ago

This is one part of the problem though, I know someone in the hospital staffing industry and they have 28,000 open positions in America for skilled nursing alone even with the huge pay increases. Just hope you don't get sick in the next year. And besides, the job tree has stopped bearing its fruit because it is out of season and it's been picked dry already.

michaniskin 6y ago
So prices will go up. That's how we get other people to voluntarily do things for us. I don't see a problem there.

kristjansson 6y ago

Sure, but the terminal point of that logic is _an exodus of healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic_. Seems like something to avoid?

michaniskin 6y ago
Pay them more money. Simple.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  How much money do I have to pay you to get a nursing degree, quit your current job, and start helping out the pandemic? Serious question. Now that you have an idea of how much money that actually costs, do you understand why things don't scale the way you think they do? Even then, it will take you years to get the skills needed to be a nurse (and in ~1 year, thanks to the vaccine, the surge in nurses won't be needed anymore). What needed to happen is that you needed to start training to be a nurse 2 years ago, if we wanted you helping a hospital today. And that's assuming you're inclined to learn biological sciences and actually pass nursing school on your first try.
  - michaniskin 6y ago
    Nursing is not that complex. The bulk of the work can be offloaded on semi-skilled labor with on the job training. This is what the army does, it works fine. This is not rocket science here.
    - athriren 6y ago
      nursing is “not that complex” in the same sense that programming is “typing characters into a file”. my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covid crisis zone earning less than 60K a year. this is with a decade of experience in some of the top hospitals in the country. i think HN has a very California/New York view of nurse’s compensation and status. her previous hospital responded to covid by firing a lot of nursing staff (grandma’s couldn’t get knee replacements, but covid wasn’t super bad here yet so hospitals just shed resources only to need them again in two months). hospital administrations responded to the crisis by cutting staff, cutting pay, and increasing their own salaries, while taking months to procure PPE for their workers. at the height of the iraq war, it was a big news story that soldiers had not been receiving adequate protection and that some of the vehicle and personnel armor they had received was defective. if we want to make a war analogy, this is blackwater contractors getting paid millions to play at war games geared to the tits and barely ever leaving the green zone while the soldiers doing the real grunt work are getting shredded by mandatory redeployments with no leave and issued substandard gear. on top of that, covid has been functionally live clinical experimentation at mass scale. a lot of medicine has been made rote, so i think jaded people think it is just a big book of instructions. this pandemic was figuring things out live at runtime. the compassionate response to a massive crisis in healthcare worker morale brought on by burnout due to extremely fast paced, high risk, high stress, highly specified work conditions during a global pandemic is something like “i hope this can be managed so that care can continue to be delivered” and not “they should get a new job”.

pizza 6y ago

Trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of this comment that doesn't just imply tossing nurses from one abusive and under-appreciative hospital system gig to the next. If that was the case the people who we would have the privilege of calling our healthcare services would all just leave. Market collapse, if you will. Not exactly long-term thinking in the middle of a worsening pandemic.

michaniskin 6y ago
We don't have the power to toss anyone anywhere. They have the freedom to work or not work, or to change jobs, or any number of alternatives to working somewhere where they don't want to work. If a lot of workers quit then the wages (and prices) rise, and workers move from other jobs to do the higher paid ones. There is only a shortage of labor when there are wage or price controls imposed on the businesses by legislation.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  There's a shortage of labor because COVID19 grows exponentially, and there's no possible way we can grow our nursing / doctors labor pool exponentially in a few short months.
  - michaniskin 6y ago
    The type of work required to monitor covid patients can be done by semi-skilled workers for the most part. The army does this, it works.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      Since this is similar to another reply you gave me, I'll just note that our discussion basically moved there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25213955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25213955