3 ms·
Doesn’t a doctor tend to have deliverables in a timeline of minutes or hours, on the order of dozens such deliverables a day, often with health- or life-critica
by alwa 3y ago
Doesn’t a doctor tend to have deliverables in a timeline of minutes or hours, on the order of dozens such deliverables a day, often with health- or life-critical stakes attached?
It seems like only yesterday that this counterpoint made the rounds here:
“The darker side of being a doctor” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40025261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40025261
- BeetleB 3y agoI'm not discounting the prior submission. The medical field is vast. Some jobs are a lot worse than others. Just as you can't generalize across all STEM jobs, you can't generalize across all medical jobs. Yes, a lot of doctors have a high amount of stress. And a lot don't.
- photonthug 3y agoThere’s a difference between things like not being able to disconnect from work emotionally vs requirements for off the clock training vs on call rotation. Some subset of this stuff might affect some doctors and some engineers, it all depends on career goals and trajectory, so probably not that useful to try and generalize. One observation though, doctors on average have a better reason for work stress to follow them home, seeing life or death shit all the time. Whereas SWEs carry home an unreasonable amount of stress in situations that not only aren’t as important as that, but situations where the fruit of their labor will last only a few years at most. Like, your magnum opus at work will very likely be torn down anyway, so in terms of lasting legacy you’re probably better off with a job in landscaping or carpentry rather than a “living in the future!” career in ad tech, self driving cars, etc. From this I conclude that most software people, including myself, are way more obsessive and less rational than we usually like to think.