Comment by paul7986
6 hours ago
Are engineers still making 100s of thousands a year still just for vibe coding while a nurse and other skilled / highly trained medical professionals working their butt off make half of that?
Do we think there is going to be a correction for the vibe coders?
Pardon I know such question is controversial but thinking ahead.
There's something weird about nurse pay where it doesn't seem to raise even during large shortages of qualified nurses. I think it's artificially lowered by hospital admin, with temporary traveling nurses acting as "scabs" to avoid the normal wage increasing
It is weird how it works with anyone there but the doctors... Do they have some type of cartel or mafia that nurses and other staff don't have?
They do, it’s called the AMA, American Medical Association. Very tight control of who can be a doctor, how many new doctors per year, etc. which ensures salaries stay high. They also fight against other roles like nurses doing too much doctor-like work, helping doctor pay while harming nursing pay.
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At least where I live there’s a shortage of doctors so you can’t negotiate with them . There’s a shortage of nurses too, but if you lose 1 nurse because they’re striking it’s bad but things don’t collapse. With 1 fewer doctor who also knows and is allowed to do things nurse don’t / can’t things get really bad. They also have access to power, are often elected, and are respected.
Nurses need to unionize I think and strike to get something .
The Labor Theory of Value was defeated decades ago, get with the times
Unfortunately, we haven't found a better alternative.
I'm solving harder and harder problems for real users/customers than I was a year ago and our sales are increasing as a result.
Are you saving lives?
Is it my job to make sure that nurses are paid more than I am?
I'll readily admit that they deserve it, I'm a lazy dickhead and they help people, but I think your blame is misplaced if you're insinuating that software engineers are to blame for nurses being paid less than ourselves.
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While it depends on the market, job, and hours, but the bedside nurses I know make in the low $100k range. Typical shift structure at the hospital is three 12 hour shifts in a row and then four days off. Most of the time, they are union jobs, so they receive many benefits from collective bargaining such as increased holiday and overtime pay in the range of 1.5-2x normal rate. A nurse practitioner tends to make something in the 180-220k realm.
Again, to be clear, this is highly dependent on the market, job, and hours and one needs to understand the difference between a CNA, RN, NP, etc. However, it's a regulated typically union job that's very secure and in high demand. It probably pays more than what you expect.
Yes, they are still making that much. I am. I don't fully understand why yet but I think it is because of a few reasons:
1. We still need to keep the lights on. If things go wrong, which they still do, humans have to debug it.
2. Jevon's paradox: now the expectation is that we ship stuff faster and there is still a LOT of stuff to do, not less.
3. We are still in the very early days of this and it is too soon for corporations to make a dramatic call like laying off 80% of engineering. We just don't know how that would look like.
I want a world where teachers on average make more than software engineers. If we figure that out, everything else will be fine in the long run.
I think nurses in the Bay Area make like 200k a year
Don't you worry about salaries of any trained medical professionals:)
The effort/pay ratio never made sense though.