alt Hacker NewsOh no, imagine the people that save human lives having high salaries, the horror.
If you, like me, are in the software field, know that this is likely the most comfortable job even invented by humanity, we should really be paid just above the poverty line in exchange.
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Give me a break, most of them are glorified drug dealers. Their salaries are inflated by an artificially capped supply of doctors, at the cost of patients.
I had to leave my job this year because of burnout when the execs mandated that we use AI tools, become our own designers, PMs, and QA, and double our velocity. They run through a decision tree they leaned in residency every day and I’m learning how to do 3-4 other people’s jobs on top of whatever the new AI thing is. I was working nights and weekends while my friends in medicine are planning their 3rd vacation this year to Tuscany.
Everyone is taught that doctors save lives.
However many others in society save lives that are not so lavishly praised or financially rewarded.
For example in New Zealand median pay for a Road Design Engineer is about $100k NZD compared to a GP (doctor) getting $240k. Plus the doctor gets paid a massive overpayment of social status.
Over a 40-year career, an average NZ GP will save 5 to 10 lives. The Road Design Engineer saves 40 to 120 lives. Road engineers in NZ prevent roughly 10x more serious injuries than they do deaths so it isn't just death stats.
Our hypothetical engineer should be paid > 10x more than the doctor on raw stats.
It gets harder when we start looking at quality of life versus raw lifetime numbers. You then need to consider the value of say entertainment (a good movie) versus the hypothtical lives saved by spending the budget elsewhere.
A game designer might be valued highly by a gamer mum, and negatively by their children and gaming widowed dad.