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Comment by joncrane | Hacker News Reader

LOL in terms of bang for buck, being a Developer/Cloud Ops person is way more lucrative more quickly than law or medicine.

Also keep in mind it's much more egalitarian. In law yes you can eventually make partner at a white shoe firm and make millions (and make FAANG money at a Xth-year associate) but the competition is staggeringly intense.

Let's say I'm 18, intelligent and ambitious, I live in the USA, and I want the quickest path to making $500k per year and my choices are law, medicine, and computer science.

I sincerely hope that for everyone on HN, the answer is a no-brainer.

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Mid-career quality of life is a thing.

The doctor making 200k stitching up chainsaw mishaps in some small city can live on several acres (or in the nicest suburb of that city if that's his preference), send his kids to private school, he drinks $2 milk and fills his car up with $2 gas. Try living like that in SF or any other "tech hub" on 200k.

I'm not saying tech isn't easier and doesn't start off making big bucks faster but doctor probably takes the lead around age 30 or so. If you wanna make big bucks without going into management doctor seems like the better route.

I suspect most MDs will never take the lead versus a programmer making FAANG level money. Just the health toll and lower quality of life alone from the studying and work requirements in residency, as well as having to work off hours and nights and whatnot put them behind. But also compounded returns on investment from income in 20s would require a lot of income to makeup for in 30s. Which doctors do make, but in the recent past, not enough to surpass top programmers.

Also, doctors have to deal with the byzantine paperwork nonsense in the health field, and work with the general public as well as in places that have infectious diseases floating around. And can't work from home as easily. I wouldn't trade not having to work with the general public for a couple hundred thousand.

200k is a 22 year old at a FAANG vs 30 year old MD.

I was a somewhat successful premed student (99.9th percentile MCAT, CS major), and I went the FAANG route instead. Physician and tech salaries are similar in that the top makes alot more than everyone else, although the bottom for physicians is a bit higher. For less competitive people who may only have only gotten into a single med school and whose job prospects with a biology degree are limited, the med route can make sense from a purely financial point of view.

Can you really even have been a doctor for that long at age 30? That's barely even "start-of-career" by my calculation.

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