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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

I've got two doctors in my family, and from how they describe it getting into med school is easier than FAANG. Once you're in you're practically guaranteed 250k after 7 years of training and 500k debt. Residency definitely sounds like a pain in the ass, but if you graduate from a reputable American med school it's very unlikely that you don't match. I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

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> Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months.

Med school has a very different selection bias than FAANG interviews. No one seriously attempts to attend medical school unless they've committed to 7 years of grueling training. A FAANG interview, on the other hand, is barely a blip on the radar over the course of an engineering career. A lot of people apply to FAANG jobs just to try their chances at the application process. Not so for medical school.

> I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months.

It's obviously easier if done only once.

But doctors go through education & residency once and then start their careers.

Software engineers need to repeat this every job change for no reason.

Getting into any US med school is definitely harder than getting into FAANG. [0]

Part of it is things like the MCAT and organic chemistry are hard, part of it is there's a whole "hidden" component of med school applications related to volunteering, shadowing, research etc, that is opaque to most. This is part of the reason 50% of med school students already have a parent working in medicine.

[0] https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A...

I'm not sure what the table proves without FAANG statistics. I don't think 65% of students with a 3.8 are getting accepted at FAANG.

> I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

I'm not sure if the chances of success are any higher for getting into a medical school in the US. As a one-shot thing, a FAANG interview loop may be tougher, but there are a lot of big tech companies and you can keep trying your luck. I think Amazon alone has like 50K software engineers, they churn engineers like crazy and the hiring bar isn't quite as high as some of the others. Whereas if your undergraduate credentials aren't good enough or you simply don't do well on standardized exams, you're kind of out of luck in terms of getting into a US medical school. I could be overestimating the difficulty of getting into the least competitive medical school in the US, but my understanding is that they are all pretty difficult, leading many people to go to a medical school in the Caribbean.

Applying to FAANG isn't a one-shot thing. At most of them, you can re-interview every 6 months to a 1 year until you get the job or give up.

I think that's exactly what I said? This contrasts with the medical school where I guess in theory you could reapply, but large parts of your application are going to remain the same.

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