My experience: I'm an icu nurse in the sf bay area. I make a good salary. However, you can make this and more with a job with less physical and emotional stress/abuse. Even the "best" hospitals like kaiser/stanford/ucsf are always short staffed. I considered another area of nursing/hc but it's really all the same BS of being short staffed, constantly being denied vacations, etc.

I feel like a waitress, custodian, social worker, therapist, punching bag and other stuff - It's never ending. This has effected my mental health so much that I am slowly doing my career switch to SWE. While I know every job has it's own difficulties bs/stress/politics, the one's i deal with as a nurse now I can no longer deal with. I don't regret this career path because it has taught me a lot, and their is something better for me out there.

Career: I did consider other areas of nursing, but they didn't satisfy me, ICU is relatively the most enjoyable for me. On a regular hospital floor/intermediate floor, a nurse will be given 4-5 patients and let me tell you its a ZOO! In ICU i only have 2, and those keep you busy the whole shift. They're both different kinds of crazy.

I will say, being a nurse in California is 5x better than anywhere else simply because their are laws that allow us to have uninterrupted breaks!