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Comment by g_sch | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting choice of analogy. Just a few weeks ago there was a popular submission here reporting how 90% of nurses are considering leaving their profession in the next year due to burnout and poor working conditions [0]. It's true that doctors receive more training, but without nurses (hell, even with any fewer nurses than we have now) our health system would completely collapse.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180646

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Ehh, not sure I'd make the comparison. Plenty of tech companies don't have QA engineers. Hospitals without nurses not so much..

It's a very rough analogy. Required skills for an entry level QA tester is pretty low. It's essentially "do these things in a video game, look for bugs". It's certainly not just having fun playing video games all day, it's far more rote, but it's hardly a scare skill.

Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).

Yeah. Companies make the engineers do the nursing work on top of the doctor work, with a dose of self service nursing for the customers, who need to report their own symptoms into a tracker as well as gather and report their own vitals during their treatment.

The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system.

Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.

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