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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

> Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.

Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?

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>Nurses?

I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

>Tenured professors?

I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers).

Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think what they do is important.

[UPDATE]: Note the downvotes. I didn't post anything that attacked anyone. I made a "blanket statement" that has been made millions of times, and is, regardless, quite true.

I also talked about some projects that I've done (a few that are easily accessible, for anyone interested). These were not mentioned to be "snotty." They are simply what I have done, out of Gratitude and for deeply personal reasons.

Don't like to look at things that make us uncomfortable? Join the club. However, it often makes us better people.

> I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.

My fiancee is a nurse. Conditions are absolute shit, especially in states where the patient to nurse ratio isn't legally protected.

I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).

The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.

The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.

Nurses are treated like complete shit and work in dreadful conditions in the UK too (public and private), and that certainly predates the pandemic.

Thank you. I see so much that people conflate some issues has having been a direct result of the pandemic. Its like, nope, the pandemic just made the problem surface, but the problem has been there for a lot longer. With nursing, it is keeping the nurses understaffed and hiring travel nurses when they are suddenly backed into a corner. Many hospital systems have been under-staffing nurses for years, it just didn't become apparent until the pandemic. The nurses at my local hospital went on strike a year BEFORE COVID over this exact issue.

What he's describing is by no means a recent trend!

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