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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

If you're in SW, you probably will need to think about your job off work: They usually don't work in shifts, and will have deliverables in a timeline of months. They need to plan the work, and always adjust to hit the deadlines.

If you're a doctor, then you probably don't have to think about your job off work.

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That is not true about doctors at _all_, especially inpatient. They have so many hours in a day to spend on patients. They are checking on them after hours, fielding calls, looking at lab results, responding to messages, preparing for the next day, filling out notes, reading new notes. So not only do they think about the job off work, there is lots of job to do off work as well.

> That is not true about doctors at _all_, especially inpatient.

Varies depending on the type of work you do. People I know who are hospitalists, urgent care and ER doctors actually do just check out at the end. If something happens to a patient, it's the headache of the doctor who's rotation it is - not theirs.

And I also know PCPs who check out at the end and are done with it. If something happens off hours, they get taken care of by an on-call doctor, not the PCP. If it's serious, they're referred to urgent care and ER.

But as I said - all a function of who they work for. Same with SW.

Negative. Almost twenty years in the software industry, and I clock in at 9 and clock out at 5. Let's be honest, earlier on Fridays. It wasn't always that way, but now I prioritize time over more money, and for me it's worth the trade.

Doesn’t a doctor tend to have deliverables in a timeline of minutes or hours, on the order of dozens such deliverables a day, often with health- or life-critical stakes attached?

It seems like only yesterday that this counterpoint made the rounds here:

“The darker side of being a doctor” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40025261

I'm not discounting the prior submission. The medical field is vast. Some jobs are a lot worse than others. Just as you can't generalize across all STEM jobs, you can't generalize across all medical jobs.

Yes, a lot of doctors have a high amount of stress. And a lot don't.

There’s a difference between things like not being able to disconnect from work emotionally vs requirements for off the clock training vs on call rotation. Some subset of this stuff might affect some doctors and some engineers, it all depends on career goals and trajectory, so probably not that useful to try and generalize.

One observation though, doctors on average have a better reason for work stress to follow them home, seeing life or death shit all the time. Whereas SWEs carry home an unreasonable amount of stress in situations that not only aren’t as important as that, but situations where the fruit of their labor will last only a few years at most. Like, your magnum opus at work will very likely be torn down anyway, so in terms of lasting legacy you’re probably better off with a job in landscaping or carpentry rather than a “living in the future!” career in ad tech, self driving cars, etc.

From this I conclude that most software people, including myself, are way more obsessive and less rational than we usually like to think.

True but the number of hours I work in SW + the number of hours I think about my job outside of work is still probably less than a typical doctor's working hours so I feel like we come out ahead anyways.

Here's actual data for doctors:

https://www.amnhealthcare.com/blog/physician/locums/average-...

It's more than I work, but I know many SW professionals who work longer hours than the typical physician.

And there's on-call responsibility

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