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Comment by questinthrow | Hacker News Reader

Want to lose your faith in humanity? Do any public facing job for long enough and eventually you will be a soulless husk. Happened to my retail friends, happened to my doctor friends, and so on and so forth. As far as doctors are concerned I find the new meta of overworking those young doctors that are passionate to do cost cutting is the most insidious thing. Youre using their passion and empathy as bait to burn them out and make money. Makes me grateful I mostly interact with computers

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Yes, it seems cruel to push young doctors to the limit like this. But I’ll offer a counterpoint:

In an emergency, you want doctors who are used to making decisions under stress and who are aware of their impaired decision making abilities when tired. This is a rite of passage that means in a true emergency where they have to be making good decisions without adequate resources they can do so. You see a similar tactic when training military recruits.

I don't know if you need the duration that residents undergo to get that stress training benefit. But I also don't think we have enough training throughput of doctors to prevent the situation where a tired doctor has to handle an emergency.

It's also quite frustrating the money is not there for the work put in and the personal sacrifice.

But doctors do not end up "aware of their impaired decision making abilities when tired" after that grueling period. They emerge convinced that they are used to being tired, able to work long hours and generally an exception to the "decision making abilities are impaired" thing.

The situation is normalized in their heads, they lived it so long that they see it as normal.

And with military recruits, they are made to sleep a little so that they are easier to coerce and mold. Then not being able to think is a feature.

I don’t get the connection between retail workers and doctors. It seems that they are “soulless hunks” for totally different reasons.

Its still empathy punishment at its core but starting from different incentives.

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