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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

> Developer compensation talk always gets biased toward top companies and high cost areas. The median developer or even top 10% developer isn’t living in the Bay Area working at FAANG, but that’s what gets talked about.

That's what should be talked about in comparison to doctors. A FAANG position is comparable to the level of effort, competition, and accomplishment involved in becoming a doctor.

On the other hand, the "median healthcare professional" (counting only those requiring a college education) is a registered nurse, and that's the healthcare profession most comparable to the median developer in education, competition, and income.

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I disagree with this. It's more like "Doctor at the Mayo Clinic" or Johns Hopkins.

I live in a capital city of 60,000. Unemployment 4.5%, median household $79,000. Here, you're not seeing >$150K in IT unless you're a Director, or more likely a VP level employee.

Conversely, I drive by multiple homes that are being built or were recently built by physicians living in the area that are in the $2M range (our median home price in the area is just under $530K.

You can't say "the subset of one thing compared to the spectrum of another", because testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional") are not generally clearing high six digits even at FAANG (well, Netflix maybe, which is an outlier of an outlier).

> testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional")

Where are testers and tech writers the median (50th percentile) jobs in IT?

I frankly don't. Here we have a discussion that is predominantly about software engineers, and as a subset of those, those who are employed at FAANGs...

... and they're variably being compared to physicians, specialists, "median healthcare professionals" (whatever that means).

I'm more breaking up that these comparisons... don't really make a lot of sense, the way many of the arguments here are going.

Seems like this discussion is predominantly about physicians. It is about "The darker side of being a doctor"

But this being a forum for software engineers, the discussion naturally has a lot of content about that group. And many average software engineers, with a bit of amusing hubris, apparently think they are roughly comparable to physicians.

(Actually, they may be in terms of raw intelligence. You don't have to be a genius to become a doctor. But on average they aren't in the same league in terms of work ethic and dedication.)

You're looking at "doctor" too narrowly. The top end of doctors get paid a lot more than the median physician.

The FAANG equivalent of being a doctor are select professions that pay a lot.

Comparing Bay Area salaries to the median across the country is the second fallacy.

I'd say the highly paid specialties are more comparable to senior positions in FAANG.

Both made it through the first filter (admission to medical school/being hired at FAANG), then succeeded so well in the early stages (med school/junior employee) that they were chosen for those coveted positions.

There are 10x more physicians than FAANG developers in the US.

There are generally about 10x more jobs in healthcare than in tech, at all levels. Healthcare is labor intensive.

Sure but I don’t think there are 10x as many people competing to become doctors than there are competing for FAANG jobs.

That's because the process to have any chance in the competition to become a doctor is arduous and there's no consolation prize.

If you aspire to work at FAANG and fail you can be a software developer somewhere else. If you aspire to be a doctor and aren't admitted to med school, those years of education, volunteering, shadowing, test prep, etc. are fairly useless.

And even if you succeed, the hours are as bad as can be and the pay isn't much better than FAANG. It's not a logical choice unless you really want it, while software dev is (was?) a great career choice even if you don't care about software.

For all these reasons, a lot of people are filtered out long before applying to med school.

You’re making my argument for me. The percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t is higher than the percentage of people actively trying to become doctors.

It’s more selective. So comparing FAANG salaries to the average doctor salary isn’t useful. To find something equally selective, you’d need to pick a higher paid subset of doctors.

Here's why that's a silly comparison: the percentage of people on the general election ballot for US President who don't make it is lower than the percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t make it. Does that mean US President is less selective? Obviously not, because that's the last of many filters for President and there are essentially no filters before "I'll send a resume to FAANG".

In the same way, there are many filters before filling out a med school application.

Anyway I can't see any way anyone could believe the "median software developer" writing CRUD web pages or in-house apps is comparable to the average physician.

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