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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Was looking at nursing for these exact reasons.

It's bizarre that you have more free time as a nurse to work on your own programming projects than you do in the tech industry.

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The commutes are almost certainly better. Hospitals are located in cities, not in office-parks at the end of an hour-long commute in bumper-to-bumper sprawl traffic.

Ha. That's a Silicon-Valley-centric problem. There's plenty of programming work in great walkable places in San Francisco proper, New York, Boston, etc.

I'm not in Silicon Valley, I live in Ontario. The tech industry in this province is concentrated in two places:

1) Waterloo, which everyone sees as a ticking time-bomb because of Rim.

and

2) Mississauga, which is Toronto's sprawl and is where all our soulless corporate code is written.

Fortunately, I work for a hospital.

So live in Mississauga? It is the nicest place anywhere near Toronto anyways. Also you missed Toronto itself which has tons of tech jobs, and richmond hill/markham which absolutely dwarfs Waterloo's imaginary tech industry.

I live in Waterloo. Toronto dwarfs Waterloo. It's not really close.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of great stuff going on in Waterloo and I love living here, but Toronto is so much bigger and has so many more opportunities its not funny.

Waterloo has a population of 100K people. If you include Kitchener and Cambridge then you're up to 400K.

Toronto on the other hand is the 10th largest city in the Americas[1]. To put that into perspective for Americans, that means that if you live in a city in the states that isn't NYC or LA, then Toronto is bigger.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_Americas

Ah. If you want a programming job in a city and you're finding them more in Mountain View than SF proper, also try "Silicon Alley", New York.

(I'm looking out the window from the Empire State Building right now.)

Nursing can be extremely exhausting though, physically and mentally. That's not to say you can't program a bit after work to get your mind off it, instead of watching TV or whatever; but I don't find it "bizarre" at all that nurses are well paid, I think they ought to be. Just like teachers and people working in kindergartens, I don't think very many people can do that job, certainly not for decades. (Speaking purely of those who have empathy, as the rest shouldn't do these jobs to begin with)

Technology even at its most complicated is hardly a comparison, but at its average? Heh. You can't compare any of it to caring for people while they are sick, get better or die.. with feeding them, taking care of their wounds, cleaning up vomit and feces, washing a dead body, being confronted with suffering and fear (as well as bravery and generosity beyond comprehension).

I never even worked as a "real" nurse myself, just in a close enough capacity for long enough to have some serious respect for cojones I simply don't have, not in the long run. A few years would be rough, but a career of it? Anyone who light-heartedly thinks they could hack that might be fooling themselves. Programming is "just" hard, but being a nurse is hard.. of course I can only speak for myself, but what kept me from becoming a "real" nurse wasn't anything I could have learned, no matter how disciplined; I just don't have it in me. On the other hand, I think at least smart people generally all could learn to program in just about any language if they really wanted to, and invested time regularly. I'm not trying to diss "the tech industry", but I do think firefighters and nurses and whatnot play in wholly different leagues, sorry :P

Yeah. I bet your average person can't understand compiler theory or asymptotic growth of recursive functions.

But I see your point.

They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced.

Based on lived experience, I don't see a lot of people in this industry understanding "compiler theory or asymptotic growth of recursive functions".

> They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced.

Some of them are pretty damned intellectually advanced as well.

They could be smart, like scones, enjoy hot tubs, practice riverdance and have a peg leg but that's not what the point of the exchange was.

The point was that nurses have more emotional strength than most people.

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