I’m a nurse and oversaw a doctor checking his bank statements: his salary is a bit more than twice what I earn.
This is not a particularly productive doctor, if you listen to several doctors and nurses where I work at. Just today I overheard a group of 3 female doctors ranting about him and how all he does is sitting and playing with his phone, always redirecting us nurses to talk to the other doctors. I was surprised, because I never expected to find so much drama between doctors, them being much more educated than nurses and I never expected doctors, specially female doctors, to use that kind of language.
This lazy doctor earns more than double my salary. It’s depressing.
But I also feel like a loser, because even those ranting doctors earn more than twice what I do… and they get to sit for longer than I do.
Regretting my life choices.
Maybe the sane choice here would be to study or to get a certification that means a higher salary?
Only double? Honestly I would have thought more.
We live in a world where most jobs compensation is determined by the difficulty of the program. Medical doctor is very hard to get into and hard to do. Sounds like the problem now is that he’s lazy. Don’t get me wrong, nursing is hard work. But that’s how the cookie crumbles.
Become a doctor, then the nurses can hate you whenever you decompress too.
Your worth, your value is not determined by what someone else makes.
Also, I’m a bit ignorant of this subject so forgive me if I get it wrong, but did he not go to school significantly longer for his MD than you did for yours?
I believe he also had to go through the hell that is residency, I didn’t believe nurses do.
If you’re envious of his salary, improve your skills, or your education. If you’re happy where you are at In life, then don’t let the fact that others make more than you interfere with that happiness.
No matter what you do, there will always be others who make more, one of those sad facts of life.
I believe he also had to go through the hell that is residency, I didn’t believe nurses do.
Nursing education never ends. All the nurses I know are a bit loopy from the constant need to retrain and recertify.
This is true for every regulated profession. It’s not exceptional.
Correct, your plumber has to do the same thing too to maintain their license.
I bet doctors need to retrain and recertify too.
Is it too late to become a nurse practitioner?
It’s never too late if you care!
Doctors go to school for seven years racking up debt, and then usually have to shoulder the burden of liability and operational costs. It’s expensive to become a medical doctor, and expensive to be a medical doctor.
These costs are part of what keeps both doctors and patients safe. Doctors end up with both the power and the risk.
Nurses by comparison have only basic training before on the job training kicks in; it’s relatively easy to become a nurse, and if you mess up, the worst that’s going to happen is that you get fired and have to go work somewhere else.
But even as a nurse, if you’re quick to pick things up, you can move up the ranks and find a specialty that has more power and pays better than a standard RN. Without the seven years of debt.
And life’s not just about pay; quality of life is generally more important, and that sucks for most doctors, who have relatively short life expectancies and limited time to spend their money.
This.
Additionally, there are lazy people in every company/industry. Many of whom earn more than the average person. Oftentimes, life just isn’t fair.
Oftentimes, life just isn’t fair.
Remember to thank a capitalist for this
Nah, uncle Mao and papa Putin have shown us life’s a bitch even in communism.
Also, some clever leeches are going to exist regardless.
Shit, Russia is communist? Why didn’t the Central Committee send me the memo?
Life was unfair long before capitalism, and will be unfair after it.
Doctor here. 👋 I just wanted to give my experience. I had to do eight years of schooling/debt, THEN I had to do 6 years of post graduate training (internship, residency, fellowship).
Now the post graduate years are paid like a job but not at a physician salary rate so paying on student loans during that time was next to impossible for me because I was in a high cost of living area. So my interest continued to compound during that time. It sucked.
As for the OP I just want to say that part of the reason I expect a higher salary is because I gave up 14 years of my life - most of my youth - in training to get here. Those 14 years were immensely valuable and I often regretted going down this path because of all the things I gave up instead. The training was incredibly difficult and time consuming. I lost touch with all my friends, had to move repeatedly, etc. It was absolutely brutal and felt endless. That’s part of what those paychecks are paying for.
How does anyone accept executives making 100x or more the salary of everyone else?
Or youtubers, or twitch streamers making bank?
I’m okay with YouTubers getting paid. A lot of them put his of thought and work into their videos without earning anything, before they do. And yt never paid any of them fairly. What I’m not ok with is it’s endless ads and creators not being fairly compensated. Hence why I donate what I can, when I can, to creators I use. I also wish invidious instance operators were easier to donate to, but I see why they aren’t.
Sure. But my reply was specifically to OP about doctors being paid more than nurses for doing “less work”.
There’s an mbin issue. It’s been reported. https://kbin.earth/m/mbinmeta@gehirneimer.de/t/304935/Feedback-Suggestions-and-Questions/comment/2799826#entry-comment-2799826
This is a little different. Whereas executives might not have any requirement on education or performance, in the US at least you’ve got 6 years education And 2 years residency to become an MD. It is still crazy money considering I’ve got 11 years in a PhD with an actual contribution to a field, but not insane compared to a 4 year degree or less.
Okay that’s different
A MD with 7+ years of education and loads of debt earning more than a nurse with far less education and debt is fair.
An exec with barely any education, debt or importance earning 10× or more what the actual workers do is not fair.
I don’t deal with that, but I also can’t fix it without unwrenching the fabric of our society and I’m going to need a lot more people for that.
Steady on. You’re starting to sound like a dirty communist. ;)
I’ve worked for and with people who made a lot more than me.
So what? They achieved that by doing something I didn’t. They may have also made sacrifices I didn’t. Doctors certainly busted their ass a LOT more than me - I could never do what they do in educational terms alone (not to mention the biological stuff).
Did you really get to being a nurse without knowing typical salaries for different types of nursing or different kinds of doctors?
Now to answer the real question: how to not be bothered by this. Start by changing the idea in your head that your work has the same value as the work of someone else, let alone someone who spent years more time studying than you did, and also took on a lot more debt to do so, and a lot more risk.
Go read “Your Erroneous Zones” by Wayne Dyer. It’s an intro to the methods of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) - these thoughts of yours are “scripts” that aren’t useful for you. He teaches how to change thinking such as this.
Are you an RN or a Doctor of Nursing? If you’re an RN he has many more years of schooling than you. That alone will get him a higher salary. If you’re a Dr of Nursing then I’d go talk to your boss or start looking for another job.
Wages aren’t really about how much work you do, if it were then the janitor would earn the highest wages in the hospital.
Shit on his desk.
Years of schooling and years of experience.
you can customize the serenity prayer as a form of mantra if it fits you more.
i use it as a constant reminder that life is what we make it to be.
SERENITY NOW!!
If it makes you feel any better he’ll be the one that gets slapped with malpractice if he fucks up. He’s inherently accepting a certain amount of liability as a doctor.
The other thing that comes to mind is he is trained specifically in his field to diagnose and treat. As a nurse you are trained to do what you do best.
That doesn’t give him a right to be on his phone all the time and be a dipshit. Eventually, that will have consequences of some sort. Currently he’s receiving less respect and earning a shitty reputation. That might come to bite him in the ass some day. Him being lax may come out in his work and bite him in the ass too at some point.
But I understand your frustration. I’ve got shitty managers who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground and I constantly question how they got and are keeping their jobs.
This is exactly why my RN wife won’t become a nurse practitioner or similar. She’s absolutely capable, just doesn’t want to deal with the malpractice insurance.
Don’t accept it. It’s fundamentally unjust and you’re right to be upset.
It’s unjust that someone who spent WAY MORE to get their education and spent way more in time shouldn’t get paid way more? What planet is that logical on?
It’s unjust that someone who spends their day goofing off and looking at their phone feels entitled to earn twice what a nurse does, just because they had the privilege to get into college.
lol. The thing is you’re taking what this nurse says at her word entirely and not allowing for the decent chance that actually this doctor does do his job cos like if he didn’t he’d be getting disciplined?
She either watches him a lot of the time which means she’s not working. Or more likely she just sees him when he’s on his phone having a break.
It’s takes like a decade or longer to become fully trained as a doctor so of course they earn more than nurses. The knowledge you need to have is much more advanced, the responsibility is much larger. If it’s anything like the UK then you have to do incredibly well before in what we call college (16-18) to even get a place on a course which seems to be sort of a little bit what you’re saying. Except scrap “privilege” and replace with “had to have worked really hard and got outstanding grades beforehand in order to get onto a course”.
It’s like with a lot of professions where you’re not paying the person for working up a sweat. You’re paying them for their knowledge.
I’ve worked in care, was the lowest paid job I’ve had yet I’d argue the hardest, certainly very physically as well as mentally demanding.
I’ve also earned twice that wage in a job that was much easier, although could be stressful and I was taking on more responsibility.
Especially in America which I assume the person is probably from, where doctors are getting sued for shit all the time, it really is a lot more responsibility on top of the years and years of education, debt and knowledge they have to build up to do the job.
Just sounds like a salty nurse. Unfortunately some people want to pull everyone down to their level rather than raise everyone up.
Like if nurses unionised properly then they could demand better pay. If we didn’t live in a capitalist society then things would be fairer too, but under the current system, doctors are just far more valuable to us than nurses. Those is the facts…
It’s reasonable to assume that people with more status are behaving worse than people with less.
Power - status, fame, privilege, wealth, etc. - causes neurological changes that suppress a human’s ability to excersize empathy. The kind of self-centered behaviour that the nurse describes is typical of a high status inidividual.
Also, I used to work in health insurance and this story just jives well with the little personal experience I have with medical workplaces.
Final thing: I think you have it backwards. I think the culprits you’re referring to, lack the empathy in the first place, making them sociopaths. This lack of empathy allows them to ascend the ranks stepping on the shoulders of whoever.
You’ll go crazy if you dwell on this. The corporate world is the same way. Generally speaking, the less actual work a person does, the more they tend to get paid. It’s a tale as old as time.
Try to become an anaesthesiologist. They get paid more. Just a thought.
