One could say the same for any given field from sports to programming to business to pet-sitting. It's a hard knock life for us all. None of these reasons should have stopped any decent doctor from taking the path. The single reason would be: Don't go into medical school if you care more about money and an easy-going life than the actual field and people involved. And the same applies to every single field.
Please name a sport, business, or other profession that involves staying up 40 hours straight unshowered, unfed, on a routine basis, for years, trying to not die or get anyone killed.
I can think of only two: medicine and the military. I do both. They're roughly equal. Given the choice between residency and deployment, I would need more information.
edit: Actually, I'm facing that choice now: do I apply for residency or orders which will probably involve going to Afghanistan. I'm leaning toward Afghanistan.
"... Please name a sport, business, or other profession that involves staying up 40 hours straight unshowered, unfed, on a routine basis, for years, trying to not die or get anyone killed. ..."
"None of these reasons should have stopped any decent doctor from taking the path. "
Here's part of the problem. You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field. You can go into it with the right intentions, but it's not like people doctor as a hobby or as a passion and then decide to go into it. It's not like being a musician, or a programmer, sports or pet sitting.
You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field.
No, it's like that in a lot of fields.
Obviously, many jobs have a much lower barrier to entry than "doctor" -- it takes years of work to reach the point where you can understand what doctoring is like first-hand -- but I've found most jobs fall into one of these categories:
A) The problems with the job don't always manifest until you're months or years into it, whether it's long-term boredom, lack of opportunity for advancement, chronic occupational injury, or rare but awful events. (Soldiering is a lot more fun before you're under fire than afterwards.)
B) It's not so hard to be a happy amateur, but the amateur experience is much different from the pro experience. Pros need to make money, consistently, and that is a big constraint, often to the point that it takes an entirely different skill set. (e.g. Being a freelance programmer or musician is as much about marketing and customer service as it is about code or music, and the stuff that's valuable to customers may be boring to the point of tears for you. Ask a classical musician to tell you how they feel about the inexplicably popular Pachelbel's Canon.)
C) And, of course, jobs with barriers to entry are hard to really understand until the barriers are down. Research has a whole series of barriers: Being a science major is not like being a grad student, being a grad student is not like being a postdoc, being a postdoc is not like being a junior prof.
Mind you, though you can never know what it is really like to do a job without doing it, you can interview people and get some big hints. And you'll find that medicine is actually pretty easy to research, as careers go. The OP's points are not hidden mysteries. They have been made before. There are a lot of doctors, both successful ones and burned-out ones, and they're happy to talk. The trick is to be able to listen to what they tell you, and unfortunately there are also a lot of teachers and parents who are happy to push you into medicine regardless of what the actual doctors are telling you.
I agree with you to an extent but this article is especially relevant to the medical profession. There is a tremendous commitment to entering it. You must go to undergrad, medical school and residency (with standardized exams throughout) whereas for programming, there is no "traditional" path that you must follow. Moreover, although there is a tremendous reward—financial, societal and perhaps even moral—at the end, that end only comes after 8+ years of extremely hard work. Compare that with programmers, athletes and businessmen who could make millions before they turn 30. I know this number is very tiny but such a prospect is virtually impossible for any med students.
I'm not disparaging the medical profession; I actually go to a school where most students (I'm guessing about 30%) are pre-med majors. If anything, this article makes me appreciate just how much sacrifice doctors and doctors-to-be make just to help people.
I'd argue that this sort of article applies mostly to the "glamourous" professions -- things that kids want to be when they grow up, jobs that will impress your nephews. Actor, musician, doctor, certain varieties of lawyer, physicist cough, athlete, artist, airline pilot.
These sorts of professions have a ready supply of suckers wanting in, which means that the competition is tough, the work is hard and the compensation is minimal at the lowest levels. For all of these professions, the advice is the same: there are definitely some cool bits to the job if you can reach the top, but it's a really tough slog, so don't go into it unless you just can't think of anything else you want to do with your life.
But then you've got the less glamourous professions. Accountant. Actuary. System administrator. Management consultant. Less glamourous varieties of law. Pet sitting. Running a lawnmowing business. And hundreds of other occupations which don't readily spring to mind because they don't impinge much on the public consciousness, but which exist and pay well and are good jobs for folks who can't think of anything else in particular that they'd like to be doing. Since there aren't huge masses of people clamouring to become actuaries, junior actuarial positions are actually well paid and generally reasonable jobs. On the downside, your nephews won't brag to their friends about their uncle the actuary.
Figuring out where programming jobs fit into this classification is left as an exercise for the reader.
Last I heard actuarial science is brutally competitive and quickly becoming a slog. Apparently all the asian math geniuses see it as their only way to please their grandparents without switching to medicine or law.
Actually the introductory salaries in law are quite high. They start in Canada at or above the average Canadian salary. First year lawyers make between $40-100k a year depending on who you work for (in Ontario). If you're willing to move there's also nearly guaranteed employment by going up north/rural areas.
No, but the bit after you finish medical school and spend the next eight or twelve years as a sleep-deprived zombie working thirty-hour shifts for a crappy salary at a hospital you probably didn't choose is due to it being a competitive field.
Nah, it varies a lot. The nature of the work itself is different among various jobs and economic forces also create inequalities in working conditions in various industries.
I've been a programmer and a teacher. I've found being a programmer to be easy, and being a teacher to be difficult (but not as difficult as what was described in this blog post).
