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by JohnHaugeland 1587 days ago
> Dude, there’s something wrong either with your schools, or with your perception of reality.

Talk to some doctors. Ask what their workload is like.

It turns out that software engineers are worked way, way harder.

4 comments

Certainly not true in the US. Medical professionals often work double shifts and put in lots of hours. Being on call or working weekends is mandatory in many cases. Beyond that, the work environment is much more stressful, especially now. The patients' lives are in your hands, and on top of that you have to deal with being assaulted (yelled at, spit on, hit, etc) or making a mistake and being sued.

Having worked as a software engineer/developer, I can at that sometimes the work can be challenging but overall the job itself has been pretty easy and low-stress in comparison.

During the first half of my career, I put in a lot of extra hours but then I realized it wasn't going to help me get a raise or get promoted so I stopped doing that and stuck mostly to the 40 hour work week which I was being paid for.

I don't undermine the stress of a software engineer (althouth 95% of them out there are doing quite simple and boring stuff on a daily basis, if you ask me).

But the nature of the medicine is incomparably harder and more complex than the nature of CS discipline (which is an artificial human-made construct, however sophisticated).

It only means that if someone puts less time/effort in studying more complicated thing, this someone is much worse in it than in less complicated matter.

This is just not true for at least the first 15 years of a doctor's career.

Source: Worked with multiple surgeons all over the country.

Sorry, I'm going to believe the BLS over one random person on hn
Surgeons are not typical doctors. That's not a valid comparisons.
In school?
Maybe in the US is different but where I am the self reported preparation times for medical exams are lower than that of a Physics/Math/Engineering exam: if I recall correctly Physics was at the top, then Math, then various Engineering disciplines (but not all, maybe CE was an exception), then Medicine.

Edit: Obviously things change in the actual job.