[woodruffw]

Nurses are paid well, relative to the average American salary. I don't think they're paid particularly well relative to the job's lifestyle requirements and latent stress levels, especially during a pandemic.

Looking at my area (NYC), I'd have to take over a 50% pay cut from my engineering job to be "paid well" as a nurse. And I suspect my job is a lot less stressful.

[LegitShady]

While I don't doubt that nurses have very high stress jobs, the reason why you'd take a pay cut to become an nurse is because their job is a lot less technically difficult.

I have some friends from university who became nurses, one of which I was roommates with for two years during school. I helped them study for 'their most difficult math test' and it was a relatively straightforward test on changing units. They would not have passed a first year calculus class. The majority of their academic work was memorization, and then lots of hands on work in hospitals. The reason they get paid well is because the job is important and stressful, not because it requires highly technical people of which there is limited supply.

I don't say that as a slight - I know many nurses who are very intelligent people, its merely a judgement as to the academic rigor involved in getting your nursing credentials.

PS I worked at home depot during busy periods in the summer when the store was understaffed, I've worked as a waiter where I was the only person on shift because the owners/manager were idiots, and I've worked cleaning big chicken barns out in preparation for new chickens and those were all significantly more stressful than my technical work. Stress is not correlated with difficulty or limit of supply.

[woodruffw]

Were your friends NPs, CNAs, or something else? There's a wide variety in nursing roles, with a corresponding wide range in technical difficulty and expected proficiency. The average NP is certainly more technically proficient than the average undergraduate with a CS degree, albeit not in a domain the CS undergraduate might understand.

Tangentially: I'm not sure what the relevancy of "passing a first year calculus class" is. Just about every BA/BS passes one, and I (a program analysis researcher) have never even remotely needed by calculus knowledge in my day job. I don't think it's a good proxy for technical skill whatsoever, given that "technical skill" is a domain-specific qualifier.

[duxup]

That's not that usual of a dynamic.

I think the "hardest" job I ever worked was a PC tech support call center or a job at a pizza place. I didn't pick my hours ... and the job was a heck of a lot harder than my coding job that pays WAY more.

But it wasn't like I could just go and get a coding job at the drop of a hat.

[woodruffw]

Sure. Both programming and nursing are relatively niche fields. Nursing is arguably a significantly more professional field, given that (1) formal requirements are higher, and (2) Nurse Practitioners are effectively educated at the MS level (versus a BS or lower for the average programmer).

If we're using job difficulty and stress as some of our metrics for fair pay, then I would argue that tech support and pizza delivery should also be higher paying! But even with that, it doesn't seem unreasonable to factor in the professional qualifications (and corresponding time and money commitments) required of nursing. Relative to all three, it's a remarkably low-paying job.