[haldujai]

> My wife is a physician, as are many of our close friends. They nearly all work for private groups, and they mostly have some kind of employer matched plan. My wife’s group just directly contributes up to 13% of her salary to her retirement plan through profit sharing.

Knowing that your wife is in PEM now I expect she's not in the 500k-1M category (if she is kudos again but I definitely made a career mistake) and presumably a large/whole-hospital billing group?

In this setting there tends to be more benefits because the group is so large the costs are diluted and you need to retain certain lower-billing specialties to maintain coverage requirements (peds EM being a good example) but overall compensation tends to be on the lower end, kind of like an academic-lite environment but less non-clinical work hours so comp is better but I really can't imagine the average specialist in a paediatrics or hospital-based group is taking home 500k-1M while providing benefits.

The majority of physicians billing >500k purely for clinical work (especially as you go up) will be 'high income specialties' (proceduralists/surgeons) where the setting is much smaller specialty-based partnerships, or billing as single-individuals, where benefits don't exist as they more directly come out of your pocket and you don't need to 'subsidize' a specialty to keep them employed/eating and your contract in place.

[sarchertech]

I’m not sure where we only started talking about physicians making >500k. Very very few software engineers are making that despite what you’d think from reading HN. The vast majority who are making anywhere near $1M are no longer really ICs, so they aren’t comparable to a physician who only does clinical work.

My wife doesn’t make $500k, but if she decided she wanted to work 40-50 hours a week instead of 25-30 she could get close.

Her group, and from what she says most hospitals in the country, are basically always struggling to find enough PEMs to maintain coverage.

The incentives to work more than 15 shifts and more than 4 overnights are very generous—the alternative is to bring people in from the next city over. And if she really wanted to she could pick up extra responsibilities and work towards becoming a partner.

But virtually no one is making $500k-1M in base compensation in any industry, so percentage based benefits are such a small part of it.

Look at Google for example, you’re at senior staff before your base reaches $250k, so percentage based contributions are based on a much smaller chunk of your total compensation.