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by localhost3000 5195 days ago
take an evening and go have drinks with some current med students / residents - here's what you'll hear (not from all, but from many): "Obamacare is killing my profession!"..."i should've gone to b-school instead"..."i could be working at GS but now i'm busting my ass for $50k"..."i'm getting screwed! this is sooooo unfair! how am i going to survive this debt?!"...so, the problem isn't that they don't make a great living - because they do. the problem is that they feel they're entitled to make as much as other 'smart people' (aka, their former undergrad classmates at princeton) in other professional careers like corporate law or banking - which they don't. they still make way more than 99% of the population, but those people don't matter as a basis of comparison. if you counter with, "...but, you're a doctor. you're not in it for the money - you want to help people, right?" you'll get an extremely exaggerated eye-roll and the conversation will end...so, in short - it doesn't surprise me at all that a doc is leaving medicine to chase $ in tech now that it's no longer cool to tell your cronies you work in finance... (there are many exceptions and God bless them but, I've personally run into too many self-righteous, woe-is-me med students to know what to do with...) - why do you think dermatology is such a competitive field? $$$$$$
2 comments

Sounds like unworthy people who are just clamoring for status (which income is a proxy for) instead of figuring out who they are as individuals and what their life purpose is.
And, once Obamacare comes in, people who actually want to be doctors (and there are enough of them) will get in.