[ChrisMarshallNY]

Just FYI, if you know much about the medical field, nurses tend to do most of the actual work, with highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors. Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.

Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

So lots of jobs for nurses.

[sarchertech]

> Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.

But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary travel nurses.

> nurses tend to do most of the actual work

Techs, environmental services, phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, CNAs etc. probably do more of the “work” than nurses.

> highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors

Only if they go back to school and become a Nurse Practitioner or CRNA, but in that case they are no longer functioning as a nurse. Even then they are general operating under the direct supervision of a physician.

> Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.

Only in absolute numbers. It’s far harder to hire a doctor than it is a nurse. I know an ex-NFL player who works as a physician recruiter.

[mejutoco]

> Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

> Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.

Or midwives, for unimportant things like giving birth /s obviously

[sarchertech]

Nurse midwives have to go back to grad school after becoming a nurse and are no longer operating as nurses. Despite containing the word nurse it is a completely different job.

[Retric]

I think the only metric that matters is total medical care provided on a national / global scale.

It may take vastly more training but on average a full annual physical provides less benefit on average than a 30 second vaccination requiring minimal training. Value creation and skill are wildly different things in the medical profession.

[mlrtime]

There is no reason the medical field needs to gate keep injections. Anyone can inject, you don't need a nurse. Maybe as far as an IV with some very basic training.

[vkou]

After you've had that 30 second vaccination, the second same 30 second vaccination provides next-to-no added benefit, but the physical does.

[Retric]

The day after your physical doing another physical provides next to no benefit.

Healthcare is a world of diminishing returns at ever increasing costs. But that doesn’t mean the low effort first steps are less valuable.

[sarchertech]

Nurses may administer vaccines. (but you don’t need to be a nurse to do this. Medical assistants do it too. It’s a very easy procedure).

But nurses aren’t the driver of vaccination. Nurses are anti-vaxxers at a much higher rate than physicians, and if you removed physicians from the equation, vaccine rates would plummet.

>total medical care provided

At the end of the day a physician is responsible for every patient that comes through. Nurses are incredibly important, but all of the care they provide is at the direction of a physician, so it’s impossible to separate out “total medical care provided” into doctor vs nurse.

[theshrike79]

> So lots of jobs for nurses.

Exactly. (Experienced) Nurses can do ALL of the basic stuff we currently use doctors for. They diagnose patients with a glance (not by going to medical school but with raw lived experience on the field), administer medications etc.

And in some countries (I think the UK?) they are allowed to do more of the doctor-y stuff to free Actual Doctors to do the stuff they studied for years for.

The same thing will come to the software industry. All of the basic CRUD HTTP API crap can be done by "nurses", just run of the mill domain experts can wire up a basic UI + API + DB -combo for a product MVP with AI assistance.

And with a "doctor" (more experienced programmer/architect) guiding the process, the quality will be slightly above average. Not artisanal excellence, but how many services actually need that, really?

I think I've mentioned this before, but the only ones whose jobs are at risk at the moment are the mid-tier programmers. Either by skill or experience.

Juniors can learn to work with AIs and easily become the "nurses" of programming.

Programmers with decades of experience in multiple fields can either go full the artisanal-no-AI route and do the things AI's suck at or do AI assisted programming, which isn't really that different from working with a team.

But the midtier people who are too well paid to be "nurses" and not experienced enough to work as "doctors" might find it hard to find a place for themselves.

[sarchertech]

> Exactly. (Experienced) Nurses can do ALL of the basic stuff we currently use doctors for.

That’s not true. They do completely different jobs. Some experienced nurses could do some things that we currently require doctors to do.

Other experienced nurses have problems doing basic dosage calculation.

The main difference that addition to med school being much more selective, rigorous, and longer, residency is regimented, standardized, supervised, and evaluated in a way that nursing experience isn’t.

There are entire teams of doctors who spend hours every month discussing each resident’s progress (I know because my wife runs the resident program for her department and I overhear the discussions in the background).

You might have one nurse who worked in the ER for 5 years who can diagnose appendicitis as well as a doctor, but another who worked there for 20 years who couldn’t even begin to do that.

And since diagnosing appendicitis is not part of their job description, both could have absolutely stellar performance reviews.

And the nurse who can diagnose appendicitis, might be terrible at other tasks normally handled by a doctor.

The solution for this is to put them through more standardized on the job training/evaluation, but you’ve just reinvented residency at that point. That’s the thing people don’t understand about residency, it’s as much evaluation as it is training.

No amount of on the job experience is equivalent because job experience isn’t rigorously regimented, and evaluated.

[wickedsight]

Yeah, I kinda feel like OP is missing the fact that it kinda already is the way they described. The majority of devs are mediocre at best and work on variations of mostly the same CRUD apps for different businesses. Only a relatively small number of people work on complicated stuff that requires CS knowledge.

There's a much bigger group of people building games with Unity than the number of people building complicated engines like Unity. Same for [insert Javascript framework here].

[Metricon]

I completely agree with you, and I certainly meant no offense to anyone who's a practicing nurse.

I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.

For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.