| > 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. |
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.