[Zombieball]

Just curious why you think nursing is bad pay? Or what do you consider to be bad?

Where I live (Vancouver, BC.) entry level (students) pay for nurses is $50K/year. Average earnings for nurses I believe is on the order of $70-90K/year though.

[kamaal]

I think it is mainly because nursing isn't a 'career' kind of a job. You can make $50K an year, but 10 years down the lane, now what?

While your engineering friend is aiming to sell his start up for some millions of dollars, your job doesn't even have the scope to even attempt anything like that even if you wanted to.

[DanBC]

Nursing has career path through specialist forms of nursing (intensive care, nurse-prescribers, etc) to management of teams, wards, hospitals, health trusts, etc.

That's what a normal career. Most people don't have the sell-the-company lottery as an option.

[kamaal]

Actually my point was, if you look at it carefully- Professions like teaching and nursing do have a degree of career progression, but that looks super pale in comparison with any anything in the engineering domain.

The argument is similar to the discussion about Wall Street traders and Programmers. Note each of those folks at the Wall Street are taking back millions in bonuses each year. Yet we are to them a nursing-like profession, what the nursing profession is to us.

[notastartup]

It's almost like Vancouver cares more about nurses than software developers making up a significant portion of tech industry.

Think about this, an entry level nurse makes more than an entry level software developer in Vancouver, an experienced nurse ends up making more than a intermediate/senior developer with several years of experience at a firm in Vancouver.

Nurses get paid overtime, software developers are not, as overtime is almost expected with any software project.

Nurses get unions, software devs do not, because someone decided that tech jobs are not as valued or skilled as being a nurse, and that the market is efficient or protected from exploitation by employers knowing that the supply of jobs is seldom, so they treat them like commodity.

[Zombieball]

I think this argument also holds true about Vancouver when you replace nurse with [insert random trade] (e.g. HVAC technician, elevator technician, etc.)

On average I feel software devs are highly underpaid in Vancouver (even more so when you take into account the cost of living).