The Falling-Down Professions

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashion/06professions.html?ex=1357275600&en=e61888dd3b47a9f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

by pg • 19 years ago

33 44 19 years ago

nytimes.com

Alex39175• 19 years ago

Rule of thumb: If a job has a prestigious title, it's probably because it sucks and no one would do it otherwise.

timr5• 19 years ago

Yeah, well...most software development work sucks, too. There's no magical career path that guarantees success without "suck".

In any case, unless you've personally served time as a doctor or a lawyer, you might want to tone down the rhetoric a notch. Because whatever the intangible benefits of devoting your young life to a startup, I can guarantee that ten years from now, there are going to be a lot of cynical 30-somethings who feel screwed that they didn't get rich from web 2.0.

It seems that every generation has to discover the law of "no free lunch" for themselves.

Alex39175• 19 years ago

If there really is no such thing as a free lunch then it should follow that there is conservation of utility for the sum total one's compensation. And, therefore, if one is compensated with a prestigious title then one should be less compensated in other ways, be it through making less money or having less job satisfaction or what have you.

Alex39175• 19 years ago

To answer your other point, I make no claims the world owes it to me to be successful. But if I'm not I'll eat out of a dumpster and you won't hear me bitching about it.

aswanson5• 19 years ago

there are going to be a lot of cynical 30-somethings who feel screwed that they didn't get rich from web 2.0

I'm a cyncial 30 something that screwed myself by not getting rich in web 1.0.

sosuke• 19 years ago

Doctors and lawyers are jobs like any other. These new adverstising based websites are companies. Doctors and lawyers have some of the largest salaries of any career but starting a successful company is a whole different beast. They shouldn't compare being an employee to being an employer.

Alex39175• 19 years ago

How do you choose between being an employee and being an employer without comparing the two?

bayareaguy3• 19 years ago

I think anyone who wants respect should have to earn it regardless of their profession.

jgamman• 19 years ago

the corollary of this statement is why should i care to garner your respect? having spent 10 years in med school and pursuing a career that is fundamentally devoted to helping people during times of crisis - shouldn't the default position be 'respectful till proven otherwise'? don't confuse respect with adulation...

bayareaguy3• 19 years ago

Not all doctors and lawyers end up in positions where they really are helping people (and some of them end up doing more harm than good).

Look at the lady in the article who spent a week in a hotel sticking post-it notes on documents. Unless there are extenuating circumstances (e.g Erin Brockovich), she's not going to get much respect for doing that sort of thing regardless of how much time she spent in school.

jsnx6• 19 years ago

Wow. To think of the envy doctors must feel -- making a measly 200Gs while the venture capitalists are making millions!

We all ought to consider, too, the absolute worthlessness of venture capital in a social sense (and the basic worthlessness of the web, I might add). How much should people expect to make for playing with computers -- in one form or another -- while other people make their bread and clean their houses?

Of course, it's always been that way -- income is not proportional to work. If it was, the grape pickers would be shopping at Neiman Marcus.

pg2• 19 years ago

We all ought to consider, too, the absolute worthlessness of venture capital in a social sense

What do you mean? What is value "in a social sense?"

jsnx6• 19 years ago

Venture capitalists benefit themselves and a handful of other people economically, while providing funding for services that are -- in so many cases -- vacuous garbage. The tubes of the internet are clogged with pr0n, but where is a single good site for searching #haskell?

However, my point was a little more general -- it makes most sense in connection with the bit about work and reward. Doctors and lawyers are portrayed as civil servants in the article, and this is used to drum up some sympathy for their relative impoverishment (relative to VCs). Why don't they mention the poor nurses?

Doctors and lawyers have ridden the demand curve long enough; they now find themselves contending with people who do even less and make even more, and they complain. Reflection would have been a more respectable response.

jsnx6• 18 years ago

I'm forced to reconsider this remark. Venture capitalists -- like all investors -- play an important role in bridging the gap between consumer demand and actual innovation. They are less risk averse than most investors, though -- and more able to drop a bunch of money all in one go -- so they tend to be more timely than other investors.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

the grape pickers

Good example. Just coming off the wine tour at Napa are we?

jsnx6• 19 years ago

I was a homeless man two Januaries ago -- I lived in a van at the corner of MLK and Oregon in Berkeley. This wasn't a student project, either. I really just had no money, no friends who would take me and nowhere else to go. Thank God someone loaned me their van.

In the intervening years, many kind people tolerated me as I wormed my way into IT. Now I live in a house and, yes indeed, drink the wines of Napa and other places.

forgotmypass• 19 years ago

income is not proportional to work. If it was, the grape pickers would be shopping at Neiman Marcus.

If it was, there would be no Neiman Marcus, or much of anything else.

jsnx6• 19 years ago

I meant to highlight the irony of doctors and lawyers, of all people, complaining about this fact. I am not a socialist.

noonespecial• 19 years ago

The difference is not how "hard" the work is, but how many people could do it. Any doctor could pick grapes, but very few grape pickers could be doctors. Scarcity of doctors, high pay; plenty of grape pickers, low pay.

The problem we are having is that the economics are being changed in a occluded space. The doctor makes 250k, but has to shell out 60k for malpractice insurance, and 30k a year to repay student loans for nearly a decade. The lawyer trudges to work every day to stick postits on briefs in order to get that "big score" from a medical liability suit, knowing that he is part of the problem; I'll just grin and bear it until I make partner...

Picking grapes starts to look pretty good.

What will we do when all of the good doctors decide to pick grapes?

jsnx6• 19 years ago

I feel so bad for doctors and lawyers after reading your post. Now think about how the poor sysadmins feel -- man, picking grapes is starting to look pretty good...

daniel-cussen• 19 years ago

You know something's up when they put an article like this in the fashion and style section. I feel like half the articles on hacker news that come from there are PR.

mechanical_fish2• 19 years ago

As anecdotal evidence goes, this is very good stuff. I mean, I've heard and believed all the same anecdotes, so they must be true!

As actual evidence goes, this is typical innumerate newspaper crap.

* "20% of lawyers experience depression sometime in their careers." As compared to... what? In my anecdotal experience, for physicists this number is closer to 80%. For software engineers... well, let's just say that PG is one of the most happy and successful ones I know of, yet he claims to have been pretty depressed as a Yahoo employee.

* "Law firms have a 20 to 30 percent annual turnover in associates." As compared to... what? What's the equivalent number for software engineers, dental hygenists, grade school teachers? How have all of these numbers changed over time?

* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale." Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw.

* "The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003."

This sentence deserves it's own special multi-paragraph gripe. First, as usual, we must ask: compared to what? What percentage of the job applicant pool do these numbers represent? Could these just be fluctuations in the population of recent college grads? Are they correlated with the state of the economy? If someone doesn't go to med school, where do they go? The article deploys anecdotes to suggest that they've all gone into Web 2.0 companies and Wall Street... are there statistics for that?

Despite his best efforts, the author of the article has presented some data with an interesting anomaly... which he then utterly fails to explore! Why did the number of med school applicants dip in 2003? My own hypothesis is that this is the ghost of the dotcom boom... folks who started school during the boom avoided hard stuff like organic chemistry in favor of classes in HTML and check signing and Maserati selection, and that depleted the pre-med population. But it'd be nice to look at the evidence.

Studying the dip in 2003 is particularly important because this article may suffer from the same problem: anyone want to bet that, assuming that the legal and medical professions really have been shrinking in relative terms, the leftover people have been going into real estate, and real-estate-fueled banking, and the cashing of giant real-estate-related checks? Anyone want to guess where all those people are going next, now that the bubble is collapsing? Law school!

manvsmachine• 19 years ago

I agree. I think externalities are having a much bigger impact than what the article would suggest, and the stats aren't nearly as bad once they are put into comparison. For example, they say the number of med students has dropped a little under 10% since '97.. enrollment in CS/IT programs has dropped roughly 50% since 2000. That being said, I doubt that college students are running from a sure 6 figure income to try their hand at software development; from my experience, college kids run to traditional professions from CS, not the other way around. My guess is that we're seeing the less affluent potential med/law students not being able to dole out the cash necessary for all the years of schooling, combined with the really affluent kids recognizing that ~$150,000/yr in this current economy isn't enough to support their desired lifestyle.

iamelgringo• 19 years ago

I agree about the anecdotal evidence. I didn't think, though that it was as much about people not going in to medicine to be a web 2.0 developer. It sounded to me like it was about the loss of prestige that Medicine and Law professions have gone through. they aren't the "sexy" occupations any more. They're becoming like accountancy--"A good solid job". The "sexy" jobs in NY are portfolio managers, VC's and Hedge fund types.

* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale. Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw." Yeah, but real estate agents take a 2-6 week class at their community college. Doctors go to school for an average of 12 years and end up with an average of $200k in student loans. It's a little harder to switch careers when you've dropped that much on your education.

mechanical_fish2• 19 years ago

Well, like I said: the anecdotes are fine. I don't necessarily have a problem with anecdotes. One of my favorite genres is the oral history, in which a historian sits with a bunch of people and just writes down their anecdotes. (The Box: An Oral History of Television is really good, but let's not forget Founders At Work, which is essentially in the same genre.) You can learn quite a lot by just listening to people talk about their lives and their professions. I certainly agree that it's good to know that quite a few lawyers are bored stiff, and that quite a few doctors hate practicing medicine in our broken health-care system.

What I dislike is this style of journalism where the storyteller tries to tart up the anecdotes with meaningless numbers in an attempt to make them seem more significant. Meaningful numbers would be nice; meaningless numbers just distract you and dilute the directness and frankness of the stories.

Reading a story like this is like having a conversation with a day trader: they are anxious to impress you with their detailed knowledge of the up-and-down movements of randomly-walking lines on charts, but they barely know what their favorite company's product is or who its customers are.

joshwa2• 19 years ago

Am I the only one who is bothered by the new Google-bait title tags on NYTimes articles?

This one was labeled "Economic Conditions-Economic trends-legal profession-lawyers-prestige-doctors - New York Times"

pg2• 19 years ago

What strikes me is how naive the NYT must still be about the web. It's as if they don't realize title tags actually show up at the top of the browser window.

joshwa2• 19 years ago

I'm sure Khoi Vinh threw a fit and lost to the SEO consultants...

icky• 19 years ago

> In a typical complaint, Dr. Yul Ejnes [...] said he was recently forced by Medicare to fill out requisition forms for a wheelchair-bound patient who needed to replace balding tires. "I'm a doctor," he said, "not Mr. Goodwrench."

Dammit, Jim!

geebee• 19 years ago

My gripe with the legal and medical professions is that I think they use licensing, ostensibly meant to protect the public, to create cartels and up the cost of their services.

I attended a single semester of law school before dropping out and getting an MS in Engineering, and believe me, it wasn't because law is "too hard". I'm convinced that you can get through a top law school while sitting on your thumb, dude. There's nothing in there that a reasonably bright and literate high school student can't handle. I'm not saying it's easy - a reasonably bright high school student is a pretty well educated person. But it's not in the same leage as grad programs in hard science, math, or engineering. I think the main reason for the 3-year grad degree is to keep smart people who could figure this out more quickly and offer services for less money out of the field. To make it worse, lawyers lobby heavily for regulations that tend to increase their billable hours. Restrict supply, increase demand, largely through government manipulation. I just couldn't be a part of it.

Medicine is a bit less objectionable, but I do believe that the Nurse Practitioner field has shown that a very high quality of independent care provider in less time. Nurse practitioners have to do quite a bit of grad school and apprenticing, so it's still a degree-intensive field. But physicians have definitely tried to use licensing to limit the competition they feel from NPs.

This is why I like, and admire, the software field. It's totally open and free. If my clients want to open up a book and try to learn it themselves, they are free to do so. If they want to hire someone right out of high school, they are free to do so. If they want only a PhD out of Stanford, that's fine too, as long as they're willing to pay. It's a genuinely open and free market - and while that means there are a lot of truly crap programmers, it also means that a brilliant person who is ready to contribute doesn't have to deal with a cartel that wants to keep him or her out.

The Falling-Down Professions

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