how do I accept that a doctor earns more than double what I do?
how do I accept that a doctor earns more than double what I do?
I'm a nurse and oversaw a doctor checking his bank statements: his salary is a bit more than twice what I earn.
This is not a particularly productive doctor, if you listen to several doctors and nurses where I work at. Just today I overheard a group of 3 female doctors ranting about him and how all he does is sitting and playing with his phone, always redirecting us nurses to talk to the other doctors. I was surprised, because I never expected to find so much drama between doctors, them being much more educated than nurses and I never expected doctors, specially female doctors, to use that kind of language.
This lazy doctor earns more than double my salary. It's depressing.
But I also feel like a loser, because even those ranting doctors earn more than twice what I do... and they get to sit for longer than I do.
Regretting my life choices.
Maybe the sane choice here would be to study or to get a certification that means a higher salary?
Doctors go to school for seven years racking up debt, and then usually have to shoulder the burden of liability and operational costs. It’s expensive to become a medical doctor, and expensive to be a medical doctor.
These costs are part of what keeps both doctors and patients safe. Doctors end up with both the power and the risk.
Nurses by comparison have only basic training before on the job training kicks in; it’s relatively easy to become a nurse, and if you mess up, the worst that’s going to happen is that you get fired and have to go work somewhere else.
But even as a nurse, if you’re quick to pick things up, you can move up the ranks and find a specialty that has more power and pays better than a standard RN. Without the seven years of debt.
And life’s not just about pay; quality of life is generally more important, and that sucks for most doctors, who have relatively short life expectancies and limited time to spend their money.
Doctor here. 👋 I just wanted to give my experience. I had to do eight years of schooling/debt, THEN I had to do 6 years of post graduate training (internship, residency, fellowship).
Now the post graduate years are paid like a job but not at a physician salary rate so paying on student loans during that time was next to impossible for me because I was in a high cost of living area. So my interest continued to compound during that time. It sucked.
As for the OP I just want to say that part of the reason I expect a higher salary is because I gave up 14 years of my life - most of my youth - in training to get here. Those 14 years were immensely valuable and I often regretted going down this path because of all the things I gave up instead. The training was incredibly difficult and time consuming. I lost touch with all my friends, had to move repeatedly, etc. It was absolutely brutal and felt endless. That’s part of what those paychecks are paying for.
Become a doctor, then the nurses can hate you whenever you decompress too.
Your worth, your value is not determined by what someone else makes.
Also, I'm a bit ignorant of this subject so forgive me if I get it wrong, but did he not go to school significantly longer for his MD than you did for yours?
I believe he also had to go through the hell that is residency, I didn't believe nurses do.
If you're envious of his salary, improve your skills, or your education. If you're happy where you are at In life, then don't let the fact that others make more than you interfere with that happiness.
No matter what you do, there will always be others who make more, one of those sad facts of life.
I believe he also had to go through the hell that is residency, I didn’t believe nurses do.
Nursing education never ends. All the nurses I know are a bit loopy from the constant need to retrain and recertify.
This lazy doctor earns more than double my salary. It’s depressing.
Wait until you find out how lazy people with inherited wealth are...and they make way more than double your salary in passive gains.
Double than ANY of our salaries with their passive gains. Few of the working class are failures, only the system
Orphan crush machine requires Orphans to crush
How does anyone accept executives making 100x or more the salary of everyone else?
Or youtubers, or twitch streamers making bank?
Okay that's different
A MD with 7+ years of education and loads of debt earning more than a nurse with far less education and debt is fair.
An exec with barely any education, debt or importance earning 10× or more what the actual workers do is not fair.
I don't deal with that, but I also can't fix it without unwrenching the fabric of our society and I'm going to need a lot more people for that.
This is a little different. Whereas executives might not have any requirement on education or performance, in the US at least you've got 6 years education And 2 years residency to become an MD. It is still crazy money considering I've got 11 years in a PhD with an actual contribution to a field, but not insane compared to a 4 year degree or less.
C'est la vie
I'm okay with YouTubers getting paid. A lot of them put his of thought and work into their videos without earning anything, before they do. And yt never paid any of them fairly. What I'm not ok with is it's endless ads and creators not being fairly compensated. Hence why I donate what I can, when I can, to creators I use. I also wish invidious instance operators were easier to donate to, but I see why they aren't.
Are you an RN or a Doctor of Nursing? If you’re an RN he has many more years of schooling than you. That alone will get him a higher salary. If you’re a Dr of Nursing then I’d go talk to your boss or start looking for another job.
Wages aren’t really about how much work you do, if it were then the janitor would earn the highest wages in the hospital.
The fact that you're jealous of a person who spent ten years of their life studying in a stressful and competitive school with over $100k in student loan debt reveals to me you have no awareness and are exactly in the correct job you were supposed to be in.
Yes, they don't understand, so what?. Maybe they're young, maybe they just never learned. Do you really think your backhanded comment is going to make things better? If you want to strike people down for asking questions that are too simple from your perspective, you should visit stack overflow more often.
You response mentions the right issues, but tone of voice matters. If you insult, belittle or alienate anyone who tries to understand what they don't understand, you're just throwing them to the republicans or the right wing populists.
People these days are often not interested in learning or understanding. If someone does, you should encourage that.
That commenter is a bootlicker lol what do you expect from a person like that
Look at the grammatical errors throughout their post. The cherry on top being the statement at the end being terminated with a question mark.
They also just recently had a question that includes them being on a pip.
I get the feeling that this person should be grateful that this doctor is only making enough more than they are that they would use the word "twice" to describe the salary discrepancy.
I think they know. The problem is the doctor that about all of the work gets paid as much as the others that do his and their own.
My wife got a position at a teaching hospital and the director was making about 2.5x her salary. When the administration figured out he was completely unqualified to be the director, they made him a faculty and her the director. Now he still made 2.5x her salary and proceeded to just sit in his office and not do any of the work. He was tenured and so it took 4 years to force him out of the school. He of course quit and got a job elsewhere just before being fired.
Some people are just lazy and worthless, but are able to study hard enough to learn how to pass the tests. Then they try and coast thru life because of how hard they worked to get there.
Speaking as a technician (associate's degree), every engineer in my country makes easily double what I do. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are just examples of professions that are paid more for their expertise than their actual work output. I would have to work 60-hour weeks just to get paid what a fresh engineering grad would get.
If you think you're at the top of your pay scale and want to earn more, then you should probably think about further education or look into travel nursing if travel is interesting/a possibility for you. Some kind of specialized knowledge like radiation, imaging, or anesthesiology would probably help.
If it helps at all, if you do your job right follow the doctors orders and administer care and medications as instructed you are next to impossible to be held responsible for the patient having negative outcomes. A doctor, even a hard working one who knows their shit well and does their absolute best is still under the constant threat of a career ending lawsuit from a patient.
Only twice?
I mean if you think what he does is easy then go to med school. Debt for a medical degree pays back 100x over a 20 year career. If you believe that you can do it, then there is no excuse not to.
Years of schooling and years of experience.
If you're in the US, run for Congress, win, reform the medicaid backed doctor residency program, with the aim of opening it up so many more people can become doctors. Then watch as the new supply brings down salaries, and eventually gets lazy/ineffective doctors fired. Revenge is a dish best served nation wide, as they say.
Lol @ the absolute delusion on display here.
Nobody is that regarded, I say sarcasm?
#Capiltalism #OnlySystemThatWorks #BlessedToBeACapitalist
I've worked for and with people who made a lot more than me.
So what? They achieved that by doing something I didn't. They may have also made sacrifices I didn't. Doctors certainly busted their ass a LOT more than me - I could never do what they do in educational terms alone (not to mention the biological stuff).
Did you really get to being a nurse without knowing typical salaries for different types of nursing or different kinds of doctors?
Now to answer the real question: how to not be bothered by this. Start by changing the idea in your head that your work has the same value as the work of someone else, let alone someone who spent years more time studying than you did, and also took on a lot more debt to do so, and a lot more risk.
Go read "Your Erroneous Zones" by Wayne Dyer. It's an intro to the methods of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) - these thoughts of yours are "scripts" that aren't useful for you. He teaches how to change thinking such as this.
What about "That kid inhert his wealth from his dad and do nothing while i have to work paycheck to paycheck"
Salty
Is it too late to become a nurse practitioner?
It's never too late if you care!
Shitty doctors can make a ton of money because there's a massive shortage of doctors.
If it makes you feel any better he'll be the one that gets slapped with malpractice if he fucks up. He's inherently accepting a certain amount of liability as a doctor.
The other thing that comes to mind is he is trained specifically in his field to diagnose and treat. As a nurse you are trained to do what you do best.
That doesn't give him a right to be on his phone all the time and be a dipshit. Eventually, that will have consequences of some sort. Currently he's receiving less respect and earning a shitty reputation. That might come to bite him in the ass some day. Him being lax may come out in his work and bite him in the ass too at some point.
But I understand your frustration. I've got shitty managers who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and I constantly question how they got and are keeping their jobs.
This is exactly why my RN wife won’t become a nurse practitioner or similar. She’s absolutely capable, just doesn’t want to deal with the malpractice insurance.
You should take advantage of the free continuing education you likely get. While nurse practicioner isn't quite as high paying you can get there without [more] debt and get raises on the way as you get more deducation.
You'll go crazy if you dwell on this. The corporate world is the same way. Generally speaking, the less actual work a person does, the more they tend to get paid. It's a tale as old as time.
Life's unfair. Always has been and always will be. Imagine someone making half what you make, and sitting less, and not feeling like a loser about it.
I think you're on the right track. First, especially with your experience, do the work and become the doctor you want them to be. And buy a Porsche.
Second, how much work did that person do to earn the degree? How much debt did that person incur?
I've seen many times where a person with lesser education outperforms a "superior." It's not really fair, but getting the degree and then the job...that's just the way it is.
Think you probably went into the wrong career if your aim was to earn a lot of money, if wages are similar to the UK.
Even if they somehow got sacked for being lazy or whatever, it doesn’t affect your salary, so I wouldn’t really obsess about it? It obviously takes a lot more training to become a doctor and that’s why they’re paid better. Along with the massive responsibility. I’m sure it’s a stressful job and it could be that those other doctors just don’t like that doctor and so are talking shit about them. You don’t monitor this doctor the whole day (if you do then it sounds like you’re not doing your job very well), so you can’t really say how he spends all his time.
Maybe he’s just coasting now, having done the hard stuff. But he had to do the hard work beforehand to get qualified. But yeah if you wanna be a doctor and think you can do it then make that your aim I guess?
Of course you could earn more money doing another job completely unrelated to healthcare if you trained up and progressed enough.
If you enjoy your job then I wouldn’t worry. If you don’t then try to retrain.
I would also ask yourself how often and how long you work compared to this doctor. I think standard for nurses is 3-4 shifts per week. Doctors work much more than this and often have out of work responsibilities as well. The hourly rate is much closer than you make it out to be.
Many trades pay big money just for having the knowledge more than doing work. Being capable =/= Doing lots of work necessarily. I know people being paid big bucks to do nothing until a specific job comes up that requires their niche knowledge. That knowledge can be so hard to find or capable people so sparse that it's worth paying a lot to have that value on retainer.
Maybe that Dr. Is a specialist? Maybe there's shortage? There's plenty of possible reasons, including that person just being a bad worker. Regardless, they definitely spent near a decade to gain enough knowledge and skill to aquire that position. That's gonna come with a larger salary.
Check with your employer if they will help with your continued education somehow. My employer, for example, will reimburse some tuition costs if you get a degree while working there.
As a nurse you can continue up to and including a PhD. Or you can go to medical school and become an MD. There are many options. Try to find a few that sound interesting and learn more about them.
If you feel you have unused potential, maybe making a change in your career is just what you need. Even if you just look into what it would take, it could put things in perspective for you.
Try to become an anaesthesiologist. They get paid more. Just a thought.
Eh, imagine how the nurse's assistants feel. A lot of that tier of medical care end up on disability before retirement age, after years of dealing with literally being shit on.
We're all trapped in a capitalist hell. It doesn't do any good for us (as in the individual) to dwell on whether or not other workers make more or less than we do. And doctors in industrialized healthcare are labor, not management or the owners. Only the ones that break free of things and open their own practice that's independent are partially outside of labor.
But, if you look at the system as it is, doctors get extra rewards once they're fully allowed to practice because they spend a major amount of their life and youth in specific studying and training instead of making income. They're usually so deep into student debt that it won't be paid off for decades. Their specialist level of training means that they have to preserve their energy and time to be able to work later in life than they might otherwise.
Nursing is kind of in between blue and white collar work. Doctors are almost always white collar. Low physical demands, but high energy/time demands, with high consequences for minor errors at times.
It isn't that they don't deserve the pay they get. It's that everyone should be getting paid very well in a high risk job. If capitalism is in place, that isn't going to happen; we're treated like a resource instead of people. But within that framework, someone with extensive skill and education is a more valuable, and more scarce resource.
My advice? Unionize. Nurses have more power than they think. It's a skilled profession that takes large numbers of people to keep the machine grinding along. Don't worry about the doctor, worry about making your job more respected and valued. Be pissed at the system, and work to change it. It's the only way that profit driven industries will realize they can only be parasites to an acceptable degree.
But, yeah, it's always going to help if you increase your education, and thus your value to the machine. If it's a low cost add-on to your degree/license, even better.
Only double? Honestly I would have thought more.
We live in a world where most jobs compensation is determined by the difficulty of the program. Medical doctor is very hard to get into and hard to do. Sounds like the problem now is that he's lazy. Don't get me wrong, nursing is hard work. But that's how the cookie crumbles.
You don't accept it, because that's bullshit. You also don't accept that it's somehow your fault that society (and your employer) is okay with that kind of injustice.
I think there are two sane choices, you named one that's really a good idea cause you do not have to take that shit.
The other one would be sharing this situation with other nurses, forming a union or joining one, and going on strike. Letting the hospital see how well it functions when only those lazy doctors doing 1% of the necessary work and getting 2 thirds of the cake show up.
I'm a doctor and my partner is a nurse and the size of the difference is straight up injustice. Join your union and vote for militant leaders that will push for better conditions and salaries. If you don't fight you lose
you can customize the serenity prayer as a form of mantra if it fits you more.
i use it as a constant reminder that life is what we make it to be.
SERENITY NOW!!
Yeah, um. I have never seen a doctors or judges salary but im as sure as anything in my life that the lowest paid one who is not specifically maybe working part time or something, is making more than double my pay.
There will always be someone making more than you. The only person you should be competing against is yourself, to reach your goals in life. If your goals are to become a doctor, then go back to school and do it.
Shit on his desk.
Fun side note: When I'd remoted into our medical client's workstations, there were more than a handful of occasions where the recipient on the other end had only just finished frantically closing out Netflix tabs.
Things like this make me hope very much that I my physical health holds out for decades to come.
But I also feel like a loser, because even those ranting doctors earn more than twice what I do… and they get to sit for longer than I do.
Regretting my life choices.
What kind of "I also feel like a loser" is this feeling?
Maybe the sane choice here would be to study or to get a certification that means a higher salary?
What in particular would that get you? I mean beyond the obvious "More money would make my life easier" thought.
Peace.
Start an onlyfans.
Don't accept it. It's fundamentally unjust and you're right to be upset.
It's unjust that someone who spent WAY MORE to get their education and spent way more in time shouldn't get paid way more? What planet is that logical on?