"Our peers in tech and other non-medicine fields are making 6 figures already"

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yesmaster said:
I am a community physician in early 30’s. I attended an engineering school similar to Caltech or Harvey Mudd before attending medical school. It’s helpful to have trusted friends with high earning power so you can have frank discussions on investing for FI & social good. Anyways, of those I keep in touch with:

1. SF, software engineer at workplace productivity B2B company, $900k/year
2. SF, software engineer at FAANG, machine learning, $400k/year
3. SF, software engineer at FAANG, machine learning, $450k/year
4. Seattle, software engineer at FAANG, $450k/year
5. Seattle, software engineer at FAANG, $500k/year
6. Etc.

This doesn’t include acquaintances who are founders of tech companies that sold for $100m plus, or early employees of publicly traded companies. Their net worth is probably somewhere between $10m and $30m, and yes, they’re also in their early 30’s.

My acquaintances that are VP’s in high finance, partners at law firms, or biopharma folks seem like they do okay but the $/effort and upside do not compare to TECH. ibanking is the worst, horrible grunt work for unimaginative people.

Tech jobs do not have a high barrier to entry and there are very good, free or affordable resources to develop your technical skills. I am reasonably confident that if cancer disappeared tomorrow, or if the healthcare system was nationalized (kidding but not kidding), I could get an entry level job in tech paying $200k+ with 6 months of prep.
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Can you have a chat with my husband then? This is what I keep telling him! He has an engineering degree from a great school and has been toiling in the same place with essentially menial bonuses and menial salary increases despite making 6 figures and I keep telling him - you can make so much more! he tells me no, this is what engineers make.
 
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Remember, many who work as software engineers (particularly before remote work) are at “boring” S&P 500 companies like in insurance, utilities, old-school banking (think Wells Fargo, PNC). Salary may get to 6 figures as a senior level, but that’s probably after 6-10 years and it won’t budge much past 110-120k. Particularly if outside NYC and other major markets. Those places also don’t give the RSUs/stocks to employees like Facebook and Google are known for.
 
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Well, from the sounds of things, many of you and your “peers” are extremely privileged.

People in their 20’s making 6 figures are absolutely in the 99th percentile. It is very rare. If most of your peers are making that much money then you absolutely have a heavily skewed privileged social group, which of course isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not at all normal or expected.

I was born and raised in the most educated state in the country and not a single “peer” of mine is making that much, all are heavily educated and in their mid to late 20s. They’re either living with their parents, have several roommates or are recently married and are able to purchase a modest family home. But 6 figures? No. Not yet, anyway. I expect to see most settling into 6 figure territory by early/mid 30s though.

I wish some of you would be realistic about the financial landscape out there. Yes of course there are engineers able to swing 6 figures with a specific certification at 23 but it is NOT common and not realistic. If it was so quick and simple to attain these high paying jobs straight out of high school/undergrad then everyone would do it!! Everyone is not doing it because 1. They don’t have the same major connections (parents, family etc) 2. The quality of life trade off is abysmal 3. These six figure jobs for 19 year olds who learned coding over the summer are few and very far between.
 
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I’m only one data point, but I have a brother who graduated with a bachelors in cybersecurity this year. His first job is just over 110K base salary per year working for a major tech company in product security.

I’m very happy that I’m going into medicine, it’s what I love, but some days I do wish I had the passion for computers that got him that gig.
 
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SCallergydoc said:
Undergrad who goes to top consulting firm makes about $90k with $10-20k bonus. Can advance to Associate partner in 5-6 years with salary plus bonus around $450-500k. No graduate degree; no MBA...just undergrad.
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These are so much harder to get though. McKinsey, Bain, and Boston took maybe 5 students each from my school whereas most banks (except boutiques) take 30 each (if you factor in IB, S&T, equity research etc.)

And what’s the point of being a management consultant if you can’t rack up hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles /s (but not really)
 
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Iamnew2 said:
Can you have a chat with my husband then? This is what I keep telling him! He has an engineering degree from a great school and has been toiling in the same place with essentially menial bonuses and menial salary increases despite making 6 figures and I keep telling him - you can make so much more! he tells me no, this is what engineers make.
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Those salaries seem high with the first being higher than a chunk of partners at the investment firm I work at currently. Of course I could be underestimating how much companies are paying to retain talent in SV/SF. I know Apple was giving engineers 175k bonuses to prevent attrition. Is this sustainable? I’m not sure. I do know that most equity holders will tolerate excessive bonuses when the market is irrationally exuberant, but are less willing if margins start decreasing or growth slows. High salaries are actually why buffet used to be opposed to buying stock in investment banking companies.
 
eightoheight said:
Well, from the sounds of things, many of you and your “peers” are extremely privileged.

People in their 20’s making 6 figures are absolutely in the 99th percentile. It is very rare. If most of your peers are making that much money then you absolutely have a heavily skewed privileged social group, which of course isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not at all normal or expected.

I was born and raised in the most educated state in the country and not a single “peer” of mine is making that much, all are heavily educated and in their mid to late 20s. They’re either living with their parents, have several roommates or are recently married and are able to purchase a modest family home. But 6 figures? No. Not yet, anyway. I expect to see most settling into 6 figure territory by early/mid 30s though.

I wish some of you would be realistic about the financial landscape out there. Yes of course there are engineers able to swing 6 figures with a specific certification at 23 but it is NOT common and not realistic. If it was so quick and simple to attain these high paying jobs straight out of high school/undergrad then everyone would do it!! Everyone is not doing it because 1. They don’t have the same major connections (parents, family etc) 2. The quality of life trade off is abysmal 3. These six figure jobs for 19 year olds who learned coding over the summer are few and very far between.
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Median income post graduation from my school is 55k so even the people making six figures right after are relatively rare. There is likely some confirmation bias (people who are convinced the average college student makes 100k post graduation will tend to focus on the right tailed outliers) and reporting bias (people who make more are more likely to tell other people what they’re making).

The smartest financial advice I could ever give a new grad (especially one who wants to go to med school after working for a little bit) is to take advantage of remote work if possible. Of course I know that everybody does not come from a privileged position of having a family that is okay with them living/working from home. But for those who are, look into working from home and putting most of each paycheck into a diversified portfolio of equities). The power of compound interest always amazes me and even putting 50k into an investment portfolio and letting it sit for 45 years would be better than paying high rent in a big city.
 
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eightoheight said:
Well, from the sounds of things, many of you and your “peers” are extremely privileged.

People in their 20’s making 6 figures are absolutely in the 99th percentile. It is very rare. If most of your peers are making that much money then you absolutely have a heavily skewed privileged social group, which of course isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not at all normal or expected.

I was born and raised in the most educated state in the country and not a single “peer” of mine is making that much, all are heavily educated and in their mid to late 20s. They’re either living with their parents, have several roommates or are recently married and are able to purchase a modest family home. But 6 figures? No. Not yet, anyway. I expect to see most settling into 6 figure territory by early/mid 30s though.

I wish some of you would be realistic about the financial landscape out there. Yes of course there are engineers able to swing 6 figures with a specific certification at 23 but it is NOT common and not realistic. If it was so quick and simple to attain these high paying jobs straight out of high school/undergrad then everyone would do it!! Everyone is not doing it because 1. They don’t have the same major connections (parents, family etc) 2. The quality of life trade off is abysmal 3. These six figure jobs for 19 year olds who learned coding over the summer are few and very far between.
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This is cynical and incorrect. Please don’t buy into populist garbage or woke nonsense regarding “privilege.”

My tech friends and myself all came from modest backgrounds, small non-coastal towns, or immigrants whose parents came to the US with nothing. “Privileged” kids go to Ivy League schools and do high finance, law, medicine, or other fields with high barriers to entry, and the truly privileged either marry rich or go on to manage the family business. If they do tech, they go into product management, not software engineering.

The baseline software engineer job in a tech hub is: 1) not obtained with “family connections” LOL, 2) not a bad QOL if you consider 30-40 hour work weeks with remote option desirable; 3) not rare or even uncommon. FAANG is collectively worth trillions of dollars and their assets are their software engineers, obviously they employ armies of these folks who skew young, and pay them handsomely.

People buy into cynical garbage if they’re in areas with little opportunity, like smaller cities or towns. If I wasn’t a physician, I would absolutely move to SF or Boston, maybe NYC or Austin or Seattle as a backup. You have to be in areas with high socioeconomic mobility, which involves going to the absolute best college/university you can, taking jobs that challenge you, moving to areas with a high density of talent & opportunity, and surrounding yourself with like minded peers.

Being in the right field helps of course, all the fancy degrees in the world from Princeton’s art history department isn’t equal to a 4 year CS degree from a solid state school, in terms of economic opportunity in 2022.
 
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Let's start by saying that "peers" is a tricky term. The majority of Americans over age 25 do not have college degrees so right off the top we might say that those who have been able to earn college degrees are more privileged than those who have not had the opportunity or who squandered it.

There are those people who have narrow ambitions.... learn a trade, or get hired at a retail store, get a teaching certificate, join the police or fire academy, etc. There are jobs for folks who want to be plumbers, carpenters, cooks and waitresses, sales clerks, k-12 teachers, police officers and fire fighters in every city in America. Nothing wrong with those folks and they make up a large proportion of the US population.

For many of us, the people in our "peer group" in HS ended up in those low paying but ubiquitous jobs that are found just about everywhere. Others, particularly if we switch our idea of "peers" to people we met in college, have a circle of acquaintances who have gone on to tech and finance jobs that are more often found in bigger cities. This all comes down to spectrum bias.
 
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voxveritatisetlucis said:
Median income post graduation from my school is 55k so even the people making six figures right after are relatively rare. There is likely some confirmation bias (people who are convinced the average college student makes 100k post graduation will tend to focus on the right tailed outliers) and reporting bias (people who make more are more likely to tell other people what they’re making).
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I mean, the typical medical student is definitely not the typical college graduate. It's fair to compare medical students to grads going into finance, tech, etc. Not saying anyone in medical school can do the other high-paying jobs, but the talent is high enough that it's fairer to compare them with this group than the average college graduate.
 
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The takeaway I’m getting from this thread is that there is a lot of variability in compensation in the tech and business fields, just as there is in medicine. I would bet that different types of “IT” are as different as orthopedic surgery is from psychiatry. In discussing the low-100’s jobs in other fields to the 300’s and above, are we sure we are not comparing apples to oranges?
 
meow1985 said:
The takeaway I’m getting from this thread is that there is a lot of variability in compensation in the tech and business fields, just as there is in medicine. I would bet that different types of “IT” are as different as orthopedic surgery is from psychiatry. In discussing the low-100’s jobs in other fields to the 300’s and above, are we sure we are not comparing apples to oranges?
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There are lots of variation in salaries - both in and outside of medicine. I. have no doubt that some finance and tech places pay enormously high but there are many tech and finance places that pay average. Same with Medicine - some places pay pittance and some pay enormous.
 
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LizzyM, wow I remember using the LizzyM score calculator when I was a premed student.
 
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Kiko5838 said:
2 years out of undergrad with a B.S. in Biology and I was making a 6 figure salary already working in sales at SaaS technology companies in Silicon Valley. If I stayed in sales instead of leaving to do research to get into medical school, I would of easily been making 300K per year 5 years in. Good SaaS tech sales reps (half your salary is commission-based) and software engineers make significantly more than your average physician and only ever have a bachelor's degree. If your reason for going to medical school is just to make bank as a physician then you've chosen the wrong career path. There are other professional careers that pay significantly better and require much less student loan debt and fewer years of education. I personally left a very lucrative career and a job I really excelled at to pursue medical school because I wanted to help people; financially, medical school is not the smart move for me as I will incur a lot more debt and make significantly less income as a physician (unless I specialize in neurosurgery or plastics). Hopefully most people going to medical school are not in it for the money.
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How were you able to get a job doing SaaS sales as a bio major?
 
Sales jobs usually require charisma more so than advanced technical expertise. For example, I would surmise that business majors are more common than biochem majors in pharma sales.

The level of knowledge needed can usually be picked up on the job.
 
AnonymousUser2 said:
How were you able to get a job doing SaaS sales as a bio major?
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What you major in doesn’t matter to sales managers. They just want practical experience. To get a sales job after undergrad get a part time sales/commission based job during undergrad or over the summer (doesn’t need to be anything fancy) or do a sales internship at a tech company if that’s an option. Then network with recruiting firms!

Many of the start up tech companies hire outside recruiting firms to find good candidates for them. It’s much easier to get your first job in the industry going through a recruiter than applying on the company website because the recruiter has multiple job opportunities they can submit you for and they advocate for you and pitch to the company why they should interview and hire you. Recruiters prevent your application from getting buried in the company’s large pool of applicants and you are hired as a full time employee with the tech company and not a contracted employee through the recruiting firm. So your employee status is the same if you’d applied directly through the tech company. It’s a win win.
 
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oolagok7 said:
1st post on SDN ever. Saw this and had to respond cos I’m in the other room looking through the glass windows.

I Currently make ~$210k/yr in Business IT. Never thought I’d make this much & I’m in early 30’s. Had two friends who got into Medschool when we all 3 of us applied 2yrs ago.

I Have Masters & Undergrad in Biomedical sci and Biology.

I Always wanted to be a MD so I’d be attempting med school applications this year 2022.

I am Low key contemplating against doing that because theres immense potential for job growth in business IT due to Companies undergoing digital transformation. I have worked in healthcare as a project manager and also worked with pharmacists and MD’s working as Project & product managers and are Making $160-$230k per year easily.

On the other hand Primary Care Physicians are paid lower and lower each time I check and we can all say it’s about fulfillment which I’m all in for but I gasta get paid at the end for all my blood sweat and tears. Specialization is even worse!!
You can’t take care of people when you as a doctor suffers mental and financial stress.

Bottom line is MD is still a dream of mine. Perhaps if I can pay for school I won’t be bitching by the time I’m paid s**T as a resident. Yes!! People are making bank outside medicine and it’s not ($20 is the new $50) that’s trash talk. People get close to $20k/month outside medicine and are still under 30yrs old.
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Primary Care Physicians have seen increases in pay since I started paying attention (2005 or so). I'm a hospital-employed outpatient only FP in a small-ish town in the SE and for 2020 I earned over 400k. That's with working 4.5 days per week, no nights, weekends, holidays. I ended up taking around 5-6 weeks off for vacations/long weekends.

That said, there's a reason most of us say you have to enjoy the work. Medicine can pay very well but between the late start and rough path to get here, doing it purely for the money isn't always the best strategy. But if you like the work, you will be paid pretty well for it.
 
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nimbus said:
Tbh Epic is not bad except they are vulnerable to ransomware attacks.
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It is bad, but still might be the best available EMR. None of them are particularly good.
 
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I once read an epic pitch book/slide deck at work and it seemed borderline monopolistic in terms of the %of hospital systems they were in.
 
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yesmaster said:
This is cynical and incorrect. Please don’t buy into populist garbage or woke nonsense regarding “privilege.”

My tech friends and myself all came from modest backgrounds, small non-coastal towns, or immigrants whose parents came to the US with nothing. “Privileged” kids go to Ivy League schools and do high finance, law, medicine, or other fields with high barriers to entry, and the truly privileged either marry rich or go on to manage the family business. If they do tech, they go into product management, not software engineering.

The baseline software engineer job in a tech hub is: 1) not obtained with “family connections” LOL, 2) not a bad QOL if you consider 30-40 hour work weeks with remote option desirable; 3) not rare or even uncommon. FAANG is collectively worth trillions of dollars and their assets are their software engineers, obviously they employ armies of these folks who skew young, and pay them handsomely.

People buy into cynical garbage if they’re in areas with little opportunity, like smaller cities or towns. If I wasn’t a physician, I would absolutely move to SF or Boston, maybe NYC or Austin or Seattle as a backup. You have to be in areas with high socioeconomic mobility, which involves going to the absolute best college/university you can, taking jobs that challenge you, moving to areas with a high density of talent & opportunity, and surrounding yourself with like minded peers.

Being in the right field helps of course, all the fancy degrees in the world from Princeton’s art history department isn’t equal to a 4 year CS degree from a solid state school, in terms of economic opportunity in 2022.
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Look up the stats on the average salary of recent college grads, from Boston to Seattle. Let me know what you come up with. I would like to know if you think statistics are cynical, too.
 
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voxveritatisetlucis said:
I once read an epic pitch book/slide deck at work and it seemed borderline monopolistic in terms of the %of hospital systems they were in.
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Their whole business model is monopolistic.

Most of these healthcare IT systems are bad because they really only need to do two things well:
1) Capture billing codes and meet government regulations
2) Make it hard for another vendor to replace their system, even if they do the same thing.

There are open standards like HL7 for healthcare data, but most EMRs really only focus on making it easy to incorporate information from other sources into their system and painfully difficult to export that data to anything else.

Try searching the web for “vendor lock in”.

If the EMR is just a consumer of data from a vendor neutral archive, then there can be actual competition on user interfaces too and it becomes much cheaper to migrate from one to another. But not sure how widespread these are for general clinical data (they are becoming more common for imaging data).
 
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yesmaster said:
Being in the right field helps of course, all the fancy degrees in the world from Princeton’s art history department isn’t equal to a 4 year CS degree from a solid state school, in terms of economic opportunity in 2022.
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Being in the right field is the most important thing. But let's not act like a Princeton degree is nothing. It depends what the Princeton grad decides to do after graduating. Even with an art degree... if you went to princeton there are plenty of avenues you could take to get paid great money... such as strategy consulting or pivoting to a non-technical role in tech. There's plenty of roles that don't care about your major that pay great (assuming you went to a target school). Your school matters much more in the business world than in medicine. I know a girl with a communications degree for example who got a 6 figure job at Google just bc she went to Berkley

I agree with your sentiment though
 
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zurc2014 said:
Bruh, who are these people everyone knows that are making 6 figures at a young age? I don't know anyone that is relatively young (below 40) and making bank. I see med students/residents complain about their peers making money easily and it always confuses me. You guys have some very successful friends because most of the people I know outside of medicine are making 50K-80K in their careers, which is the range for residents.
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Strategy consultants, investment bankers, software engineers, software sales, other non technical roles in tech

All of these have the capability to achieve 6 figure income within a couple years of graduating. Most people won't necessarily have as high of an income as many physicians... but if you are responsible with investing your net worth will be similar or higher depending how successful you are and what specialty you're comparing them to. Do the math, compounding interest is deceiving

Just saying though, some of these have ****ty lifestyles like medicine. Investment bankers work 90-100 hr weeks like residents. Consultants work 60-80 hrs a week and aren't home Mon-Thurs (during non covid times). Most people just do it 3-4 years for the resume boost and jump ship to something more friendly (similar to residency? lol). Tech is perhaps the kindest industry as far as work hours go. But typically the higher paid roles still work a bit more, unless you get lucky. Which can happen

Investment banking is where the biggest money is. If you can survive through it all and make partner you'll be making millions a year. There are adjacent finance industries that pay well too, like Private Equity or Venture Capital

imo the best lifestyle for money is to be a software engineer... but you have to actually be good at it

Keep in mind that you might not know these people bc unlike in medicine, the majority of these high paying jobs only exist in certain cities. In these careers you have to move to where the jobs are, put your time in. If you do well you might be able to move back to your smaller city and get a higher management job at the small local company bc you have so much more corporate experience than everyone else there. Or work remote, which is recently becoming way more acceptable

Edit: there are a lot of other jobs that make a respectable low six figure salary (90-140k) by 40... like financial advising, accounting, middle management at jo shmoe company, even being an NP.... the ones I listed above are the ones that make the big big bucks
 
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Imo ranked by quality of life (obviously biased towards medicine);

Attending physician > FANGM/SV SWE/mid level manager > HF/PE associate > Strategy consultant > Corporate lawyer > Investment banking associate/VP.

The highest earning potential is obviously in hedge funds, private equity, and IB. Caveats as I mentioned in a previous post are the stress, job uncertainty, and work hours (not uncommon for some analysts to work 85 hour weeks).

I am biased but I think that being a physician brings more non-material fulfillment than the others. This is partly why it’s not necessarily uncommon to see 75 year old practicing physicians but almost never similarly aged managing directors at banks. Above a certain threshold, higher incomes don’t correlate with higher levels of life satisfaction. Honestly, I feel like the only other careers in which this may be common is professors (not necessarily clinical) and entrepreneurs/executives. I feel working that long takes a lot of passion for either serving others or making advancements in a field. Personally, I never envision myself retiring. I get too bored too easily, and I’m not somebody who could just play gold or cards all day.

More generally, I think that investment banking has lost its luster for many college students. There will always be a desire/draw due to the salaries but it’s not 2007 anymore . The end of the GFC actually coincided the rise of today’s tech magnates. All of a sudden more people are interested in CS than econ (many schools that banks recruit at ironically don’t even offer pure finance majors, so people just did econ). Now with covid, I honestly think that many people would rather just find a job that offers flexibility than having to work 90 hour weeks in NYC offices, even if it means leaving large sums of money on the table.

Just my two cents.
 
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Can we get a tldr for this thread
 
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zurc2014 said:
Bruh, who are these people everyone knows that are making 6 figures at a young age? I don't know anyone that is relatively young (below 40) and making bank. I see med students/residents complain about their peers making money easily and it always confuses me. You guys have some very successful friends because most of the people I know outside of medicine are making 50K-80K in their careers, which is the range for residents.
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Not uncommon in software if you have some kind of obscure niche or are a wizard. I've had contract offers north of 100.
 
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BioPsychotic said:
Can we get a tldr for this thread
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There are many careers that allow you to make good money. Only choose medicine if you're passionate about the job because the others are easier to attain and take less training.
 
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jamaica jan sun princess said:
There are many careers that allow you to make good money. Only choose medicine if you're passionate about the job because the others are easier to attain and take less training.
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Good. Because I truly love medicine. Money is important, but it’s not everything.
 
zurc2014 said:
Bruh, who are these people everyone knows that are making 6 figures at a young age? I don't know anyone that is relatively young (below 40) and making bank. I see med students/residents complain about their peers making money easily and it always confuses me. You guys have some very successful friends because most of the people I know outside of medicine are making 50K-80K in their careers, which is the range for residents.
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I dated a guy a few years ago. He is an engineer. Not only is he making 6 figures, but the company he works for also gives him a stipend for housing. My friend is a traveling nurse. She just signed a contract and will make 6 figures in 3 months. I have another friend that is a consultant. She worked 3 years in her position and is now making 6 figures.
Trust me, our counterparts are out there but why is this significant when we are pursuing something that we love? Many doctors have reiterated that if it's the money you are after, then it's not worth it. You can make 6 figures in another field spending less time in training.
 
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I believe money and long-term job satisfaction are both important for a happy life, and medicine seems to offer a significant amount of the latter and a decent amount of the former.

Other careers can promise one, but not the other.

Do what you love and things will work out! I love the quote that one of the site admins keeps in their bio: Comparison is the thief of joy.
 
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JourniFar said:
I dated a guy a few years ago. He is an engineer. Not only is he making 6 figures, but the company he works for also gives him a stipend for housing. My friend is a traveling nurse. She just signed a contract and will make 6 figures in 3 months. I have another friend that is a consultant. She worked 3 years in her position and is now making 6 figures.
Trust me, our counterparts are out there but why is this significant when we are pursuing something that we love? Many doctors have reiterated that if it's the money you are after, then it's not worth it. You can make 6 figures in another field spending less time in training.
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what nurses are making now is ridiculous - I don't think its sustainable. It also makes you wonder why some physicians are so lowly paid - i see sometimes job ads for PCPs in the 100's/low 200's. But it's ok to pay nurses 8-10/week.
 
Fission Chips said:
I'm a PGY-2 in Urology. Of the friends I keep in contact with from college:

1) Financial advisor, makes ~300k now. Started at 150k out of Business school. Wife is climbing the ladder at a marketing company, makes 150k+ depending on bonuses. Both work ~50 hours per week.
2) Software analyst - first job out of college 80k at age 22. Now at 140k + stock options (don't know what thats worth). Works 32 hours per week on average. Sometimes more sometimes less depending on projects.
3) Dentist - 220k, one year residency finished at age 27. Works 4 days per week.
4) Started a wood finishing company, pays himself 100k but company value is growing. Works ~60 hours per week.
5) Regional manager for Tesla - makes 200k, works ~55 hours per week.
6) Working at a medical translation company - 70k, 40 hours per week.
7) Architect - 65k, 40 hours per week
8) Marketing - 125k, 40 hours per week
9) Hydrologist - 130k, 40 hours per week
10) Pathology resident - 70k (in HCOL). Wife makes 130k as a medical science liaison after her PhD.
11) CPA - makes ~150k. Works more than I do in tax season, minimal hours outside of that.

Me: 60k at 60-80 hours per week depending on call. Wife makes a little less at similar hours getting her PhD. She has external funding though, I think her stipend from the University is like 21k. Overall I tend to think I have very successful friends outside of medicine... May be selection bias. My job is way more interesting IMO, very happy with my decision but currently very tired as a junior resident.
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Comparing your salary as a junior resident to people in their actual careers is disingenuous. When you graduate residency you will be making at least triple what most of those people are making. Some even more than that.
 
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Iamnew2 said:
what nurses are making now is ridiculous - I don't think its sustainable. It also makes you wonder why some physicians are so lowly paid - i see sometimes job ads for PCPs in the 100's/low 200's. But it's ok to pay nurses 8-10/week.
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No physician should ever take a job for that little money. There are plenty of jobs for PCPs.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
No physician should ever take a job for that little money. There are plenty of jobs for PCPs.
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That's the salary of a lot of physicians. 200's is very frequent for many non-specialties, including my own (PM&R). While I make numerous times what the typical doc in my field makes, for example, most people in my former group were making in the mid 200's with no room to go up.
How do employed doctors make more money aside from seeing more patients - do they get salary increases? I left my former practice before making it to a new salary negotiation but it seems like there wasn't a early increase. It's amazing how medical practices screw physicians.
 
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Iamnew2 said:
That's the salary of a lot of physicians. 200's is very frequent for many non-specialties, including my own (PM&R). While I make numerous times what the typical doc in my field makes, for example, most people in my former group were making in the mid 200's with no room to go up.
How do employed doctors make more money aside from seeing more patients - do they get salary increases? I left my former practice before making it to a new salary negotiation but it seems like there wasn't a early increase. It's amazing how medical practices screw physicians.
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100s is not a salary any physician should ever take. That’s just insulting. There’s no reason a PCP should have to take a job for that salary.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
100s is not a salary any physician should ever take. That’s just insulting. There’s no reason a PCP should have to take a job for that salary.
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Before I took my current job, I was offered a job as a medical director for healogics - for $170k. Then they wanted me to do no base and just collections. I said no thank you. Lots of jobs even on indeed and stuff list salaries in the mid to high 100's. I agree it's insulting.
 
as somebody who doesn’t really like cities, how much should doctors expect to make if they practice in “rural” areas as opposed to metropolitan areas?
 
Iamnew2 said:
Before I took my current job, I was offered a job as a medical director for healogics - for $170k. Then they wanted me to do no base and just collections. I said no thank you. Lots of jobs even on indeed and stuff list salaries in the mid to high 100's. I agree it's insulting.
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Yeah I’m not denying those jobs are out there. Just that no one should take them.
 
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Matthew9Thirtyfive said:
Comparing your salary as a junior resident to people in their actual careers is disingenuous. When you graduate residency you will be making at least triple what most of those people are making. Some even more than that.
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We're all on a ladder somewhere, and the goal for most (not all) is to climb. Residency is just another wrung on that ladder, though certainly the next step up is a large one. My footing on my ladder is more solid than most, as progression is nearly guaranteed, which can't be said about nearly every other field. Most junior analysts are not in their position because they dreamed of being a junior analyst. The software engineers I know are looking forward to the day they are a senior engineer or operative director. In fact, not one of my friends is in their "actual" career per se, even the dentist is applying for orthodontics residencies this year.

Sorry if you found that disingenuous; it wasn't much of a comparison more than answering OP's question, and you'll notice nowhere am I complaining about my relative income. I'm really simply sharing my own experience, and the people I've kept in contact with are doing very well in my opinion. I'm happy for them and I hope they keep climbing if that's their goal.
 
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JourniFar said:
I dated a guy a few years ago. He is an engineer. Not only is he making 6 figures, but the company he works for also gives him a stipend for housing. My friend is a traveling nurse. She just signed a contract and will make 6 figures in 3 months. I have another friend that is a consultant. She worked 3 years in her position and is now making 6 figures.
Trust me, our counterparts are out there but why is this significant when we are pursuing something that we love? Many doctors have reiterated that if it's the money you are after, then it's not worth it. You can make 6 figures in another field spending less time in training.
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Nursing pay right now is literally insane. One of my buddies is making bank. He is working a lot of hours, but the overtime incentives are crazy right now. It's even better for travel nurses like you said. I really wonder how long it's going to last
 
voxveritatisetlucis said:
as somebody who doesn’t really like cities, how much should doctors expect to make if they practice in “rural” areas as opposed to metropolitan areas?
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rural areas generally make more than huge metros as physicians. Obviously it can depend though. Medicine is the most reliable highest paying career if you want to live rural
 
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