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?
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.
Try to become an anaesthesiologist. They get paid more. Just a thought.
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.
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
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.
#Capiltalism #OnlySystemThatWorks #BlessedToBeACapitalist
Lol @ the absolute delusion on display here.
Nobody is that regarded, I say sarcasm?
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.
I bet doctors need to retrain and recertify too.
This is true for every regulated profession. It’s not exceptional.
Correct, your plumber has to do the same thing too to maintain their license.
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?
It’s unjust that someone who spends their day goofing off and looking at their phone feels entitled to earn twice what a nurse does, just because they had the privilege to get into college.
lol. The thing is you’re taking what this nurse says at her word entirely and not allowing for the decent chance that actually this doctor does do his job cos like if he didn’t he’d be getting disciplined?
She either watches him a lot of the time which means she’s not working. Or more likely she just sees him when he’s on his phone having a break.
It’s takes like a decade or longer to become fully trained as a doctor so of course they earn more than nurses. The knowledge you need to have is much more advanced, the responsibility is much larger. If it’s anything like the UK then you have to do incredibly well before in what we call college (16-18) to even get a place on a course which seems to be sort of a little bit what you’re saying. Except scrap “privilege” and replace with “had to have worked really hard and got outstanding grades beforehand in order to get onto a course”.
It’s like with a lot of professions where you’re not paying the person for working up a sweat. You’re paying them for their knowledge.
I’ve worked in care, was the lowest paid job I’ve had yet I’d argue the hardest, certainly very physically as well as mentally demanding.
I’ve also earned twice that wage in a job that was much easier, although could be stressful and I was taking on more responsibility.
Especially in America which I assume the person is probably from, where doctors are getting sued for shit all the time, it really is a lot more responsibility on top of the years and years of education, debt and knowledge they have to build up to do the job.
Just sounds like a salty nurse. Unfortunately some people want to pull everyone down to their level rather than raise everyone up.
Like if nurses unionised properly then they could demand better pay. If we didn’t live in a capitalist society then things would be fairer too, but under the current system, doctors are just far more valuable to us than nurses. Those is the facts…
It’s reasonable to assume that people with more status are behaving worse than people with less.
Power - status, fame, privilege, wealth, etc. - causes neurological changes that suppress a human’s ability to excersize empathy. The kind of self-centered behaviour that the nurse describes is typical of a high status inidividual.
Also, I used to work in health insurance and this story just jives well with the little personal experience I have with medical workplaces.
Final thing: I think you have it backwards. I think the culprits you’re referring to, lack the empathy in the first place, making them sociopaths. This lack of empathy allows them to ascend the ranks stepping on the shoulders of whoever.
Nope.
I know it sounds wrong when you first hear it, but power changes your brain. Sociopaths are more drawn to powerful positions, but getting power makes your brain look more like the brain of a sociopath when it didn’t before:
https://hbr.org/2015/04/becoming-powerful-makes-you-less-empathetic https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/201909/power-blocks-empathy https://www.npr.org/2013/08/10/210686255/a-sense-of-power-can-do-a-number-on-your-brain https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/how-power-erodes-empathy-and-steps-we-can-take-rebuild-it
Becoming powerful makes you less good, neurologically.
I think you’re possibly describing sociopathy. Which is of course more common among the rich and “successful”, politicians are typically mentioned of having higher incidences of sociopathy, than the rest of the populous.
Because to get up to a certain level you have to be pretty cut-throat. You have to not care about shitting on other people in order to progress.
But this is the more extreme category of people. Like highly successful politicians as I say are the main culprits people usually mention.
I certainly don’t think you have to, to simplify things, be a “dick” to be a doctor. I’m sure some are but certainly not all.
What if one of your good friends decided to train as doctor? You wouldn’t suddenly call them a sociopath for achieving that aim, would you?
I’d agree there’s a higher incidence of them amongst doctors compared to say… carers. But it’s nowhere near all of them.
There is also this thing I often hear and have actually experienced first hand (obviously this is not to be taken too seriously as it’s just a personal experience) but people who care for vulnerable people like nurses or carers, can sometimes take those positions in order to gain power over vulnerable people.
There’s a fair few documentaries that show these kinds of people abusing their vulnerable patients. Pretty disgusting stuff. Imagine bullying say a non-verbal autistic person. There is very little chance that person can defend themselves. They can’t even communicate effectively.
So much trust is given to these low paid carers, caring for the most vulnerable. You definitely get bad apples there.
So it’s certainly not only a problem with doctors. Who can be probably a bit more easily found out.
Just thought about Lucy Letby as an example of an evil nurse with power over the most vulnerable tiny premature baby’s. (Although see some stuff about people doubting her conviction and her not fitting the typical serial killer profile, but that’s a tangent anyway).
But no I don’t think it’s automatically wealthy privileged people. I hate capitalism as much as I suspect you may do unless I’ve misinterpreted your tone haha. But this is the system we have and going back to the main thing, doctors and similar professionals are valued much more than the lowly nurse or extra lowly care worker who works physically twice as hard but without all the the risks that doctors take.
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.
Become a doctor, then the nurses can hate you whenever you decompress too.
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.
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.
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.
Shit on his desk.
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.
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
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