No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

How does anyone accept executives making 100x or more the salary of everyone else?

Or youtubers, or twitch streamers making bank?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shit rolls downhill; profits roll up. Source: fellow nurse.

My psych unit is having a pretty severe pants-in-the hall deficiency tonight and I'm definitely not getting paid enough for any of it.

What about "That kid inhert his wealth from his dad and do nothing while i have to work paycheck to paycheck"

Shitty doctors can make a ton of money because there's a massive shortage of doctors.

Is it too late to become a nurse practitioner?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.