As an attending anesthesiologist in a teaching hospital (University of Virginia Medical Center) for 15 years, I had occasion to interact with only one (1) software engineer who decided to change careers, attend med school, and then become an anesthesiologist. He was super-smart but oddly enough not an exceptional anesthesiology resident, though highly competent by the time he finished training with us and went on to a career in academic medicine, where he was a superb teacher.

The reason he had difficulty as a resident from time to time is that he was reluctant to do things unless there was a logical reason to do so. In medicine, and especially anesthesiology, where five minutes of respiratory obstruction/anoxia can lead to permanent brain damage or death right on the OR table, there are times when you do what works and has been shown by experience to work WITHOUT reasoning about the absolute best thing to do. Sometimes the correct action is not logical.

I'm not a doctor but I've dated enough med students to tell you that the value proposition of being an MD is far overrated. You have no more earning potential than a typical SWE, or less if you're not one of the top earning specialities. But the top earners don't hit their potential for a LONG time, and work insane hours. Probably most doctors are lucky to be broke, ie just finished paying off student loans, by 40, assuming a normal med school timeline. It makes more sense economically and sanity-wise to switch to law.

Have you considered that some people might choose their career based on something other than money? The sentence "med students should probably do law instead" strikes me as very very odd; they are such wildly different occupations that unless your sole consideration is money I'd say most med students would never want to do law, and most law students would never want to do medicine.

I thought we were talking about a SWE making a late-life career change, so I offered one perspective. Certainly I'm glad that doctors exist, and I hope they chose their profession for altruistic reasons (although I'm not sure I believe that to be the common case).

Many choose their occupation for status, or it's chosen for them. Doctor still has the higher prestige above attorney or engineer.

A few, not many, IMHO as regards medicine.

Have you been following the closures of law schools in recent years? In part it's because the cost of attending is so steep that it takes many years to pay off student debt at an entry level salary. As this fact becomes more widely known, and the career prospects for those who graduate from lower tier law schools become ever more dim, the trend will continue. Also, the intellectual demands of law vs. medicine vs. SWE are so very different in kind, it's hard for this MD to believe they are interchangeable. For example, about every decade I decide I'm going to try to learn how to program: after a few hours of complete failure, I abandon my efforts until the next time.

Thanks. I'm specifically not concerned about money (other than tuition if it comes to that). Not that it is unimportant, but I won't bring any to my grave.

As I've gotten to do business, negotiations, and dealing with "money" more, I became kind of disillusioned to the power game. It's not always as fun as commonly portrayed and medicine seems like a very demanding but cool job. Maybe the grass is just greener and it gets as boring (if not more due to the lower potential for creativity).

The reason why I switched from SW development to veterinary medicine (looking back on it) is because I do much better with a service-oriented role instead of a project-oriented one. If I finish my notes I can put everything to bed each day and not have to worry about deadlines or doing parts of a project incrementally so I'm not swamped at the end. It's nice to help people but if I was more interested in projects, veterinary medicine would be a bad way to do it.

Yes! I was a GP/family doctor for a while before going back into training to become an anesthesiologist. The reason I liked anesthesiology so much and hated GP/family medicine is because each case in the OR was self-contained: once I woke the patient up, I had succeeded. GP/family medicine, on the other hand, consisted of seeing the same people over and over who never got much better or worse but rather required maintenance that would go on forever. I loved leaving the hospital each day not having to wonder if I'd done enough or the right thing or missed a diagnosis.

That's a very interesting perspective, thank you!

The usefulness of money is that it gives you more free time between now and death. And yes, tuition is a killer. So is lost earning potential as you go through school instead of working. As for creativity and mental exercise, I think law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

>Law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than late

>The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

"X is just a system! Why is this not automated?" is a common engineer mindset :) Unfortunately, X is just a system is only a good approximation if you don't actually understand much about what's going on. When you actually zoom in on the problem, the rough edges and hidden complexity start to become apparent, and your abstraction is no longer useful.

Computers are incredibly simple machines when compared to most messy real world systems, and we still have a heap of trouble dealing with them.

Healthcare has tons of potential to be improved by technology. There are regulatory and incumbent forces that will make it difficult and unfun to work on, but the general stance that automation can help reduce difficulty and human errors seems like a given to me.

I actually have hands on experience with EMR (epic) and I can tell you their convoluted solutions only make a complex system worse. As for actual clinical care, all the experience I have is second-hand, through friends and family in the field, but the ones I've talked to have admitted that most of med school is rote learning and bemoaned how easy it is to make mistakes.

I also have experience with something of an EMR, both from the implementation/standards side and the buying side. It is a complete and utter mess. The amount of cruft is insane, and service is very poor (nobody masters the subject, so you get the poor support). It is very tiresome.

>... medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

That made me laugh big-time even though I can't tell a python script from a boa constrictor.

Later rather than sooner would be much more accurate.

There is immense potential for creativity in ANY field — medicine, law, SWE, you name it. There are not many creative people.

Of course I am concerned with creativity on an intellectual level, not necessarily related to painting or sculpting or other arts.

Curiously the MDs I work with have been relatively unanimous about this: there is a variability in cases and you do, in a way, have to be "creative", but in a very limited sense of what that means. "Creative" in your analysis. Some thought that was a boring aspect of the job, some thought that was the whole point.

What kind of creativity could you demonstrate in the OR?