High stress environment, stagnant wages unless you're a travel nurse, underappreciated during the pandemic, and having friends turn on you because they associate you with some crazy conspiracy theory. These are all reasons I've heard of career nurses quitting and going into other industries.
Conflicts with patients and their families. Politicians claiming you are overpaid and your friends and family believing them. Increased responsibilities without increased pay, something experienced nurses really feel.
I'm trying to think of how any of those can be solved with "technology" :-/
Nurses are paid well compared to the average worker in the US, but not compared to the service they provide. My wife, an RN BSN, was hit with a pay cut due to hospital system being bought out by another larger one. That's right, a pay cut, during a pandemic. Now on a fixed pay scale, with no raises built in. $3/hr shift differential for working night shift in no way makes up for the strain it puts on your body, your free time, and your relationships. Tons of attrition in her hospital and department, no signs of retention bonuses or anything other than a "We <3 our healthcare heroes" sign out front.
They're paid alright (generally speaking), but most devs wouldn't even consider a job at that rate. And the bar for entry is way higher: years of competitive and expensive schooling.
And that's ignoring the other factors that GP mentioned. I don't get assaulted on a daily/weekly basis. I'm not getting coughed on by COVID-infected patients who want to kill me because they don't believe that COVID is real. I don't endure a regular drumbeat of patient deaths and the constant second-guessing "what if I did X differently". I don't need to handle people's bodily fluids. And then there's the politics, internal and external (the conspiracy nuts, the fucked-up pecking order in hospitals, unions, insurance- and pharma-driven policies, politicization of healthcare, etc). I could go on and on, and I only know one nurse personally.
Nurses are not paid anywhere near "pretty well." They're treated like shit and the pay isn't anywhere near fair compensation for the service that they provide.
It makes zero sense for a person to consider straight-up nursing as a career in this age. The school is too competitive to get into, the pay isn't worth it, the job at the end is laborious, the culture is vile. If one does go into nursing, becoming an NP, CNA, or travel nurse are the only logical options from a time invested to income and burnout standpoint.
If a student wants a health care professional job, medicine and dentistry are better options and require just as much academic competition. Failing that, the student is better off going into tech or law.
If they're not smart enough for either of those? I dunno? Onlyfans? Permanent serfdom? I fear that our new society will have many who are left behind and struggling.
>but most devs wouldn't even consider a job at that rate
Lots of people ... most people work jobs that fall into that category.
I'm not sure that means much. I don't know how many folks who go into nursing are likely to just chose to be a developer or if it is that simple for them.
I know a few folks who went to university planning to continue on to med school, but ended up as devs for various reasons. Also, a vast majority of the audience for this site are devs.
Nurses are paid well, relative to the average American salary. I don't think they're paid particularly well relative to the job's lifestyle requirements and latent stress levels, especially during a pandemic.
Looking at my area (NYC), I'd have to take over a 50% pay cut from my engineering job to be "paid well" as a nurse. And I suspect my job is a lot less stressful.
While I don't doubt that nurses have very high stress jobs, the reason why you'd take a pay cut to become an nurse is because their job is a lot less technically difficult.
I have some friends from university who became nurses, one of which I was roommates with for two years during school. I helped them study for 'their most difficult math test' and it was a relatively straightforward test on changing units. They would not have passed a first year calculus class. The majority of their academic work was memorization, and then lots of hands on work in hospitals. The reason they get paid well is because the job is important and stressful, not because it requires highly technical people of which there is limited supply.
I don't say that as a slight - I know many nurses who are very intelligent people, its merely a judgement as to the academic rigor involved in getting your nursing credentials.
PS I worked at home depot during busy periods in the summer when the store was understaffed, I've worked as a waiter where I was the only person on shift because the owners/manager were idiots, and I've worked cleaning big chicken barns out in preparation for new chickens and those were all significantly more stressful than my technical work. Stress is not correlated with difficulty or limit of supply.
Were your friends NPs, CNAs, or something else? There's a wide variety in nursing roles, with a corresponding wide range in technical difficulty and expected proficiency. The average NP is certainly more technically proficient than the average undergraduate with a CS degree, albeit not in a domain the CS undergraduate might understand.
Tangentially: I'm not sure what the relevancy of "passing a first year calculus class" is. Just about every BA/BS passes one, and I (a program analysis researcher) have never even remotely needed by calculus knowledge in my day job. I don't think it's a good proxy for technical skill whatsoever, given that "technical skill" is a domain-specific qualifier.
I think the "hardest" job I ever worked was a PC tech support call center or a job at a pizza place. I didn't pick my hours ... and the job was a heck of a lot harder than my coding job that pays WAY more.
But it wasn't like I could just go and get a coding job at the drop of a hat.
Sure. Both programming and nursing are relatively niche fields. Nursing is arguably a significantly more professional field, given that (1) formal requirements are higher, and (2) Nurse Practitioners are effectively educated at the MS level (versus a BS or lower for the average programmer).
If we're using job difficulty and stress as some of our metrics for fair pay, then I would argue that tech support and pizza delivery should also be higher paying! But even with that, it doesn't seem unreasonable to factor in the professional qualifications (and corresponding time and money commitments) required of nursing. Relative to all three, it's a remarkably low-paying job.
I went to an undergraduate school with a fairly large nursing program, and interacted with a fair number of nursing students. One thing I noted was that a large proportion of nursing students were first-generation college students from lower-middle-class and working class backgrounds. I suspect that the meme of nursing being "well paid" stems from the fact that it is a step-up in that context.
This is my antidotal experience as well from extended family and friends. Many (mostly young women) weren't really sure what to do and picked nursing because "it pays well" and had a romanticized/simplistic view of nursing. Didn't seem particularly interested or passionate about it, so I can see how many would lose interest once the reality of the hard work in the midst of a pandemic.
I don't think they are paid as well as they should be considering the need for most nurses now to be on-call 24/7 and dealing with the stress from patients and their families, and administrative bloat.
It depends on where you go (and when; things have changed somewhat recently) but I know some CNAs who never became RNs because the time it would have taken to claw back the money spent on the degree wasn't worth the added stress of actually being an RN.
