Is our career that really much better than being a doctor?
I work in AM and am increasingly looking into changing my career and going to med school. Seems the consensus on here is that front office people in IB / PE / HF make more than a physician over the long term but not sure if that us even true.
- Specialized surgeons are making 700k-1M at the age of ~32. Compare that to someone who is a VP in PE or IB making ~4-600k
- Many "lifestyle" specialties like derm and radiology are making ~500k with a 40 hr work week, something front office finance will never get you
- Sure, these specialties are competitive, but so is front office finance
- Maybe the ceiling is higher in finance (partner at a MF, bigshot PM at a HF, rainmaker MD) but would argue similar vol of outcomes exists in medicine with many doctors owning a practice / commercializing some product and having a similar blockbuster outcome
- Maybe the opportunity cost is huge (probably around ~$1M) but seems like a rounding error over the course of a career where you are consistently pulling upper 6 low 7 figures without having to worry about carry materializing or your sleeve doing well
Seems like if you go to med school and match to a lucrative specialty (e.g. don't go into something like pediatrics or psychiatry) you are making high finance level money with better WLB and more meaningful impact, better job security, and more respect in society. What am I missing here?
lord please don't let whoever made this post be my doctor 🙏🏻
del
Who cares what a doctor's motivation is as long as they are great doctors?
How much of that money goes to med mal?
I think you have an additional tailwind here with more and more kids choosing finance over medicine leading to a shortage of doctors long term. Orthopedic surgeons make bank
I was genuinely interested in being a doctor until I realized how poorly some of them get treated. Some of the most important doctors (EM/Surgeons) get treated worse than dogs. Get screamed at by patients, possibly even hit, have to work insane shifts where making mistakes could kill someone, residency where you make 50k and work 80 hours (officially) a week, hell no.
And you get treated better by your VP that makes you check emails after 5PM. Give me a break. All these jobs suck, but at least as a doctor, you’re helping the world somewhat
If the benchmark is money, it's not even close. The average doctor makes $350k. They spend 7+ years training and pay $250k tuition. My doctor friends live frugally and are largely burnt out / want to quit but suffer from understandable sunk cost fallacy. Mid to late 30s PE professionals are making $500k-1m+ cash and accruing more in carry. Many do not have advanced degrees or spent 2 years partying in MBA.
Different story if the benchmark is meaning and societal impact.
jesus christ, not you again. Weren't you the guy who sold out of tech at the bottom in October 2022? (joking)
Tell me, how many college students right now can get an internship at KKR, Apollo, Ares versus the almost 90% placement rate at your local med school (heck, even Carribean med schools place well into any state/federal/private hospitals.
Anyways, finance is objectively the better career for high salary, *provided that you make it into the top firms.
If you can make it even an MM PE firm, which should be very possible out of any BB/EB you'd make more. Heck even staying at a BB/EB pays more than doctors. You have to account for debt + time-value of money. Finance just has significantly more upside. Alos selling out of tech from a job perspective is the correct move, tech labor market is absolutely shit. It's so much easier to get a job in BB/EB IB than it is to become a doctor or get a FAANG job. I am in IB in part because I knew I couldn't cut it in med school as are many others. Meanwhile, the CS job market is shit, salaries are going down, and everyone is getting fired. IB is by far the best risk-averse career path to get into if you are at a target or semi-target and decently hardworking + social.
(1) There are substantially more "front office" finance jobs than there are surgeon jobs. Basic probability says you are less likely to be a surgeon than you are a front office finance professional. And this is before accounting for the steps you actually have to go through to become a surgeon. This is just looking at numbers and not even accounting for the path to merely get such a job in the first place. Sure, front office finance is competitive, but it is not as competitive as getting into the specialties you are specifically referring to. There are a lot more gating steps in medicine then there is in finance. Medicine is a lot more binary. You can want to be in some high-paying specialty but that requires winning in a very binary race multiple times (getting into the right med school, getting into the right residency program, succeeding in that residency program, being selected for the right attending opportunities, etc). Finance allows for a lot more mediocrity.
Don't forget to adjust your earning potential with the chances of actually getting the job.
(2) Specialized surgeons have a higher floor than front office finance jobs do. There has never been much of a disagreement about this. As you rightfully point out, finance jobs are heavily skewed right in its earnings distributions.
You have to be more than just a surgeon to make the top-end of finance earnings. It isn't just being able to own your own practice (which you functionally can't do in any of the specialties you mentioned). You need to do things like research. Aka things that are beyond merely the specialty. Aka, to compare to finance you'd have to also include in finance working at a startup, or something of a similar nature.
(3) Finance isn't the only place you can find good, high-paying jobs. There is a reason why law and medicine (and more recently finance) have been seen for generations as paths to push your kids down. This is a finance forum. Obviously, there is going to be a skew in favor of finance.
Most in med get a chill job at 350k-ish which is honestly really good
Dual income household becomes much more feasible as both parents have plenty of time outside of work
Very stable employment means you can live it up a bit more as opposed to corporate on the same income where you need to save a large portion of income
I've known a couple of chill doctors growing up from friends parents, one had a wife who sold life insurance, sent kids to private school and had a cool boat that he would go sailing on all the time. This was in a HCOL area.
The thing you're missing is that it's very difficult to get into the top med schools and match into the top residencies. It's so much easier to be mediocre and succeed in finance.
you're really going to decide whether you want to be a surgeon or banker based on compensation? God help us.
I was pre-med at one points but ultimately studied CS. I sometimes wonder what life would've been like if I became a SWE. I never wonder what it would be like to go to med school.
Choosing to become a surgeon is opting to be underpaid and overworked for a decade+ (not including the gap years that are increasingly common). Even if I go do some chill corporate job right now I will have at least a million dollars on my friends by the time they finish residency. You have to wake up at 5AM every day work with some attending at a hospital which is stressful as fuck and you have classes as well.
Apples and oranges. The fields are so different that even a comparison is silly. The skills and attributes needed to succeed in each field are totally different. The sacrifices and work required in each are significant.
Also please note that comparison is the thief of joy. You'll never be happy if you do so. And the numbers you're quoting are outliers. Many in PE are not making nearly as much as you think. Same for many of the other finance professions. If you're actually at a decision point please do research on what the job entails day to to day and choose the profession that actually suits your interests and aptitude. Please also be aware that many physicians and finance people are deeply unhappy. Your outsider's view will not mirror the industries' reality.
Yesterday I was chatting with my friend who is a surgeon. She's desperate to get out. She's forced to work long shifts, is being ground down by the administration and bureaucracy, and finds that patients are generally very disagreeable and unpleasant. The sacrifices she made to pursue this career has left her childless and without a partner now into her 50s. Her sister is also a physician- and same story there. Childless and without a partner, despite fantastic qualifications and career success. My friend was lamenting the end of private practice, her journey into institutional medicine (ie. working at a big hospital group) and what she feels is the total lack of control over her career. She has long had the joy of "making a difference" bled out of her. Now she just wants to make enough $ (it will never be enough) and seeks to take back some control and sovereignty over her life.
Meanwhile many of my colleagues who started with me as associates were retired early in their career, and rotated on to other pursuits.
For me, I was very interested in medicine and was a care extender at a prominent hospital group in California, before switching to finance. I'm not sure this was the right move. I wanted something more "life affirming" rather than grinding away in a hospital. And to be frank, my pre-med grades were not competitive. I was far more verbal and problem-solving oriented, whereas my bio, chem and physics grades were awful. And my physician friends all tell me that medschool scientific rigor puts the pre-med reqs to shame, so I doubt I could have been a physician no matter how hard I'd try. The MBA program though was happy to accept me. And thanks to grade non-disclosure (I was on academic probation twice in b-school) I still graduated and made it into an investment bank's PE arm.
Like you, I also looked to the other side of the fence, for greener grasses. Now I'm just trying to eek out a living in finance, take care of my kids, and try to set up a better life for us. And if I can make an impact somehow (ESG / renewables) so much the better.
Such totally different skillsets are required to succeed in each field that it’s ridiculous to compare.
To succeed as a surgeon, you need to be able to do surgery (steady hands plus the mental strength of having someones life in your hands)
To succeed as a banker you need to first be able to grind out excel and ppt, then shmooze hard af
Dumb to compare them solely based on comp, and others here have debunked the comp comparison as well
Yea this is the worst thread I've seen in a couple months. If you want to sacrifice your life for the next 10 years to become a surgeon while going ~$500k-1mln in debt and then force yourself to pay all those loans off then by all means go ahead. But seriously what are we doing here, why can't people just find job that makes them happy with life.
Neither is the correct answer, skip undergrad or get an online degree in business, go learn HVAC, buy a shop and create a recurring revenue stream and plumbing arm. You're now working 40-60 hours a week making 500k. Until you decide to sell to a larger national player for 5-7x your EV.
Talk to the searchers who went bankrupt doing this, not Cody Sanchez or whatever bullshit influencer
Thank you. 99.9% of the influencer ads you see online are multi level marketing schemes (I reserve the 0.01% that aren’t for Patrick ;)). “Pay me and I will teach you how to make money.” Think about that.
Bro just go into a field you enjoy and are good at. What is with people on this forum
Med school is rough and lots of $$$ + residency absolutely sucks, you have to eat shit for 4-6+ years and make peanuts before actually making any real $ + you often have very little control over where you end up for residency (especially in highly competitive specialties). Medicine is way too gross for me and many doctors have pretty subpar lifestyles too.
Source: Wife is a doc
Was pre-med at first in college and was seriously considering it all throughout college but ultimately ended up in finance. Have a lot of friends who did go the med school route and are currently in their residency. Really, this comes down to a personal decision. For me, the idea of being a doctor and what you are able to do was much more interesting than actually becoming one. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it is just like 99% of other jobs out there where it becomes just that - a job.
I would recommend shadowing, volunteering, etc. to see if you actually like medicine first since it is a big commitment.
My father is a physician; why do you think I ended up here?
Ditto, father said "insurance squeezes you more and more each year to work the same (or harder) for less and less reimbursement. Go in to finance, you have too much personality for medicine."
This was exactly what I heard as a kid, in so many words. Not sure why someone felt the need to MS me, being a physician today is genuinely torture with reimbursement costs being what they are. That, and hospital bureaucracy in major health systems is God awful.
Imagine yourself in medical school—facing the hellish task of needing to learn 7 university degrees' worth of knowledge volume on each calendar year of residency and medical school—you will regret every choice & inclination that placed you in that situation in which the effort needed to score 4.0 GPA / First Class in an Ivy League / Oxbridge program is not up what it takes to score more than 13% at the next continous assessment test or medical board/fellowship exam; the kind of hellish demand that makes you want to regret being born. If you get good at it & graduate from medical school – congrats! You have just unlocked superhuman study tactics – but at what cost? Where is the financial security or any of the rewards to compensate for what the academic demands have taken from your soul?? I BS my motivation questions for "why banking?", but the real reason is that a constellation of unique personal religious beliefs have brought me to conclude that so many aspects of modern western medical practice (not the theoretical science) are not consistent with my personal religious ethical traditions—this adds an extra layer of demotivation towards medicine as a profession
I CHANGED my career to healthcare after doing investment banking (BB) and private equity and have zero regrets.
Today I am an orthodontist and make 600k/year working 4 days a week (3 day holiday every week, with 10 weeks of pto) and only 30-32 hours a week. I have no one to report to and completely independent.
IB and private equity is an absolute joke. I highly advice everyone on here who has an interest in healthcare to make the change. You will not regret it I promise and don’t look back at my finance days at all. I can’t think of a single finance person 6 years out making those salaries as an associate. My sister is a pediatric anesthesiologist and she makes 900-1000k a year regularly on 40-45 hours starting at the age of 30. When I was at the BB investment bank, the VPs were making 280-320k a year slaving away after 8-10 years in with zero career stability. My sister and I are associates. Owners/partners make another 300-700k over these numbers in the practice. My biggest regret in life was wasting 3 critical years working in finance making a meager 120-150k, stressing all the time about employment, working on mind draining work in hopes to climb the ladder. In the end of the day, medicine will always be the king. You can say whatever you want but nothing comes close to the prestige, stability, pay, lifestyle, and intellectual interest of healthcare
Where are you an associate Ortho working 4 days making 600 - thought the pretty market was collapsing
Your numbers for finance are laughable. Idk what firm you were at that pays VPs like that. I’m 32 now and finished my last year as VP making $800k. I’ve also been building capital since I was 22 and now have ~$2mm NW at my age. The similar person in medicine would just be getting out of speciality / residency with mountains of debt and most likely a negative NW all to just now start earning what I am or less (most likely far less). Medicine is a great career path if you are interested in medicine, and you can make a shit ton of money doing it too. But if you are trying to optimize around money (which your argument was doing) as early as possible it’s not even a comparison, your post makes no sense.
If you join healthcare PE you'll sit on the board of hospitals and decide which doctors to cut funding and which doctors to get raises. Isn't that more sweat than a surgeon who sl@ves away in an operation room for 24-hour-in-row and get sued for failed surgeries
Why do these posts keep getting to the top? Just do what you want bro
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