I think anything too different from the standard manner of hiring is going to come off creepy to some extent. Much of the way we hire people is probably a deeply ingrained cultural ritual, and large deviations from that script would be disorienting.
Not to say that cultural rituals are a bad thing. Manners and etiquette keep the machinery of society well lubricated and running smoothly, so I'm not a fan of tossing them out and starting anew, tabula rasa.
At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if the way America does hiring could be improved. In particular, my experience of hiring in tech has been that it's pretty tough to do much better than having 60%-70% of your hires work out. But not only do companies have a tough time with hiring, there's this weird phenomenon where large swathes of seemingly qualified people also have a hard time getting hired. So I'm all for innovation in hiring to the extent that it can fix these problems.
But are these problems really addressable by changes in hiring? It seems like that would be pretty low hanging fruit, so I would expect businesses to have figured this out already. The fact that they haven't makes me wonder if there are other systemic explanations for the problems we're seeing.
For instance, in tech, relatively little filtering is done up front by education and credentialing institutions. Sure, it helps to have a degree from MIT, but there are substantial numbers of successful high-performers in this field without a college education. By contrast, only around 40% of the people who apply to medical school get in, but my understanding is that >99% of all physician and surgeon hires work out. So perhaps tech businesses would experience a similar rate of successful hires if there was something like the medical school filter in the tech world.
As for the tech workers who have trouble getting hired, there are numerous possible explanations. One could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, where low-competence workers are unable to recognize their own skills gaps. Vivek Wadhwa has previously argued that ageism is to blame here, and that tech is really an up-or-out industry. Norm Matloff makes the case -- and granted it's quite controversial and potentially inflammatory -- that abuses of the H1B visa system are too blame.
Clear as mud.
Still, although I don't think the solution lies in this particular hiring innovation -- which wasn't for tech, I'll grant, but the spirit of the preceeding applies to the larger US economy, struggling as it is -- the solution can only emerge from many different actors trying many different things. In that regard, the guy gets my respect. I'm reminded of something Linus Torvalds once said:
"I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style."
Bottom line: here in the US of A, your average doc (most certainly NOT an outlier) is making between $150k and $350k. Put that in your VC-backed pipe and smoke it.
(Debt? Between $150k-$200k for 4 years of med school. Post med school training, in the form of residency and fellowship, runs anywhere from 3-12 years and pays around the $50k mark. Basically, nobody went broke by becoming a doctor.)
Which means, of course, that the outliers can do very well. I have a friend who's Dad is an oral surgeon in the Eastern Shore of MD (what might be considered the "boonies" by some). He clears about $750k/year for a 35 hour work week. llimllib's wife above is probably around the $250k mark in the ER/ICU. If that ain't coin...
Anybody who thinks that somebody left medicine for the money knows very little about medicine.
And that's to say nothing of big cities. $750k may be an outlier in Eastern MD, but it's not uncommon for specialists in NY or LA to clear $1M easily. True outliers can climb north of there.
Medicine is still an extremely reliable way to become everyday rich, if not outrageously so. It beats the pants off of corporate jobs, and it beats law on average (though law outliers tend to beat medicine outliers). It loses out to investment banking, but the lifestyle is far superior.
Most are likely specialist surgeons -- neurosurgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons and going to pull in big money. The trade off is a (really) long residency, of course.
take an evening and go have drinks with some current med students / residents - here's what you'll hear (not from all, but from many): "Obamacare is killing my profession!"..."i should've gone to b-school instead"..."i could be working at GS but now i'm busting my ass for $50k"..."i'm getting screwed! this is sooooo unfair! how am i going to survive this debt?!"...so, the problem isn't that they don't make a great living - because they do. the problem is that they feel they're entitled to make as much as other 'smart people' (aka, their former undergrad classmates at princeton) in other professional careers like corporate law or banking - which they don't. they still make way more than 99% of the population, but those people don't matter as a basis of comparison. if you counter with, "...but, you're a doctor. you're not in it for the money - you want to help people, right?" you'll get an extremely exaggerated eye-roll and the conversation will end...so, in short - it doesn't surprise me at all that a doc is leaving medicine to chase $ in tech now that it's no longer cool to tell your cronies you work in finance... (there are many exceptions and God bless them but, I've personally run into too many self-righteous, woe-is-me med students to know what to do with...) - why do you think dermatology is such a competitive field? $$$$$$
Sounds like unworthy people who are just clamoring for status (which income is a proxy for) instead of figuring out who they are as individuals and what their life purpose is.
My wife's still a fellow, but you're right in the ballpark on the salary for residents and fellows. When she was an intern, we calculated her hourly wage at <$8.
You're low on your med school debt estimate, remember that loans don't just need to cover tuition, but living expenses too. Furthermore, many of her fellow not-yet-attendings are sitting on undergraduate college debt that has been deferred until they become attendings.
Nonetheless! Your overall point is totally valid. I've out-earned her for the past 6 years, but she'll even it out in about 2-3 years as an attending, and doctors frequently work well into their sixties.
There's also the part where you spend your 20's in med school/internship/residency. Hard to put a dollar value on that. There's obviously nothing inherently wrong with it, but it takes a certain kind of person. And you had better be damn sure you want to do medicine before committing to such a program.
Tech? You don't even need to go to college to be a successful software engineer. No matter how smart you are, if you want to be a doctor you have to do undergrad, med school, residency. 36 hour shifts, 100+ hour weeks vs working at Google. With tech you can work from anywhere, you can choose your risk/reward exposure, and if 10 years in you decide you hate it, you don't have a mountain of debt.
In medicine's favor I will say that the median income is probably higher, the median social status is much higher, you have a much better chance of directly making a positive impact on many people's lives, and you work in a field with a more balanced gender ratio.
This. And resdency is not the life destroyer people make it out to be anyway. You can find plenty of single residents in the bars of Baltimore. Whatever the demands of their program may be, its not like they're spending a year on an aircraft carrier or whatever. There are certainly downsides to the gig, but the "overworked and underpaid" idea really needs a reality check.
The problem with this is that the high-end of programming salaries is the low-end of, e.g. medical salaries. Yes, there is more to it than that, but on this axis alone, programming actually does not come out on top. Those inclined to seek "absurdly high salaries" are inclined to skip over programming.
Intuitively, I would expect MD degrees to be very clearly on top -- the expected salaries are easily the highest, and there is relatively more data available on that (look at the merrit hawkins surveys). So when a low-end salary for a doc is $150k -- which, to my knowledge, would be a high-end salary for an engineer -- why is engineering coming out on top?
Certainly, but by how much? It's not nature vs. nurture -- it's nature and nurture. They both matter, but a priori, it's not clear how much. Further, their relative weights of importance could very well change based on what is being evaluated (e.g., sexual orientation vs. career choice).
I completely agree. I of course don't actually know how much, but most of the women I know don't seem to enjoy technology or math any less than I do. I was mainly responding to the way billpaetzke's comment that men and women may be "hard-wired to enjoy different types of work" jumped to the easier conclusion.
It could use better publicity though. I've been here my whole life, and it's far too easy to get the impression that Baltimore is just a satellite to the fed contracting epicenter in DC. That's why I'm so stoked about this event! I'll be there for sure.
You may want to follow the tech in Baltimore google group as it was created to help over come this problem. The idea is to help connect the tech circle, check it out. http://groups.google.com/group/techinbaltimore
I've been unable to beat a plain old notebook, and not for lack of trying. I don't think technology has solved this problem yet.
In the digital age, I use a simple "stuff.txt" file in my dropbox folder, which I manipulate with droptext on my iphone when I'm on the go. It's my notebook in the cloud, and, for me, it sucks least.
Not to say that cultural rituals are a bad thing. Manners and etiquette keep the machinery of society well lubricated and running smoothly, so I'm not a fan of tossing them out and starting anew, tabula rasa.
At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if the way America does hiring could be improved. In particular, my experience of hiring in tech has been that it's pretty tough to do much better than having 60%-70% of your hires work out. But not only do companies have a tough time with hiring, there's this weird phenomenon where large swathes of seemingly qualified people also have a hard time getting hired. So I'm all for innovation in hiring to the extent that it can fix these problems.
But are these problems really addressable by changes in hiring? It seems like that would be pretty low hanging fruit, so I would expect businesses to have figured this out already. The fact that they haven't makes me wonder if there are other systemic explanations for the problems we're seeing.
For instance, in tech, relatively little filtering is done up front by education and credentialing institutions. Sure, it helps to have a degree from MIT, but there are substantial numbers of successful high-performers in this field without a college education. By contrast, only around 40% of the people who apply to medical school get in, but my understanding is that >99% of all physician and surgeon hires work out. So perhaps tech businesses would experience a similar rate of successful hires if there was something like the medical school filter in the tech world.
As for the tech workers who have trouble getting hired, there are numerous possible explanations. One could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, where low-competence workers are unable to recognize their own skills gaps. Vivek Wadhwa has previously argued that ageism is to blame here, and that tech is really an up-or-out industry. Norm Matloff makes the case -- and granted it's quite controversial and potentially inflammatory -- that abuses of the H1B visa system are too blame.
Clear as mud.
Still, although I don't think the solution lies in this particular hiring innovation -- which wasn't for tech, I'll grant, but the spirit of the preceeding applies to the larger US economy, struggling as it is -- the solution can only emerge from many different actors trying many different things. In that regard, the guy gets my respect. I'm reminded of something Linus Torvalds once said:
"I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style."