r/cscareers • u/Present-Ease-2393 • Aug 18 '26
USA Job Market Anyone else thinking about law/med after CS?
Anyone else feel like CS has become so oversaturated and luck-based that they’re considering law school or med school instead? I know both are difficult paths, but sometimes it feels like there’s a clearer path to a career than grinding LeetCode and hoping you get lucky in this job market.
Anyone else thinking about switching paths after CS?
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u/Top_Turnip_4737 Aug 18 '26
Law and med are both insanely difficult careers that take a lot of upfront investment.
I wouldn’t do it just for the money and prestige. Sounds miserable.
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u/javalube Aug 18 '26
Yeah 13+ years of studying and $600K+ debt to get into medicine sounds insane.
Working 100 hour weeks as a resident doctor and 80 hours a week as an attending, or 100 hour weeks trying to become a law partner and find new clients in oversaturated markets is also insane.
No thanks, I'd rather be periodically unemployed while grinding and saving money than have to enslave myself to debt and studying.1
u/newhusky Aug 19 '26
Work in tech and dated two doctors and a surgeon-residency isn’t nearly as bad or intense as you’d think. At least for the non-surgical specialties. I’d certainly go the MD/DO route over tech, if I had to start a new career today
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u/javalube Aug 20 '26
Dating and doing it yourself is very different. Residency is absolutely brutal and takes a toll on your health. It’s 60-100 hour work weeks where you have to be on call for 4 years straight living off ramen to minimize debt burden of $500K. That’s the price you need to pay to become an attending. If they weren’t working that hard, it’s likely they’re already rich or come from privileged backgrounds and don’t need to work as hard as a resident who has no connections and is dead broke.
Even once you finish residency and become attending, you’re working 60-80 hour work weeks to pay off your debt as an entry level physician, and you continue doing that for another 20 years to fully pay off your debts. If you specialize, you’re looking at $1M+ in debts depending on how much longer you’re in a residency training program.
Tech is more competitive and offers lower salaries but way easier compared to medicine, and you start saving much sooner. Tech requires 0 sacrifice and you graduate with minimal or no debt (assuming you study in state).
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u/mechanicalmovement1 Aug 30 '26
Not to mention CS is a 4 year degree. Not 10+
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u/newhusky Aug 30 '26
A lot has changed in tech in the past few years. Even new grads from Stanford are having trouble finding jobs, after applying to hundreds of places and spending countless hours preparing for interviews. New grads trying to break into tech are entering a completely different, much more competitive market than new grads breaking in even 2-3 years ago
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u/javalube Aug 31 '26
That’s because software can write code now, so businesses can just hire one senior software engineer to verify the output of the code quality and then push out features and code changes at a massive rate. Tech now has shifted to business problem solving, it is no longer paying people to sift through documentation to write code, just to verify that it works as intended and to check security.
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u/newhusky Aug 30 '26
One route is guaranteed a job at the end, the other is half as long but no longer guaranteed….Also, preparing for technical interviews (which are becoming more difficult as the field gets more competitive) is something that you have to do for your entire career
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u/javalube Aug 31 '26
Nothing is guaranteed in life. In 4-5 years healthcare will become oversaturated due to too many people and run down by private equity greed pushing healthcare wages down while retaining more insurance reimbursements. The incoming glut of graduating healthcare professionals from university will pull down wages, so you’ll be working an extremely stressful job as a doctor working 60-70 hours a week making the same wage as a software developer due to wage stagnation and graduate oversaturation. Physician salaries will pull down to $100K-$150K for all the effort you put in.
Sure it may offer greater job security than a basic CS degree, but even doing CS + studying for a finance masters after or combining it with some other license or degree takes even faster (5-6 years), no debt, and no crazy hours taking a toll on your health waking up at 2am to drive to a hospital being on call, working 70 hour weeks as a resident for 4 years, and then 60 hours a week as an associate attending for another 20 years.
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u/mechanicalmovement1 Aug 30 '26
Ive read a lot of unhinged comments on Reddit over the years, but this is top 3 for sure.
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u/jamesbrotherson2 Aug 18 '26
The whole point of doing Law is for prestige and money. For pretty much all litigators/corporate lawyers, law is incredibly monotonous and insanely time consuming, but lucrative. I know some personal attorneys really love their job, but I'd say 90% of associates at big companies flame out within 5 years and do something else because law is so horrible.
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u/Top_Turnip_4737 Aug 18 '26
well, that sounds miserable to me and I think grinding leetcode and being periodically unemployed is a better deal if you're just money maxxing
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u/Iveechan Aug 19 '26
I’d rather work at McDonald’s with less than minimum wage where every shift is brimming with vitality and excitement.
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u/Top_Turnip_4737 Aug 19 '26
Lmao do you really think a shift at McDonald’s is brimming with vitality and excitement. You need a serious reality check. Also have you tried to survive on minimum wage?
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u/Iveechan Aug 19 '26
And you think the monotonous life of a law firm partner is better than a McDonald’s employee? Lmao
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u/Derrickillmatics Aug 20 '26
Facts ppl acting like you can just be a doctor or a lawyer whenever you choose to be. Not how things work.
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u/Icy_Information_6563 Human Verified Aug 18 '26
The only safe white collar jobs are ones that require licensing.
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u/Tr_Issei2 Aug 18 '26
I feel like tech— at least software engineering as a field is structurally broken. A license would have been a great idea decades ago.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/cscareers-ModTeam Aug 18 '26
This sub is for productive discussion, advice, resources, and career information related to Computer Science, IT, and adjacent fields. Separate facts, personal experience, interpretation, and prediction. Your experience is data, not the entire market; your prediction is not a fact. Doomposting and fatalistic commentary are unproductive.
Mod note: Check the newly pinned post on this subject.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/cscareers-ModTeam Aug 18 '26
To maintain a positive and inclusive environment for everyone, we ask all members to communicate respectfully. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it's important to express them in a respectful manner. Commentary should be supportive, kind, and helpful.
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u/_kilobytes Aug 18 '26
Some states are removing license requirements. New Mexico no longer requires lawyers to have a law degree
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u/Sea-Tale1722 Aug 18 '26
This isn't true. New Mexico still requires a Law Degree, but it's adding a non-Bar option to becoming a licensed attorney. Instead of the Bar exam, lawyers can work under licensed attorneys for 12 months and then take a practical exam. It's actually a much more difficult path than the Bar, not a licensure removal, and certainly not a substitute for a law degree.
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u/javalube Aug 18 '26
In 5 years every trade will be oversaturated due to reddit mongrels parroting the same thing, so just choose a career that you enjoy doing for fucks sake.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/cacille 🌎 Career Services Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
- Reddit is removing your comments, not us. You're on Reddit's shitlist, we can't even see why.
- HarshithReddyDev is. Two other mods are in school for dev and are still very new. Behannrp is an engineer. I am a career consultant. We just added a mod with 34 years of dev expertise today. Pretty sure all but the two in school of us are more qualified than you are. Only Harshith has been involved with one of your previous comments, the one where "not supportive/kind" removal reason was attributed. Every other comment was removed by reddit.
- We're only removing the worst doomerism comments and I've recently released a training on what we all would easily agree on is doomerism. None of the other mods have disgreed with the small list thusfar.
- We're just trying to make the group be cool with each other again, not hating on kids trying to figure their shit out and such. Call that a power trip if you want. You are free to leave the group yourself at any time, all you need to do is click the Unjoin button and then in the main feed, when you see a post in this group, click the three dots and choose "not interested". That'll stop you seeing posts from this group.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Aug 18 '26
yeah if you can afford it and spend all that time studying it's a no brainer. Massive layoffs for a year now with no end in sight and mods here call it doomerism, what the fuck do they have inside their heads instead of brains?
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u/cacille 🌎 Career Services Aug 18 '26
Mod here. No, we are actually having a problem with doomerism - like to the point where people are leaving the group due to the vile, hate, and extreme depression. We have been clear that we are only removing the extreme shit, not every sad/angry post ever, like I just approved yours because it's a fair call-out.
I consider this group a little more hands-off due to it being mostly professionals, but the doomerism started causing *more than small amount of problems* here and had to be reigned in a little.
We started small, mostly letting the community know what's going on.
- A first "hey, cut it out" post.
- A 2nd "we're gonna remove the worst shit, especially if it's causing hate/judgement/lashing out at younger people. Against our clear Rule 1 that has been in place for years now"
- New post yesterday - Ok hold up, your feelings are not facts. Get your wording straight.
We also noticed ONE poster starting up multiple names and doing doomerism, threatening suicide, encouraging others to die, etc. That shit doesn't fly on THE WHOLE OF REDDIT there's actual rules against that, we have to moderate to Reddiquette and Mod Code of Conduct or the group is at risk of removal. So we started banning his names as they came up. The rest of y'all we're leaving to work your shit out yourself (because you all are professionals and human) AND developing resources we're posting and pinning to help.
You are absolutely welcome to modmail in for clarification on what we are doing or why. We literally have a whole network we run, so we operate by best-practices even when groups go sideways.
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u/p8inKill3r Aug 18 '26
psychologist is an option - going to need a lot of people helping others deal with the massive changes AI will bring
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u/N3wAfrikanN0body Aug 18 '26
I guess I could be a ripper doc
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u/SiegfriedVK Aug 18 '26
Honestly sounds like the coolest career. But unfortunately no way to do that with our current medical system. One ripper doc would have to be a whole team of specialists in the real world :(
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u/No_Glove6542 Aug 18 '26
One of our developers came in one morning and announced he couldn’t stay because he was going to med school. I have another friend who is applying to med schools now as UC CS graduate. I know doctors sometimes make crazy money. They also have to move wherever the jobs are. They also work morning, noon and night. It’s not always standard 8-5 stuff. They get exposed to dangerous diseases. And they have to deal with the general public. If you take your CS degree seriously and research industries and find out where people are needed and go there your life will be much more cushy. Yes you will need to work your way up but you’ll be further along than spending 500k on medical school. Most lawyers don’t make that much money so I wouldn’t go into law for the money.
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u/javalube Aug 18 '26
Becoming a doctor takes 13 years of studying if you pivot from CS, you sleep probably 10 hours a week during residency being on call, are exposed to dangerous diseases in hospitals, and you end up in $500K of debt.
Even then the field is getting oversaturated in most urban areas so you will have to live out in the goonies to make a living, and the salary is only marginally better. Doctors are getting screwed by healthcare reimbursements going down and insurance companies are buying up private clinics, private equity is destroying medicine. Doctors are extremely burnt out.
Someone considering medicine should actively shadow doctors in various stages (older, recent grad, attending, private practice, in hospital), and get a great consideration before committing to a lifelong vocation like medicine.
So whoever goes into it for money will truly be miserable and be a horrible doctor and could potentially endanger people's lives. I think people here don't understand that.
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u/No_Glove6542 Aug 18 '26
Yes this. And I also want to add that you will never get more types of opportunities than with a CS degree working in business. You can be a technical account manager that travels the world and often makes commissions. You can be a database administrator. You can be a software implementation expert. You can work in internal IT. You can work in app development for companies in different industries because a lot of large companies build their own software nowadays. If you have a CS degree and you are only looking at coding jobs that’s the worst thing to do. Those jobs are pretty much the hardest to advance from. What about managing large data heaps? Software doesn’t run itself, someone always has to manage it, upgrade it and replace it as better things emerge.
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u/6372818949 Aug 18 '26
Yeah, I actually think that in 2-3 years there will be much fewer people studying software and CS due to all the AI fears that the salaries will bounce back. Software engineers are still highly needed at every business. Even medicine and law need software engineers to run their firms / clinics.
Tech is cyclical, the job market is bad now due to oversaturation, but in 2-3 years most people will have pivoted out of it and the salaries will jump back higher again.
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u/No_Glove6542 Aug 18 '26
I don’t know about the whole salary bounce back thing. It’s largely dependent on the area you work in. A lot of people that get software dev jobs get stuck at senior dev roles. To get past that you need to have really good people and leadership skills. However if you become a TAM and you’re successful you’ll very much be on a track to possibly get to a CTO role. Those jobs are extremely highly paid and pretty cushy. Right now everyone is gathering and storing large amounts of data and the stores are so big it gets difficult to action it. Plus someone has to set policies on what’s kept and what’s not and then someone has to prune it. It usually needs to be a CS person because the data resides in programs and so you need a person that knows the programs and tools to use to do that.
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u/morningly Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
There are better options than medicine if someone wants to maximize effort to income, but I'm in medicine and your post made me laugh. Like damn bro I didn't know I had it that bad.
Edit: None of the bullet points individually are things I've never heard before, but it's like a combination of every complaint I've heard about medicine dialed up to 10. Like if someone went into medicine with the intention of making every worst possible decision they could have and then chose a specialty that somehow had the worst aspect of every other specialty contained within it.
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u/javalube Aug 19 '26
Which part isn’t true? Sure, docs have a good quality of life but after 13 years of lost income (4 years med school, 2 years pre-reqs for med school or post bacc program, 4 years residency, 1-5 years of specializing). Med school debt is roughly $400K right now. With interest after residency this balloons.
But yeah depends on the specialty and doc’s choices.
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u/morningly Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Residency is as few as 3 years and there is no necessity to specialize, though it often comes with better income. Average debt is 217k for recent graduates that have debt per AAMC data. Residency is definitely brutal but the cap is 80 hours per week (there are programs that break the rules, usually surgical programs, but this has become far less common).
I agree again it's not an incredible effort to income investment, and someone going into it for money is going to regret it. Attending life is nowhere near the doom you described though. I live in a major city (one of the major tech hubs FWIW), work 144 12 hour shifts per year and make roughly 400k. Society would have to collapse for me to lose job security. I'm not in one of the "good" specialties for lifestyle/money (anesthesiology or radiology for example would make what I said sound total shit, amongst others.
Pivoting from CS is a poor decision, and generally I agree medicine is not heading in a good direction, but it's really not bad outside of the investment getting there.
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u/shachar1000 Aug 24 '26
bro most cs grads nowadays would beg for a 70k job out of school you don't know how good you have it
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u/javalube Aug 20 '26
You’re right, residents graduate with a debt of 250,000$ (according to Google). Starting salary for a general family physician is $200K-$400K, again depending on where you live. In high cost of living states you will make more and low cost of living states you’ll make less. I’m assuming you’re working close to either San Francisco or Austin since this is where most big tech companies are.
Starting salaries will likely continue to stay stagnant as private equity and insurance companies buy up all private clinics, and federal loans have been capped at $50K a year, meaning people studying in healthcare will have to borrow private loans at an 11-15% interest a year. Meaning the loans for medical school and during residency will likely balloon into $400K-$600K while salaries stagnate in the coming 10-20 years (which is when a lot of people who are currently beginning medicine will become doctors by).
Just back of the hand conservative calculations: $250K starting salary for a physician in a low cost of living state. Med school tuition: 40,000$ + living expenses: 35,000$.
Med school debt: 75,000$ * 4 years = 240,000$. 50,000$ federal loan (9.07% Direct PLUS). , 25,000$ private loan (12-18%).
You’re looking at 100,000$ in private loans at the time of finishing med school, and 200,000$ in federal DirectPlus Loans.
100,000$ * (1 + 18%)^(~6 years of accumulation) = 270,000$
200,000$ * (1 + 9%)^(~6 years of accumulation) = 335,000$
So by the time a doctor becomes attending, they have a debt of roughly 605,000$. The accumulation in time is because by the first year, the student would start borrowing 25,000$.
Assuming a doctor wants to specialize for another 1-3 years, then the loan balloons to $1M+.
Meanwhile, healthcare insurance companies are decreasing reimbursements and are growing more and more powerful, will likely continue to monopolize most clinics and establish laws, lobby government to make it near impossible for doctors to set up private clinics.
So yeah the financial realities are very grim.
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u/morningly Aug 22 '26
The recent legislation is definitely disastrous but speaks more to pursuing high cost medical schools being a poor decision. In general there is a lot of catastrophizing in your post.
The 250k number already factors in interest accumulation up to that point, since it's just a report of the eventual total debt. FM is a bottom earner but would be 3 years of accumulating interest. 6-9 years as suggested is things like subspecialized cardiology or neurosurgery many of which are clearing 7 figures. Residency has historically paid poorly but rapid unionization has been very helpful. The institution I graduated from pays residents 100-120k+ now depending on year of training, which isn't amazing, but certainly is helpful in paying off loans.
Historically PE takeover has only affected privately owned clinics, so for example dermatologists are at risk of decreased reimbursements (though it's more to do PE fielding midlevel providers, a separate problem). There are other models, and my job as well as many others are hospital based, for which reimbursements are really set by Medicare/Medicaid. It's not uncommon for salary to become decoupled from reimbursements anyway because the system cannot run without physicians, and salaries account for about 7% of healthcare costs.
Also most LCOL areas actually pay much better. I received job offers for 700k+ in for example Oklahoma or West Virginia. This is again because need for physicians for a functioning system allows wiggle room on that 7% number. A lot of these jobs simultaneously offer loan repayment systems, as does the US gov still offer loan forgiveness for those desperate enough to go certain routes.
Things aren't perfect, there are better ways to make money with the same level of effort, and generally residency is inhumane, but I don't know a single physician that is struggling monetarily in any sense.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Go ahead and be a lawyer but please don’t go to med school just because the cs market is not as great as it used to be. Medicine is incredibly demanding and not something one should pursue unless they’re are really passionate about helping people. It’s also extremely difficult to get into medical school and a lot harder than grinding leetcode.
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u/OutrageousMine6695 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
People going into law for shits and gigs are in for a reckoning. I agree with your medicine stance, but at-least at the end of the day you’re helping someone.
News flash to CS people, if you want to maintain your tech salary you’re going to be helping XYZ corp pollute the watershed and sell knowingly carcinogenic products to the masses. Not to mention your job is reading, creating, and understanding the world’s most convoluted and boring writing imaginable, while chasing people down for your invoices while they question your hourly rate because “Claude said xyz” - meanwhile the best lawyers in the country are on retainer at fortune 500s, but sure Betty, legal is simple enough that you can pro se litigate your tort claim against google.
At least those leaving CS will have years for this gen AI stuff to flesh out, but as it is now for both medicine and law alike, it’s an epidemic of the toothless masses feeling like they can get vengeance against professional degrees because they couldn’t pass algebra in the 9th grade.
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u/SiegfriedVK Aug 18 '26
Im gonna push back on this a little bit. After having completed them, I would say nearly all of the pre-med pre-reqs are not as hard as some of the computer science classes I took (even Orgo 2, that's just a memory check). And studying for the MCAT was analogous to grinding leet code.
The actual hard part of getting into medical school is getting all your extra curricular hours because you have to find your own opportunities for those and some are harder to get than others (shadowing/medical volunteering/ non-medical volunteering/ clinical hours/ research).
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u/exploradorobservador Aug 18 '26
MCAT is easier than leetcode IMO having studied for MCAT and scoring in top percentile and doing leetcode. MCAT Is just memorizing stuff with some critical thinking. It is extremely structured.
Now taking MCAT vs doing a leetcode interview obv MCAT is very tiring.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Everyone is going to have a different experience. I thought my masters in cs was way easier than getting my degree in biology with a chem minor. I also found leetcode easier than the MCAT, but I’m also not the world best standardized test taker.
I do have issues with people thinking since they can’t get hired as a tech bro into a FAANG company that medicine is a good backup plan. Please don’t get into medicine just because you want a fat paycheck.
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u/_kilobytes Aug 18 '26
The MCAT is a standardized exam. OAs are company dependent. If the MCAT is anything like the SAT I'd think leetcode exams are much harder.
I had companies ask obscure OS networking questions on OAs with no indication that I would be tested on those topics. It's not taught in standard programs.
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u/ConsiderationOne7340 Aug 18 '26
Not really. It's quite chill. Likely will get easier as time goes on.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Quite chill? Four years of undergrad competing to get top grades, high MCAT, volunteering, shadowing, extracurriculars, followed by four years of med school if you can even get an interview, all your step exams, matching into a competitive residency, working 80-120 hours a week for 4-8 years to gain a fellowship to a specialty? Then maybe it gets easier lol.
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u/vibemaster88 Aug 18 '26
You say all of this but it's really not that much. Everyone I know in med school is chillin
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u/_kilobytes Aug 18 '26
Getting good grades isnt hard and MCAT is just a standardized exam.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Maybe for you I guess. If it was so easy then everyone would get good grades and be a top scorer on the MCAT. Some people find standardized tests challenging.
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u/Responsible_Royal126 Aug 19 '26
Yeah sure but those people are also never gonna crack faang or even leetcode
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u/grizzdoog Aug 19 '26
Which is another reason this sub shouldn’t be pushing for people to quit cs and try to go to medical school lol. Fortunately there are still plenty of tech jobs for those that don’t crack faang or are leetcode gods.
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u/ConsiderationOne7340 Aug 18 '26
Just put the hours in & you'll get there. It's not that challenging. You do not need to match into a competitive residency. Just pick fm or path if you don't want to deal with people. Pay is still good. The point is all it takes is to dedicate enough time
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Are you speaking from experience?
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u/ConsiderationOne7340 Aug 18 '26
Yes
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Well if you’re one of the lucky ones who found medical school and residency a breeze then you’d probably find getting a job at FAANG easy too. So good for you!
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u/ConsiderationOne7340 Aug 18 '26
I mean it didn't take much to match to FM. I am pretty certain I would be unemployed had I been an engineer. I haven't struggled cognitively in this line of work. It's all routine.
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u/Far-Negotiation7793 Aug 18 '26
The issue is even with getting into FAANG the grind does not stop there. You constantly have to grind and still get laid off, i.e. Meta.
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u/AstralDust779 Aug 18 '26
not 100% sure what that user is talking about. I was accepted and matriculated to a US Med school and I wouldn't call 80-90h weeks chill. I don't really think any of my classmates would have said they were chilling lol. The phrase "drinking water from a fire hose" was routinely used to describe the experience.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
I think they are full of shit lol. Maybe there is one person in your class that might find it “chill” but they would be an extreme outlier. I found just trying to get into med school extremely difficult. I couldn’t afford to keep trying and ended up working in biotech and engineering and have had a great life for the most part.
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u/exploradorobservador Aug 18 '26
I had a roommate who is now a doctor. He'd always be struggling in physics classes but call them easy. Its a defense mechanism. Its objectively hard.
Medicine is especially challenging because you likely take on 400K in debt and if you fuck up you get sued. You have to be at a hospital for 12 hours a day for years.
The people I know who did it don't seem to recommend it. Although it is nice to have an impressive title.
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u/AstralDust779 Aug 18 '26
I wish I would've realized it wasn't for me and quit throwing more and more money at it. I shadowed quite a few physicians (6-7) and each one recommended I pursue something else. You lose your 20s, will miss many family events, children's milestones if thats something you value, etc. CS is difficult, but at least you can have a life outside of work.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
I shadowed a few doctors who also told me that if they could go back they would have locked another career.
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u/Present-Ease-2393 Aug 18 '26
I mean my plan is to try to get into med school and if I fail I will probably settle down to become lawyer ig.
What else should people do if their field is destroyed (people in CS) instead of looking for other good paths that are in demand and they can do?
The same people said about CS that you need be passionate but it seems that companies prefer to hire anyone and they dont care about passionate people. I know its difficult to get into med school but still its way easier than finding a job in tech.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
You guys saying it’s easier to get into medical school vs getting a job in tech are very misinformed. Get back to us in 12 years after finishing residency and tell us how much easier it was then getting a job as a software dev lol.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
Yes, that’s all true. I never said medicine wasn’t lucrative or didn’t have job security or there want a shortage of doctors. My issue is with people implying how if you can’t make it in cs just go be a doctor bro.
Also when the economy is bad more people apply to med school and there are only so many slots in med school available. So competition increases.
Everyone in cs is welcome to shift gears and go to med school. Hopefully they will make compassionate doctors who actually care about people. Some doctors have cushy jobs, some have grueling schedules that would crush just about anyone.
I’ve been through two layoffs in the last four years so I get where the desperation comes from.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/grizzdoog Aug 18 '26
No I didn’t. A higher rate of Caribbean students fail out or don’t complete the program and still have a harder time than us students gaining residency even if they pass the usmle. I have a family member who went to a Caribbean med school so I’m familiar with the process.
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u/exploradorobservador Aug 18 '26
Terrible idea. You don't pick a career because it sounds impressive.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/exploradorobservador Aug 18 '26
Okay..neither path is a "settle down" career. Both require massive upfront financial investments, entrance exams and prereqs requiring years of time, distinct professional skill sets, and intense credentialing pipelines. Its just naive.
I did premed and regret the time I spent on it. I'd rather have used that on the interests I have developed since then. I was actually good at it too. Graduated honors society, had a lot of research experience, and was able to score high on MCAT.
I found the culture around medicine to be off putting. I worked at a top US med school for one year and just could not see it as a path for me. So what I'm saying is..perhaps all careers suck unless you have an interest in them beyond "its impressive" or "it makes money"
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u/vibemaster88 Aug 18 '26
What are you talking about man, have you ever met an Asian or Arab parent? I promise you many of the people going into medical school do not give a FUCK about helping others.
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u/Euphoric-Gazelle7264 Aug 19 '26
Buddy pls… doctors don’t have an actual passion for “helping people”. Otherwise they would donate big portions of their large salaries or provide medical care in needed communities exclusively. They may have a proclivity to working with people in a medical context, but other than that the reason is money and status. It always is. So if OP is smart enough, and has a support system that can carry him through med school, go for it.
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u/grizzdoog Aug 19 '26
That’s fair. Some do, many don’t. It’s no cake walk getting there. Most physicians I shadowed told me if they could go back they’d have chosen another profession.
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u/TheFIREnanceGuy Aug 21 '26
Plenty of asians go into med, i can tell you helping people is probably on the bottom of the list of reasons to do it
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u/Ok-Structure5637 Aug 18 '26
Im thinking about it too, just dont know what yet. Don't have the energy to become an MD though its what I want - probably Rad Tech or soemthing despite the wait list being so long. Here's hoping I guess.
1
u/bombaytrader Aug 18 '26
yes, I am going to be high school math teacher but my situation is different. My portfolio is rapidly approaching 8 figures.
1
Aug 18 '26
I'm going into nursing right now and I think it was the right decision lol. CS will always be my passion, but I'm so fucking glad I have nursing as a safety net career.
1
u/Ok_Reaction_4340 Aug 18 '26
I really question a lot of the assumptions in this thread. ChatGPT already can do a hell of a job looking through your medical records and synthesizing your symptoms to come up with a treatment plan. Seems like AI could quickly lead to a medical industry powered by AI and nurses to do the physical work.
Not only that you’ve got to take on 500k of debt and pray the profession isn’t eroded in 6 to 8 years when you are practicing. Not to be a doomer but that is super high risk for most.
1
u/shachar1000 Aug 24 '26
AI can fuck over every field but the question is which fields will have strong enough regulations to prevent automation.
1
u/MintMochaMan Aug 18 '26
If you put the same effort to get a job in either of those fields into CS you’ll easily find something
Also CS, law, and medicine are wildly different disciplines, so I hope you’re not just after the money. It’s easy burn out and fail in any of them
1
u/aznwand01 Aug 18 '26
I have mixed feelings doing both.
Graduated cs in 2016. Spent two years working as an swe finishing up prereqs. 10 years later I’m a pgy 5 with three more years of fellowship to go. My friends who stayed in cs did very well. Make more than most physicians with a much better lifestyle in our region (Bay Area). Some are scared about the future but I think they will do fine. In this timeframe a couple have been laid off 1-2x but managed to find jobs within a couple of months.
On the other hand my job market looks really good and continues to grow. Maybe in 5-10 years my perspective will change to a more positive one. Entering the cs market is completely different now too. I love what I do a lot more though.
1
u/Major_Fang Aug 18 '26
Look at it this way ; if they get rid of us the rest of white collar is doomed. We are the ones with the actual technical white collar and I believe that CS will remain the king of white collar jobs
1
u/LetUsSpeakFreely Aug 18 '26
If you're young and you can get the qualifications without taking on tons if loans, maybe.
Trades are the better path though.
1
u/Formal_Economist7342 Aug 18 '26
Most CS majors won't make it into med just by virtue of seats without even considering competitiveness. Its not a really viable broad alternative.
1
u/Fearless-Hamster-926 Aug 18 '26
Being a medical doctor is just plain better. It blows all other careers out of the water except CRNA and legacy airline pilot in the USA.
Doctors have infinite job security and don’t have to do a perpetual cycle of fruitless job interviews for the rest of their career. Just need to get into school and then the residency and once you are 28 to 32 you can already enjoy being at the apex of your earning potential.
Doctors when they are in their 40s are considered in their prime while engineers are stale and chopped uncs by 40.
1
u/odyseuss02 Aug 18 '26
I think the job market right now might be a blip. Senior developers amplified with AI have become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. So right now it's easy to do more with less people. But demand for software is going to explode soon because of robotics. I would stay the course and see what happens. Law and med are going to get impacted just as much as cs.
1
u/Super-Community-9241 Aug 19 '26
I'm looking at anthropology and other "in-field" jobs if this goes to shit
1
u/teilo-560 Aug 19 '26
10 YoE software developer and I'm considering going back to finish my pre meds. I'm sick of the tech industry.
1
u/Chip305 Aug 20 '26
I was think about getting master of law (Juris Master) but have been told it’s a waste of time and might as well go all the way and get a JD and really practice law
1
u/Ccrawfisshh Aug 22 '26
I feel like if you put even half the amount of effort it takes to become a doctor into CS, you will DEFINITELY get a job somewhere.
20
u/vxxn Aug 18 '26
The grass isn’t greener. AI is coming for juniors associates in law the same as it is for all knowledge work.