For anesthesia providers. Simple, and to the point. Job searches are needlessly complicated and so many employers are extremely closed off in terms of revealing compensation and details of the work you'll be doing, which I find minimized on this site.
Realistically I'm 24, can I still make this career switch? Anybody have insight? No college education. Can I make it by 35? The ROI is much better than development.
Do you have the academic record to get into a good college? You'll graduate by 29. Maintain good enough grades in a relevant natural science curriculum to get into a good medical school? You'll graduate that by 33. Three years of anesthesiology residency has you completing that by 36. The median salary is $425k[0] - how many first-year programmers make the median salary right off the bat?
Since you mentioned ROI, let's look at the financial aspect. You'll need loans for college and medical school. Let's say college is $75k for 4 years all in, including living expenses, and $160k for medical school. For your residency, you'll be making barely $50k a year, likely in an urban environment. It's not unreasonable to expect additional loans on top of that just to survive, in addition to three years of interest on top of the ~$235k in student loans you already have. Is $350k in student loans unreasonable by the time you can actually start paying them off? Probably not.
Some napkin math on $350k at 5% (it will absolutely be higher because you'll need private loans) shows that you'll have a $2300/mo student loan payment for 20 years, until you're 56. If you more than double your payments to $6k/mo it will still take you 6-7 years to pay off the balance (with the benefit of saving you over $150k in interest).
A lot of people spend more than that on their house, and I'm sure $2300 is not a lot of money when you're pulling in $650k a year as an anesthesiologist with 15 years of experience. But to me there is a ton of risk in doing something like that that you may hate.
And let's not forget, you don't even have a college degree. You might find out that you just suck at chemistry. :)
This is very true. You'll probably hate your MD studies with all your guts by the end of the first year. You'll hardly make it though if money is your only motivation.
Yes, you could. But as someone who quit after medical school (now program for a living) -- make sure you actually like it. Because its a pretty demanding and time consuming job. Additionally, my wife is a Dentist. Dental school is both easier, shorter (no residency, some 3 don't even require a full undergrad) and depending on the job, makes comparable salaries. I know few dentists that work > 4 days a week. Personally, I'd hate the work. And I know plenty of M.D.'s who love medicine and would not be happy being a Dentist. But if you think you'd like it, I don't think there's a better job out there.
"Despite questions about design issues or selection bias in some studies, the weight of the evidence regarding potential health risks from exposure to anesthetic agents in unscavenged environments suggests that clinicians need to be concerned. Moreover, there is biological plausibility that adds to the concern that high levels of unscavenged waste anesthetic gases present a potential for adverse neurological effects or reproductive risk to exposed workers or developmental anomalies in their offspring (Cohen et al. 1980; Rowland et al. 1992)."
Not to mention the student loans (/r/personalfinance is littered with doctors trying to figure out how to pay off their $300k student loan tab in anything less than a decade) and the decade+ of opportunity cost and lost income from those working years.
Most doctors make very good money, don't get me wrong. And most anesthesiologists make good money compared to other doctors. But there are much, much easier and less risky ways to achieve nearly the same standard of living and financial security.
They did try recently for the absolute simplest of cases. Not too popular- turns out having an MD in the room is a lot more useful if something goes wrong than a machine that can't do much other than tweak dosages. It's not like it can do the intubations either, so any value is pretty debatable.
I guess "replacing" is not the right word. With the right type of technology you can enable one doctor to do the work of six. It's becoming especially true as AI is advancing so rapidly. Based on the number of job openings here I think that will probably be a good thing for everyone.
For anesthesia providers. Simple, and to the point. Job searches are needlessly complicated and so many employers are extremely closed off in terms of revealing compensation and details of the work you'll be doing, which I find minimized on this site.