> Do you know why people go through the pain of becoming a doctor? Because they make a lot of money when they get through the other side.
I think the guaranteed respect and admiration that comes from the title is actually a more powerful draw. Don't get me wrong, the money is good, but on par with senior manager in any large tech firm. Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry.
You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC.
Earning highly does not universally command respect the way being a doctor does. Some would even see earning that much as being immoral (i.e. actually negative)
Those "low view" is out of jealousy and the idea that they're "doing evil" to get that money. It's a personal bias, which i personally also would ignore.
I have respect for lawyers, and i have respect for investment bankers (who make huge merger/acquisition deals work).
To be fair, the term "lawyer" is generic in the US. It can mean many different things: (1) in-house corporate counsel, (2) external corporate counsel (advise on merge/acq/deals/contract), (3) civil lawyer (sue/divorce/personal injury/intellectual property, etc.), (4) defender (public or private), (5) public prosecutor (work for attorney general office), (6) law professor, (7) judge (Can you be a judge in US without a law degree? It seems hard to imagine in 2025.). And there must be other categories that I forgot. My point: Most people will have differing views on each category. Example: Most people would view public defenders, law professors, and judges as honorable, socially beneficial jobs.
Indeed. And this is an interesting counterpoint to the idea that higher income (always) confers status. Because the corporate jobs will typically be higher paid but lower status.
Regardless of how that bias is formed it's a relevant opinion. A not insignificant amount of the population holds a negative opinion of lawyers and views them as trashy or shady. So much so that in many neighborhoods real estate brokers will off a casual caveat if one of the neighbors is a lawyer.
You miss the point. why the low view exists is irrelevant.
Frankly, while I acknowledge their necessity, I have a poor (default) view of both bankers and lawyers. I don't see them as bad people, but people in their professions do many bad things.
If my son brings a banker home as a prospective mate, well, let's say they're not earning status points from their profession.
You (may have) and I (do) have respect for people in tough jobs like see workers. Doesn't mean my mom wouldn't prefer I date a nice doctor. My point being that social respect does not come with your personal respect.
One thing to consider about investment bankers: Many of them do pretty mundane work, like work on non-national/federal gov't and corporate bond issuance. (In most countries, national/federal gov't can directly issue bonds without investment bankers.) There is literally trillions of dollars of these bonds issued each year (usually to roll-over maturing debt) across all highly developed nations. It is fundamental to modern capitalism. I would estimate that 99.5% of these bond deals use "vanilla term sheets" (my term) -- literally copy and modify from the last deal. And, the buyers of these bonds are 99% institutional: our pension funds, mutual funds, and bond ETFs.
Also, secondary equity issuance is pretty non-controversial, and an important fund raising option for publicly-listed corporations.
> You miss the point. why the low view exists is irrelevant.
It's very much relevant to this conversation. Without specific negative factors like a "predatory" aspect, increasing earnings will increase prestige. ATC doesn't have those factors.
They brought up bankers and lawyers in response to someone asking "Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society? I can’t think of any"
So yes it is irrelevant in the specific context of that sub-conversation. Which isn't to say that your point arguing why that might not be applicable to ATCs isn't also a relevant thing to say to being the conversation back to the main topic of this thread.
> Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society?
Banking? Sales?
> Outside of anti-capitalist circles ofc
Well that's quite the point. Maybe those circles are small in the US, but they aren't in most of the rest of the world.
Let me just say that if I called my parents and told them that I had gotten a well-paid job at, say, a hedge fund, they would not be impressed and would likely think less of me for it.
One doesn't need to be anti-capitalist to dislike bankers, salespeople, or many other similar careers. They, in many cases at least, rely on information inequalities to deceive and rip off people. I love capitalism, but I loathe sketchy behavior done in the pursuit of money. They are two very different things.
Crane operators, any equipment operators really. Plumbers, HVAC tech, Boat Mechanics, the guy that climbed down in my septic tank to retrieve whatever he used to clear the line is making $300 an hour.
Lawyers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, congresspeople are all widely despised. To a lesser extent dentists, influencers and advertising executives are not well-loved.
In my city it's an underpaid work-a-day job that half of them hate. There is something about being trapped that can make any job sick the life out of you.
I remember a former CEO who would come into work each day and let out a heavy sigh before unlocking his office door. I learned that he was trapped in the job until he retired for various reasons...most of his own making.
It's the paperwork. Most people have no idea the amount of paperwork doctors have to fill out - it adds up to 20-30 hours of it per week. It's getting close to a full time job by itself. Think about how pleasant the experience is of filling out bureaucratic/government paperwork, and now imagine doing that as a full time job.
What? This doesn't sound right at all. I've worked very closely with Doctors during the implementation of EHR systems and they don't spend nearly that much time on paperwork. They spend a couple minutes charting things for each patient. Then about 30 minutes at the end of the day going over anything that's been flagged by admin. Then about 1-3 hours every two weeks adjusting rejected claims.
There's certainly a lot of paperwork that has to be done, but doctors aren't doing it.
Part of being a good doctor is good bedside manner. They're not going to bitch about it to a stranger, but it's a huge and well known problem that is almost certainly the single biggest cause for doctor burnout (which is extremely widespread). Some random source (though my experience comes from family) :
"What they learned was that during office hours, half the time — a huge chunk — was allocated to desk work, like documentation in the electronic medical record (EMR), reviewing test results, handling medication requests, and filling out forms. What was remarkable was that even during office visits, doctors interacted with their patients for only half of the time; the rest was EMR and paperwork. As a matter of fact, for every hour of face-to-face patient time, another two hours were spent on desk work." [1]
The paper mentions that was the amount of time spent for doctors with "documentation support" (various forms of automation/streamlining) that would generally be absent in something like a primary care physician's office, meaning he'll be spending substantially more time on paperwork. The paper also (at a quick skim) did not mention out-of-office work, where doctors often spend even more time filling out paperwork. And there are also regulations meaning doctors themselves have to be the ones filling out much of this paperwork.
This tracks. I just read through all the notes in my daughter's medical file for the last few visits and couldn't fathom where the doctor had time for it. It looked to be automatically transcribed.
I think the guaranteed respect and admiration that comes from the title is actually a more powerful draw. Don't get me wrong, the money is good, but on par with senior manager in any large tech firm. Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry.
You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC.