How To Find An Alternative Career As a Doctor

Medical students and doctors often ask me how the hell I managed to leave the hospital and work as a software engineer (and later, founder) instead.

We usually would schedule a call and somewhat aimlessly do a Q&A in the optimistic hope of the other person asking me good questions, and the even more optimistic hope of me giving smart answers. Then, we’d both hope that this conversation provided some sort of guidance to the other person in helping them leave the hospital.

After those conversations, I often ended up feeling frustrated. Mainly because I felt the other person was not going to leave the hospital and would continue working as a very disgruntled doctor.

Maybe I could have done something better? Maybe I could have provided more helpful advice?

So this is my attempt of somewhat compiling the “best of” things I shared in those conversations. Maybe there’s a chance that this is more helpful than an unstructured Q&A call, or maybe it provides some starting ground for a structured Q&A call! In any case, if you’re thinking about leaving the hospital, this is for you!

The Biggest Question To Ask

It’s funny how doctors always ask me the same, recurring set of questions, yet don’t think about the actual biggest question to ask. Here are some of those recurring small questions first:

  • Will I be able to find a job?
  • How much will I earn?
  • How did you do it?
  • Should I go study something else first?

But all those questions miss the point.

Here’s the big question which you should ask yourself instead:
What’s fun for you, and what are you good at?

That’s all there is to it, really. Let me explain!

What’s Fun?

I’ve done a few things in my life by now: I’ve worked a bit in the hospital (as an intern), I’ve worked as a software developer at two startups. In one of those, I saw the company grow from 5 to 30 people and was able to learn a lot about building software engineering teams (I interviewed 300 people or so and hired some, too) and about startups in general. And, finally, I founded my own startup in which I vowed to do all things right which I had seen done wrong before.

At the startup job and my own company, I’ve been able to work in very different positions:

  • As a junior software engineer, writing code all day long
  • As a senior software engineer, watching others write code all day long
  • As a “manager”, hiring software engineers and overseeing product development
  • As a founder and business owner, building out the company and dealing with administrative and financial stuff
  • As a regulatory consultant, working with companies and helping them create medical device compliance documentation

So you might think “where’s he going with this?”. Here’s my point: We could now go through each of these positions, line by line, and weigh the pros and cons of each of them, so you can make some sort of educated guess, thinking “that sounds cool, maybe that’s for me!”. We could analyze things like:

  • Salary
  • Career options
  • Work / life balance
  • Will AI replace that job soon?

And that’s what doctors typically do when thinking about which medical specialization to choose.

But it’s a trap. I fell into this trap for a while (and I still do). As a junior software developer, I was like “I need to become senior and manage people!”, as a senior developer I was like “I should found my own startup!”, etc., etc.

And then, later, when running my own company, at some stage I realized that my day to day work was no longer fun any more. Objectively, everything was going splendid: I was the CEO of a profitable company, the team was great, and we were building cool, meaningful stuff. Yet my work was.. not fun. Even though I didn’t have to work much.

Surprised by myself, I took some time off to re-think what the hell I should be doing if all of this wasn’t fun.

And then it struck me: Writing software was fun for me and got me started on this path in the first place. And then, every time, I just driftet into adjacent fields becuase “I felt I should”, yet I lost track of what was actually fun for me: Writing software.

That’s the first thing you should ask yourself: What’s fun for you?

Medical Students & Fun

The crazy thing I see with all doctors (and medical students!) is that, choosing to study Medicine seems to systematically make people forget what was fun for them. That’s because, from a young age, people like you are trained to not listen to your own instincts on what to do with your time (fun stuff!). Instead, you listen to your teachers on what the homework for tomorrow is, because if you do great homework, you’ll get great grades, and you need great grades to go to med school.

You see, the kid in high school who is always distracted and has crappy grades is a huge advantage to you here: They are well connected to what’s fun for them. High school is not fun for them. Soccer is. Or farming. Or tinkering with computers. That was me.

Before we get to me, I suppose you could define this in more scholarly terms: Bad high school students maybe have a higher tolerance for pursuing activities which may seem outwardly unproductive, with a highly uncertain outcome on whether they’ll yield any benefit, financial, for their CV, or otherwise.

Studying for high school provides a direct benefit – better grades.

Tinkering with computers provides no direct benefit.

So that was me, tinkering with computers. I felt like I had gotten into med school by accident, because my high school grades weren’t great and I mostly spent my time playing computer games with my friends.

That’s probably an understatement. I spent a gigantic crap ton of time playing computer games. Man, those were magical times – World of Warcraft was released, DotA 1 came out, Counter Strike 1.6 (and later Source), Half Life 2.. all while sitting with your friends in Teamspeak and sharing the excitement. It was the golden age of computer games.

Do I regret all that “lost” time?

No. I think that, often, the good things come with the bad things attached. Computer games attracted me to computers, and that opened up the path to programming and me discovering my love for it.

And, looking at other doctors nowadays, I am tremendously grateful for this experience. Because I was lucky to discover this one thing which is super fun for me, which I’m passionate about and which I could spend every evening on without getting bored.

Many people don’t have that. Especially doctors – because they’re trained, from a very young age, to not listen to their instincts on what to do with their time.

Do you have it?

What’s Fun For You?

If you haven’t found it yet: Don’t worry!

The first step is to accept that you don’t have it yet, and the second step is to start looking. Because once you’ve found what’s fun for you, all the other questions you had before (“will I find a job?”) will take care of themselves. I promise!

But first, time for some cautionary disclaimers: Something being fun for you and you spending a lot of time on it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll become good at it and that someone will pay you for it. There are many fields where “getting paid” is very hard, for example as an athlete, artist or social worker.

But, all in all, my gut feeling is that those are a small minority of possible activities you can choose from, and many others have great options for being financially viable.

The bigger picture here is that there’s risk involved. You’re walking down an uncertain path, with no guarantee that there’ll be a job and/or stable income at the other end. But, see, that’s the second thing you have to learn: There is risk involved, and you have to make some decisions with uncertain outcomes.

In other words, you’re now working in the real economy, where normal economic and rules (you know, supply and demand) apply.

This is very much in contrast to the medical bubble in which career risks are near zero and every outcome seems certain: You study in med school and, as long as you don’t screw up your exams terribly, you will graduate as a doctor. You will find some doctor job (.. somewhere) and will slowly climb the ladder of seniority unless you kill a significant number of patients. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in a cushy leadership position.

And all of this is fine!

But what you have to learn, if you want to leave the hospital, is that the outside world is different. It is a place of meritocratic competition.

Say, you want to work as a software developer. To get a job, you now have to measure yourself against all other software developers applying for the job, and the best one gets the job. So you have to become seriously good at it.

That may sound scary at first. But it’s actually a good thing! Why? Because you could just sit down at your computer and teach yourself software development and apply for jobs a few months later. If you’re good, you get a job. This is in contrast to working as a doctor, where there’s the legal requirement that you must have studied medicine before.

This is very liberating. Your job opportunities are now much more broad: You can choose to work as a plumber, a hotel manager, or, yeah, as a software engineer. You get to choose for yourself and no longer are limited to pre-defined choices given to you.

So you have more choices. But the outcome is more uncertain.

How To Find What’s Fun

How do you find things which are fun for you?

Truth be told, I don’t know. I suppose it’s like playing Minesweeper: Initially, you just “click around”, try out a bunch of things, cover a broad spectrum, and hope to get lucky and come across something which sparks your interest, leading to fun. And then you dive deeper, maybe by getting an internship, doing a project of your own, or applying for a job.

Sadly, I haven’t solved this “finding what’s fun” problem though. I got really lucky by stumbling across the programming stuff. There might be other stuff which is fun for me which I haven’t found yet – maybe hardware / mechanical engineering. Haven’t tried. I don’t know. Having found one thing is more than good enough. I hope you find yours, too!

At the very least, I know what won’t help you find it: Doing nothing and staying in whatever bubble you currently are in. So you do have to try out something, in whatever way.

Here are a few questions which could be helpful?

  • What are things which you enjoy doing in your spare time? Focus on those which are not consuming media, as watching series and playing computer games probably won’t be helpful data points here.
  • What’s something you could do forever, because it doesn’t bore you?
  • What’s an activity during which you get “into the flow”, you feel like you’re using your brain at its full capacity and time just flies?

So. Go off and find what’s fun for you.

Let’s move on to some Q&A next!

Questions & Answers

Can I Try Something Out While Working Part-Time As a Doctor?

Some doctors asked me this, and my knee-jerk reaction is “No”. That’s because, personally, I think doing something on the side is super hard. I remember trying to learn to code while working as an intern in the hospital. It was terrible and near-impossible – after a full day at the hospital, my brain was fried and I could only vegetate at home and watch series. Later, I tried working part-time as a software developer while “exploring my actual job options” and I sucked terribly at that, too! Something in my brain just switches to “hey we’re okay, let’s keep things this way” mode as soon as I’ve got a job, even if it’s part-time.

Exploring a new career path is already a tremendously hard task, and you’re saying that if you allocate 50% of your time, you can do it?

Maybe. Maybe you’re a productivity genius. But I couldn’t do it.

Ask yourself: Is the reason for this thought that you want to create yet another zero-risk solution, like in the medical bubble? In that case, I’d like to tell you, again: You’re out in the real world now and there are no zero-risk solutions.

But that doesn’t mean you should do crazy stuff, of course!

Don’t Do Crazy Stuff

Don’t do hasty, harebrained stuff. Yes, exploring other career options has its risks and, at the very least, you’re temporarily forfeiting a stable career path at the hospital.

But that still means you should follow a rational approach with calculated bets: For example, you could say “hey, I’ve got a savings amount of X, so I’ll quit my job and take 6 months to learn more about activity X which is super fun for me. After that, I will spend another 6 months looking for a job doing that. If that fails, I’ll re-apply to doctor jobs”. And that would sound like a very good plan.

What was my plan?

What Did I Do After Graduating?

After I graduated from med school, I took 12 months to dive deeper into programming and find a job as a software engineer in the process. In retrospect, all of that looks great, but I remember feeling rather lost: All my friends were starting their first jobs as doctors, and there I was, still sitting in my student flat, learning programming languages all day long. Walking through the city was especially depressing because 1) all the student parties were no longer happening (student life was over), 2) all my friends were busy with their jobs and had no time to hang out and 3) I was still living off my parents savings (thanks, mom and dad – seriously!). I also applied to Google and Deepmind and got ghosted, not even a rejection. Damn.

Then again, I did have some sort of plan: Learn as much about programming as possible. I would always created short “learning curricula” on what to study next. Each plan would describe what I’d do for the next month or so, and it consisted of learning something (usually reading 1-3 books) and then applying that knowledge in a coding project I came up with.

I studied algorithms, learned multiple programming languages, shipped two mobile apps and a few websites. I got decently good!

I was already better than many junior programmers at other companies, yet I had no clue about this and still thought I was a total amateur. One particularly funny thing was that I didn’t even know how to pronounce many technical terms (like cache (“cash”, not “catch-e”), GitHub (“kithub”, not “jithub”)), etc., because I essentially had been holed up in a cave for one year and learning all of this by myself! Haha, those were the times..

So this maybe also answers some of the other questions: How did I do it, how do you learn stuff, and do you find a job. You learn stuff by teaching yourself, and if you get good, you will find a job.

Longer answer then expected! Next question.

Should I Go Back To University And Study <subject>?

My short answer here is “no”, with some exceptions.

First off, medical students have a huge bias towards thinking they need to study something to get a job. Just because that’s true for medicine, that doesn’t make it true for every other job on the planet. On the contrary, most jobs don’t require a degree. In my experience, programmers who didn’t go to University are often better, because they are those self-driven Jedis who know how to effectively teach themselves just the right things.

I would go so far to only say you should study something if the job strictly requires you to study it. Examples here are:

  • Working as an attorney (have to study law)
  • Working as a pilot (have to go to flight school)

But.. there just aren’t many of those. In contrast, look at all the jobs you can do without having to study:

  • Working as a software developer
  • Founding a startup
  • Any sort of business position (studying this is super useless anyway)
  • Any sort of project / product management position (same)

So – don’t go off and study.

That’s It!

That’s it for now. I’ll probably write a few follow-up posts in the future as I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. In any case, do add a comment below if you’re a doctor looking to leave the hospital, and also if you have any questions!


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