Nursing starts at €30,000; IT interns start at €18,000

Nursing starts at €30,000; IT interns at €18,000

Two degree courses. One requires an 8 or 9 to enter public university; the other settles for a 6 or 7. The first places people in the public sector as soon as they finish, according to the case that opens the thread, and pays around €30,000 a year in the first job, not counting on-call shifts. The second strings together four technical interviews for an internship and signs for €18,000 at a consultancy in the field. Nor is the academic path a joke: four years of calculus, algebra, statistics and data structures versus a degree that, it is insisted, leads to almost guaranteed work.

The textbook explanation is supply and demand. The explanation repeated in hushed tones is far less romantic: who signs the paycheck.

Cut-off grades: 8-9 in nursing and 6-7 in Computer Engineering

Anyone comparing the two admissions routes reaches for the old scales, when everything was measured out of ten. Nursing moved in the 8-9 range; Computer Engineering, in the 6-7 range. The conclusion drawn from that is awkward for the tech sector: if the entry bar measures anything, it measures the scarcity of places and the pressure of demand, not the difficulty of the syllabus. Fewer nurses and more demand push the grade up.

There is a second reading, and it is no more welcome: Nursing has gone from being a three-year diploma to a degree with its own professional weight, with a professional association behind it and union presence. IT, by contrast, is an unregulated profession, with no professional body to shield it and no sector-wide collective agreement to set a floor for conditions. In terms of collective bargaining, they compete in different leagues.

Public pay versus pay set by the market

The central argument in the clash is this: a nurse is paid what an administration decides, and an IT worker is paid what the market tolerates. In the first case, the payer faces no competition and the job comes with a permanent post and predictable pogre. In the second, the paycheck depends on whether the company hiring you has won a tender and at what price.

From that comes a consequence repeated in the tech sector: when the private sector has demand, vocational courses, bootcamps and retraining profiles appear that push wages down. Pure supply and demand, say some. Public sector versus private sector, corrects the other side.

The small print: twelve hours in the operating room and 27 patients in clinic

This is where comparing paychecks falls short. The partner of a cardiac surgery nurse describes shifts listed as 08:00 to 15:00 on paper and departures no one signs off on: in the operating room, you know when you go in, not when you come out. Surgeries of 12 and 16 hours, with no relief, with overtime paid only for the first three hours. Another healthcare worker details 27 patients in clinic in a single day, with no time even for a vending-machine coffee, earning 35% to 50% more than the auxiliary staff who attach the electrodes, while carrying all the clinical responsibility.

The same account includes an episode that sums up the bureaucratic absurdity: an operating room suspended with three patients on the waiting list, two surgeons, an anaesthetist and two nurses available because there was no hospital porter to push the gurney. The offer for the specialist doctor to push it himself clashed, according to this testimony, with the argument of professional intrusion. The patients, left without surgery. And a union complaint in the mix.

The other side: overqualification and four interviews to be an intern

In IT, the problem is the opposite. A professional with ten years of experience, a master's and certifications confirms that he earns more than a nurse, but also that he works twice as hard and will be laid off as soon as the bottom line allows. His plan B is the public exam to become a secondary school teacher. The sector is also experiencing, according to one of the participants, a global shock: more than a million tech layoffs in the United States in a year and a half.

Add to that suspicion about how technology is bought from the public sector. The most repeated criticism is that administrations award tenders at the lowest bid, that consultancies win the contracts and that the work ends up in the hands of interns. Some claim to have come across exploitable vulnerabilities using basic knowledge on government portals. The gap between the rhetoric of digital transformation and what is paid to sustain it is, for this sector, the real problem.

Nursing shortages, an excess of tech résumés

The clash of grievances has a clear asymmetry. In healthcare, the dominant diagnosis is scarcity: an ageing population, more use of services and fewer professionals than needed. In technology, the diagnosis is excess: more graduates than the productive fabric absorbs with decent wages, and an economic structure that offers mostly low-value-added services.

There is also a political reading of the matter that is best kept out of the headline: that the country is divided between those who live off the public sector, shielded from the cycle, and the rest, exposed to the elements. It is a repeated, debatable thesis and, of course, not verified by the figures cited here.

Finally, there is a detail that dismantles the oldest caricature of the profession: nurses do not clean patients. That is the job of auxiliary staff, who earn close to the minimum wage. The hospital's internal hierarchy is more rigid than the meme suggests.

Does the person who saves a life deserve more than the person who keeps the system that manages it from collapsing? Put that way, the question has no economic answer. Budgets do, and they are not voted on in a forum.