← all questions · Is it worth it
The sub splits and the split is predictable: people who took a short program and finished say yes, people still in the middle of a long one say no. FRACGP is three years FTE 1; general surgery is typically PGY4–5 entry plus five 2. Same degree, very different twenties.
This question is really about which pathway you picked. The structural facts do a lot of the work here. FRACGP is three years FTE including the hospital year 1, so a PGY2 entrant is a fellowed senior doctor in their late twenties. General surgery is typically PGY4–5 at SET entry plus a five-year program 2, and RACS cut general surgery appointments from 121 in 2024 to 54 in 2025 before the 2026 intake ran 195 applications to 50 offers 2. Both are "medicine". They are not the same decade.
Money follows the same shape. ATO 2023–24 median taxable income is $335,144 for general surgeons and $156,733 for GPs 3 — but the GP figure includes registrars and part-timers and is not FTE-adjusted 3, and the surgeon got there years later. The consultant number is a poor guide to whether the years in between were worth it.
What the threads show. The loudest "yes" in the corpus is a GP working three days a week 5. The loudest "no" is someone comparing net worth with school friends who went into adjacent fields 5. The most useful reply is neither: a consultant pointing out that the person asking is in year one of a thirty-year career, and that the feeling they are describing is an early flag for burnout, not a verdict on the profession 5.
The pattern worth taking away. Regret in these threads clusters in the middle of long training, not at the end of it, and it is usually regret about the specialty and the years it consumed rather than about the degree. About 52% of the training cohort in the 2024 Medical Training Survey were unaccredited or non-specialist trainees 4 — that is the population most likely to answer "no". The same pattern shows up in the women-only version of the thread, where the answer turns on caring load and shift work rather than on the job itself 6.
Not published: nobody surveys Australian doctors on "would you do it again", so there is no percentage to quote. What exists is a self-selected Reddit thread.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I wish I pursued my original dream of becoming a pilot.
Yes, yes and yes a million times over.
OP this is the very first year of a very long career.
Absolutely not.
All the time... until I think about what I'd most likely be doing otherwise, and realise it seems even more dire.
Asked 19 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in the r/ausjdocs dump (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(do it|choose|study).{0,30}(again|over)|if you had to do it again|would you (still|do)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the two largest 'would you do it again' threads, chosen to put the flat yes and the flat no side by side, with the 'you're in year one' reframe and the opportunity-cost answer between them.