As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous.

This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.

> Virtuous people become doctors

I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.

“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.

I don't believe doctors and kindergarten teacher needed to be virtuous at all

It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.

There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.

People succumbing to parental pressure become doctors.

A lot of folk go into teaching because there's high demand for workers & the academic path is relatively accessible.

You're probably mostly right about social workers, but it's a vague term & there's at least some categories of social worker that fill the same appeal as teaching.

Virtuosity is so hard to define, I'd say there's some virtue in almost every career direction but less in some than others. Certainly in my experience tech entrepreneurship has some of the lowest levels I've encountered.

For virtuous people, look at jobs where the average person in the field could get a much better job doing something else. That’s not the case for your average teacher, who tend to be on the low end of the scale of college educated workers. Public defenders are a good example of the opposite. These are generally lawyers who have the credentials to make a lot more money in private practice.

as a former teacher, a former receiver of social services, and someone who makes great money helping teams move bits efficiently, I can say most assuredly that most teachers or social workers are regular, non-expert people. My former teaching colleague thought the screen of his monitor was watching him. And my last social worker had "personal struggles balancing his faith's view on evolution and what the science says." The classic computer nerd who "can't human," but my job is aligning hundreds of people to work on the same software. Education and social work is divorced from the "real world" in many ways, not unlike how those stuck on a screen are divorced from the "real world."

Talk about peak arrogance. Who the hell are you to think you get to be the one to decide who should have the key to society?

> Virtuous people become doctors

And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.