For quite a few years, I had to listen to demands of new graduates from fellowships and residencies when recruiting into my practice.
The most inane demands including "no weekends" or "no mammo" or my favorite "I don't x and I want to practice y 80% of the time".
I suspect this is the invisible hand of the market and other practices tolerated it, so we were faced with it also. We fought it whenever possible, and I think we were stronger for it.
Those same "its all about me" players went to other practices and became problems for those groups.
Its a different story now. The radiology professional market is a complete buyers market. Unless we see a substantial market rally, the soon to be retired radiologists remain in their practices not allowing new incoming recruits.
There is a complete glut of graduates, many who are now forced to stay on as junior attendings in their respective fellowship hospitals as very cheap labor.
I guess its good for academic practices, good for seasoning of recent graduates and makes for a much better market for private practice. If you are running a successful practice, you can be very choosy on who you hire.
My opinion of the "stock" of radiologists is that the residency selects for high intellect, selfish, non-team players seeking lifestyle and monetary reward. Almost the worst possible people to build a group practice upon. There are however good eggs in the whole bunch.
The downside... and its probably cyclical is that the dearth of jobs means less students go for radiology which in turn lowers the quality overall of the incoming med student which hurts the radiology world in the long run. You want the smartest, most driven people (with all their warts).
We (at my practice) remain optimistic in increasing the value and skill of our group on the whole with this new equilibrium but I'm still hoping the stock market rallies so the radiology world remains robust with demand for new advanced well trained graduates.
