What a tragically sad inefficiency of our current society that people who are way smarter than me are toiling away in the dark for pennies an hour on something extremely hard and useful to society, only to have their results denied by the system.
Meanwhile I'm being paid obscene amounts of money to center divs and type @Autowired and @Component for projects that never end up launching anyway. It's all so badly badly flawed.
In the same vein, the fact that teachers are paid orders of magnitude less than lawyers boggles my mind. I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued and that the people who would make good teachers never end up teaching.
Most lawyers are actually paid like shit though, if they can even get a job in law. They routinely have like 200k in student debt, as well. It's not the ivory tower people seem to believe it is (and hasn't been since well before 2008)
> I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued
I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner.
Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics.
> By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market.
What do you think would be the solution for, for example, CS teachers being incredibly unqualified?
I'm asking because based on my country, I think there literally is no solution and we just have to live with the fact that CS education cannot be good (it might also happen to some other fields over time).
Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, and paying all teachers a salary based on the market value of the most in-demand field is too expensive, bound to be unacceptable to taxpayers (who are already jealous of the incredible benefits and job security teachers have), and creates unacceptable incentives in education choices (ie even more people will try to become English teachers because the demand is the same, but the salaries are increased, so the oversupply of labor in those fields would increase even further, and the labor supply in in-demand fields would actually go down, because even though they also now get paid more for teaching positions, their relative attractiveness actually went down).
> Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it,
It looks like you have already identified your problem. You could give CS teachers double appointments with the IT department if you have absolutely no wiggling space on money/conditions. Or maybe you could gather some programmers who are eager to reach out to kids and let them work part-time as teachers after they obtain the necessary qualifications.
> Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs.
I think this depends highly on the subject of the teacher and private v. public schools. My SO was a public school teacher in a STEM discipline and at the very top of the district payscale. My SO now makes three times as much in industry. And we have much better healthcare.
Should have specified on average. Total compensation for public school teachers is higher than for private school teachers. Pensions that generous are no longer available in the private sector for rank and file employees.
* Administration overload (government compliance type stuff)
* Developing brains aren't always fun to be around
* Parents expect to outsource child rearing to the school and want to be catered to in their unique sensibilities while the teacher wants to focus on what's best for the kid and the class
* Even here in Europe, an increasingly litigious attitude, where any school decision you disagree with is escalated and finally prosecuted. This increases the box-ticking, cover-your-ass sort of administration
This has some of the classic ingredients for cooking up a burnout:
* Investing emotionally in your work
* Feeling like you're letting people down constantly
* Being expected to do things that go against your personal ethics
* Spending a lot of time on things you consider are wasting your time
Is there any difference between teachers who leave being men or women? We often hear about women leaving tech, I am curious if there is any difference in who leaves teaching.
The question is, how much do we value the impact that teachers have on student performance. Your answer is "whatever the market will pay them". I think that's a little too slavishly trusting of "the market".
Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.
HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs...
Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop.
What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software.
When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?)
If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
I've lost count of how many "no-code" movements we've had since computers were invented.
The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example.
But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.
Heh, from where I stand "the no-code movement" and "the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them" are much the same thing. What the industry needs is the boring grunt work of replacing frameworks with libraries. Rather than generating a 55-file "project skeleton", we should be able to call standard libraries written in plain old code and get the same behaviour, adding the extra stuff as and when we need it.
Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code.
But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.
> Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing?
This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).
Django is very much like Rails with the same upsides and downsides - it's easy to get started, but hard to maintain and upgrade, partly because of not having a type system. So companies making things for long-term internal use tend to prefer these Java frameworks, because while it's horribly cumbersome to get started with them, you can be pretty confident that upgrades will be safe because they put a lot of effort into backward compatibility.
Strongly agree about the difficulty of maintaining a Django project due to its lack of type system -- though tbf, it's imposed by Python, the underlying language.
And, one can annotate Python3 to make it typed, so things might improve.
actually we have. it's called standard software. in sap and salesforce, you have the standard that fulfils what you describe, and just customize the rest.
Definitely. But I don’t see the point of paying someone $200k to write a simple web app, even if it’s using react and kubernetes. VC has killed innovation and instead created a cyclical bullshit engine.
It's not only because VC sort of manipulating software labour values although it's their nature of so called "investment", it's also software developer communities. If you are around those slack channels, forums long enough you start to see there are very few discussion of developing anything real or valuable. Most of them spend time just "playing" technology/tools.
It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.
You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground. And "simple" is relative, every customer is going to need a customized app.
This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.
> You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground
This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able
to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.
Now all that's left to do is democratize that and you have a perfect world, no? That is to say increase the pool of such jobs from 10,000 to 10,000,000
I think need has less to do with it than you suggest. We don’t ‘need’ most industry jobs any more than academic jobs. It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia, and so it has more money to pay employees.
> It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia
Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
> ...that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
They generate money which people can spend, so if that's the only criterion for wealth (it isn't), then mindlessly printing money is also useful to society (it isn't).
> The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason... The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
That's clearly false. Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
For example, there are quite a few diseases/conditions that affect a decent number of people, but we don't find cures because the return on that investment would be too low, or often negative.
Capitalism suggests that the only thing that matters is having more money; I believe what truly matters is having better lives for everyone.
> Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.
> Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life.
I think this is incorrect.
I think economic (and political) behaviour suggests rather strongly that we don't much value most other human life, nor value curing most extremely rare diseases.
> Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
That comes next, after there's a collective commitment to resource that finite number of people to work on uncured diseases of some kind.
At the moment, I think we're showing that the collective commitment is not in that direction.
We're doing other things instead, that you can certainly argue are of value, but given the large proportion of "earned income" most people and businesses have to spend on somebody else's "unearned income", I have to wonder if money flow is a good indicator of value.
I posit you make a greater contribution to society by earning as much as you can by utilizing your talents, then donating the excess when you don’t need it anymore.
Meanwhile I'm being paid obscene amounts of money to center divs and type @Autowired and @Component for projects that never end up launching anyway. It's all so badly badly flawed.