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I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in so

I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments. Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company. The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it? In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.

baddox 8y ago
I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.
shados 8y ago
> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder. Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.
- zanny 8y ago
  The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce. Software is eating the world in almost all regards. Being able to perform that act - the eating part - makes you way more valuable than the effort required. But so long as characters can translate into dollars for someone the one making the characters will remain very valuable. Don't for a second be "ashamed" if someone is offering to pay you large sums of money for what you think isn't worth it - the ugly fact of reality is that we don't get to set the value of our time, those with the money to buy it do. Society is offering little money to teachers and that sucks, but that has nothing to do with code being so valuable as to justify abnormal incomes relative to the average of the rest of the working class.
- closeparen 8y ago
  The “out of whack investment to reward ratio” is the fundamental mechanism of capitalism. It’s how we get enough of what we need, motivating self interested actors to provide it. We should be terrified if it isn’t happening somewhere, or else rejoice that every demand everywhere has already been met.

baddox 8y ago

I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.

shados 8y ago

> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder. Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.

zanny 8y ago
The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce. Software is eating the world in almost all regards. Being able to perform that act - the eating part - makes you way more valuable than the effort required. But so long as characters can translate into dollars for someone the one making the characters will remain very valuable. Don't for a second be "ashamed" if someone is offering to pay you large sums of money for what you think isn't worth it - the ugly fact of reality is that we don't get to set the value of our time, those with the money to buy it do. Society is offering little money to teachers and that sucks, but that has nothing to do with code being so valuable as to justify abnormal incomes relative to the average of the rest of the working class.
closeparen 8y ago
The “out of whack investment to reward ratio” is the fundamental mechanism of capitalism. It’s how we get enough of what we need, motivating self interested actors to provide it. We should be terrified if it isn’t happening somewhere, or else rejoice that every demand everywhere has already been met.