[FlipperBucket]

> This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former.

> In general, that's not actually true.

Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true.

> Nurses make good money.

On average, no. There's the eventual objection about what "compensation" means versus "salary", but moving the bar introduces a number of other variables. Keep it simple, as per the article. Feel free to goole nursing salary - not counting the issue of registered nurses acting as sergeants for teams of nursing assistants who perform the vast majority of the care, they are arguably underpaid (and assistants are shamefully underpaid). This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.

> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird

Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".

> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader

Whatever that means. Making some other unclear comparison serves what purpose? Law enforcement entry pay is less/parity with a teacher, but is less than a federal worker at the post office in salary and definitely in other benefits.

> the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.

Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.

The world isn't in the state you believe it is.

[geebee]

Here's the review of Registered Nurse from US News Best Jobs. Salary infor is based on BLS data.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse

The median salary for a nurse, nationally, is $68,450, which isn't high. The median salary (again nationally) for a software developer is $100,080.

If you drill down to best paying cities, though Registered Nurse is a well paid job. In San Francisco, for instance, the median salary for a Registered Nurse is $136,610.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...

According to BLS stats, that's actually higher than the median salary for software developers in San Jose (the highest paying place, at $133,010) and certainly higher than San Francisco ($122,420).

There's a lot to dig into here, in terms of data, so I don't want to come off as claiming that the stats above are conclusive.

First, nursing is a tough job, and deserves to be paid well, If it is, that's great, and if it isn't, that's a problem. I also don't have any problem whatsoever with registered nurses getting paid more than software developers.

I actually think software developer is often a more stressful, dreary, and dis-spiriting job than many people here on HN believe. I work for a university, and I definitely have cold sweat moments when I worry about lost data, broken processes, and security breaches. And a lot of what I do is wading through legacy code with a fine toothed comb. I believe a lot of dev work is like this.

Another factor is that nursing requires a specific set of coursework and a specific set of credentials. In software development, we have no such requirement - you can read a book on "PHP & MySql" (or don't read it) and call yourself a software developer. Then again, actually majoring in CS (or a related field) at a reputable university is challenging, and passing the coding interview at a place like google is also challenging (challenging for me, I failed to get through, some people here on HN will say it was trivially easy for them).

Is the job more flexible? As a developer, I can go off and grab a cup of coffee more or less whenever I want, but shifting my schedule to part time, or working three very long schedules, or leaving the field for a while and coming back where I left off - all things that I discovered would be more useful than "coffee flexibility" when I acquired a mortgage and school aged kids and a spouse who also has a full time job, honestly, I don't think that software developer offers as much.

Burnout may be common. Age discrimination? (or what I like to call "Age related employment issues, since I don't think it has to be discrimination per se that makes it tougher to be a developer as you get older)?

Pay? I don't know if the BLS data includes highly variable pay such as stock options. I think it's based on tax returns, so it does include some variable pay, but may not capture it all.

There are just so many factors, it's hard to draw very strong conclusions.

I am comfortable, however, saying that the data does not clearly support the notion that in the Bay Area, registered nurses are underpaid. I'd say the data moderately supports the contention that registered nurses are well paid (again, in the bay area and a few other high cost areas).

[throwawayjava]

It's also worth noting that "median salaries in software engineering" samples heavily from places with higher CoL, whereas healthcare numbers tend to be more representative of the national picture (because not everyone can fly to SF for healthcare, but software jobs are more concentrated in a few expensive places).

Concretely, average SE salaries in flyover states are pretty comparable to average RN salaries in flyover states.

[geebee]

I agree, that's a very good point. If one profession's median salary is higher, but employment is overwhelmingly concentrated in a high cost area, then it's possible that the profession with the lower median salary on a national basis has higher median pay on a cost of living adjusted basis.

I doubt it goes quite this far for software development and nursing, but it may be a factor.

[throwawayjava]

> Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true.

This is pretty off-putting, especially given a few glaring factual errors in your own post.

>> Nurses make good money.

> On average, no.

NP average annual salary: 95,523 USD

PA average annual salary: 98,180 USD

RN average annual salary: 67,490 USD

IDK what "good money" means, but ALL of these are paid much better than average for their respective levels of education. And certainly, beat out e.g. what a fresh BA/BS would make at a place like Edward Jones or Bank of America. Hell, my first SE job offers were lower than the RN average, and I certainly felt like that was "good money"!

>> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird

> Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".

Again, offputting.

Quants at hedge funds often have Ph.D.s in hard sciences from top universities. Comparing across vastly different pedigrees is no representative.

Why not compare apples to apples?

>> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader

> Whatever that means.

Yes again, offputting.

What I meant is this.

Leader: Superintendents rarely make less than $150,000 and make up to $N00,000 which, especially with CoL adjustments, is often better pay than the 200,000+ salary ranges typical for quants at hedge funds.

Vendor: And those are just the public sector jobs. A LOT of money is made in selling education products. Do you really think the CEO of Pearson is living in the poor house?

Just like literal bankers (people who sit in banks) are a very small fragment of what we think of as "banking", literal teachers are a very small fragment of people employed in education and literal police officers are a very small fragment of people employed in law enforcement.

> Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.

This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.

Cargill, for example, is family owned and pulls in 114.7 _B_illion in revenue. (For reference, BoA, America's largest bank, pulls down 87.352 Billion in revenue.)

"Family owned" doesn't mean what you think it means in American farming. Many "family owned" argi businesses (including actual farms) are really freaking huge operations.

> This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.

Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment. The feudal system also exists in banking and in lawyerings, and the top rung of the education hierarchy is doing extremely well while the lowest rung of banking or lawyering is barely scraping by. Maybe if you'd engaged politely with me instead of getting pissed off...

[FlipperBucket]

> This is pretty off-putting, especially given a few glaring factual errors in your own post.

Ironic, given you started with none. I standby the response, as appropriate commentary.

> IDK what "good money" means,

I don't know either, but that's irrelevant to the topical subject of comparison (not equivocating over 10% here or there in difference).

> Again, offputting.

That is often the case, when you are demonstrably wrong and have to deal with the realization.

> This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.

The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.

> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.

You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

[throwawayjava]

> Ironic, given you started with none.

You said nurses don't make good money. I think 100k is good money. Better money than most people in the banking and legal industries make, that's for sure.

> The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.

Cargill has higher revenues than the largest bank in America.

Cargill has larger assets than most US banks.

Cargill had higher profits last year/quarter than most US banks, even big household names.

You "guessed" that wasn't the case. You were wrong.

>> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.

> You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

The word management wasn't even mentioned once in my original post. I mentioned banking and law.

What I was pointing out was that low-paying jobs exist in every industry, and there are plenty of people in nominally low-paying industries who do very well (e.g., nurses RN and up) as well as many people in nominally high-paying industries who do not (e.g., bank tellers, low-level financial advisors, accountants).

(BTW, you should consider re-reading the end of the article that we're discussing. The conclusion to that article is quite literally that the exemplar discussed by the article -- NYC garbagemen -- are doing fine. So fine that people who get the job feel like they won the lottery.)