[eloff]

Value and compensation aren't necessarily coupled. Think of school teachers. It's clearly an incredibly valuable job preparing the next generation of society, but pays a miserable wage before the intervening of unions, and still not great even with that.

But there's more teachers available in the labor market compared to demand than computer programmers, so the latter command a much higher salary. Even though I would say many deliver much less value to society.

Or negative value like Facebook engineers. Sorry, I couldn't resist that cheap shot, and I do believe Facebook is a net negative for society.

[jfengel]

I'm not even sure it's true that there are more teachers than programmers. But the pool of money for paying programmers is large and expanding, because we can easily calculate the value they produce, while the monetary value of teaching is harder to measure.

It doesn't help that teaching is presented as a "caring" profession, that you do for the love of your charges. Teachers don't threaten to jump to a different school district for more money, and when they campaign for more money, they're presented as not caring about the students. Nobody expects programmers to have any loyalty, so they get to demand money.

I would love to have schools fight to get the most talented teachers, instead of settling for "any woman who likes kids". (Those "caring" professions are usually ones associated with women.) I'd love to see school systems compete with software companies and research institutions, and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies. But that won't happen without money, and until we start deciding to pay for it, we're going to get a lot of mediocre teaching.

[bosie]

> because we can easily calculate the value they produce,

I am not trolling but I would really, really like a citation on this. I hear this sentiment so often but nobody ever produced that calculation. Would be great (or maybe not ;)) for negotiations going forward.

[jfengel]

I mean it in the simplistic sense that we can sum up the revenue of the software industry. That's not really a complete calculation but it's clearer than trying to measure the value add of teachers.... even though it's arguably more.

[bosie]

well, the software industry is filled with non-software engineers. and if you go with the revenue angle, what do you do with companies that don't produce "value" (i.e. product doesn't sell)?

[jfengel]

It wasn't my intention to claim that it could be calculated exactly. It was my intention to point out the distinction between software engineers, where there's a bottom line somewhere to be counted, and teachers, where the bottom line is effectively impossible to calculate.

This isn't about how much programmers are worth, but about why it is we get away with paying teachers so little while programmers are paid so much: their contribution to a corporate profit. The details are beyond the scope of the post.

[hutzlibu]

"and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies"

What bothers me with this "race for the best", is that there is a finite amount of people running fortune 500 companies.

My main problem with the school system is that even good teachers can't teach their full potential with all the outside constraints regulating their classes.