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by ClumsyPilot 1993 days ago
Well, we have this myth of meritocracy, but some proffessions are systemically underpaid like teachers - millions of future earnings depend on them, but noone ambitious wants to become a teacher, so our schooling kida sucks
2 comments
vorpalhex 1993 days ago
It's a supply and demand problem. There are a lot of folks who are willing and able to be teachers for a low amount of pay, but it turns out you can't live off discount engineers or finance people.

I assure you, if SV could get away paying $12 an hour to engineers or finance, they would.

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ClumsyPilot 1993 days ago
There are a lot of folks who are willing and able to be president for a low amount of pay. Might even do a better job than Trump.

The idea was that if teaching was a prestigious profession, we would see large returns on that investment. We have an entire underclass of population that is poorly educated, so maybe we shouldn't be living off 'discount teachers' as we are doing now.

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shuckles 1993 days ago
Really great teachers could probably find a way to make huge incomes. I tutored competition math on the side to rich families’ kids for nearly $500/hr.
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ClumsyPilot 1993 days ago
The whole point of my post was that we need the best teachers in the classrooms, not tutoring a few select rich kids.
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shuckles 1993 days ago
Your original claim was that the teaching profession is systematically underpaid but in fact you’re talking about a very specific set of public sector employees whose compensation is more complex than just annual salary.
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ClumsyPilot 1993 days ago
This 'very spesific set' is like 90% of all teachers.

The argument was -you cannot get away underpaying developers, you get crap develipers and crap code. But compare teaching outcomes, and you will see that countries with better paid teachera have better outcomes in primary education, so we are suffering the consequences in both cases. Its just that we've chosen different tradeoffs

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shuckles 1992 days ago
I haven’t made any arguments. You may be confusing me with someone else on the thread? In any case, the outrageously paid developers are probably less than 10% of all software engineers, especially if you consider that foreign engineers are part of the labor pool in a way foreign teachers are not.
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