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Comment by richdougherty | Hacker News Reader

> the sales person knows exactly how much money they bring in

I agree this is the key factor. Any job where a person can argue a clear, direct, measurable link between their work and profit is a job that can be paid based on financial results. Other jobs where you see this: financial traders, consultants with direct client contact.

To take the other extreme, look at teachers. They have the potential to generate huge value based on how effectively they develop society's human capital. Unfortunately the effects of a single teacher are so noisy and indirect that it's basically impossible to measure their performance. The lack of firm data is why the debate about teacher compensation is so fraught.

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I'll just put one citation into this discussion. Raj Chetty and his collaborators produce amazing research. I attended a talk when he visited New Zealand a few years ago. In this paper he's attempting to address the dream of measuring teacher value, by measuring changes in test scores against changes in lifetime income.

Yes there are other ways of measuring teacher "value" too, but income changes are relevant to this discussion, since they tell us how much a teacher could theoretically ask for in "commission". The paper suggests that an average teacher vs a bottom 5% teacher makes a $250,000 lifetime difference in income (present value).

"The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood" http://www.nber.org/papers/w17699

Take a look. He does a neat job controlling for different factors, trying to tease causality out of correlation.

> address the dream of measuring teacher value, by measuring changes in test scores against changes in lifetime income.

Of course, combined with the premise of this article, such measurement will incentivize teachers to turn students into sales-people :)

250k lifetime? So he should get another $6k. Teachers and engineers don't work for money. And there are often bad consequences for people who "don't work for money."

I worked in sales so I could afford to be an engineer later. There were plenty of ex-teachers in sales. They did well.

>> Teachers and engineers don't work for money.

You're right. I hit the comment button and was going to say you're damn wrong - I have done a lot to increase my pay with each new job. I wouldn't be at work if not for the money. But then I realized you're right too. I don't think about money much at all when I'm a work. I do try to make a good product, and I do worry about bill of materials and production cost, but I don't focus on money coming to me because that's already been agreed upon. Is that what you meant by that statement?

An engineer doesn't want to make a bad product, but if a company has a good product they don't even need to hire a salesperson

That's not necessarily true. There are thousands of examples of good products that failed due to lack of marketing.

Both Boeing and Airbus make good airplanes. Nevertheless, they hire expensive salespeople and pay them massive commissions. They don't just tell the airlines to download a pdf brochure of the planes' specifications and call them when they're ready to place an order.

People making statements such as "good products sell themselves" are probably thinking about gadgets like iPhones that don't require "greasy used car salesmen" with high-pressure tactics to close a sale. Yes, the Apple employees at stores are more like order takers than salespeople.

However, many well-engineered products absolutely require salespeople to close the deal. I was recently researching $100k CNC milling machines -- there are several brands with quality engineering and yet they all have salespeople to guide prospective customers about configurations and persuade me to buy. Trying to decide purely based on information posted at the manufacturers website and printed brochures would be unwise. Yes, the general "concept of a CNC machine" sells itself but a particular brand & particular model of CNC does not.

As an Account Manager, I research about my customer and reach out to them once I am convinced we can add value. Not just sell them stuff.

But you can't trust what the company says about its own product, so you really you're talking to someone who can negotiate a contract where you get your money back if it sucks.

If they get their money back, does the contract negotiator lose their commission again?

That's very true if you're selling something with a low value (most things consumers buy really), but you're dreaming if you think you can sell a technical product to a business for $10k + without salespeople. Enterprise sales is more like project management than what you probably think of when you hear "sales." Especially when you've got to pass through engineering, finance, procurement and legal to get a deal across the line.

>Teachers and engineers don't work for money. And there are often bad consequences for people who "don't work for money."

This is a metnarrative[0]. It is a thing that people say not because it is true but because it is useful to create a larger narrative that is perceived as useful within the social sphere. Peopl, especially engineers, are socialized to believe it and normed to say it. The result is very simply lower pay for their labor. It is a post hoc justificication.

[0] Sorry to lazy at the moment for a real cite so heres a wiki one...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative....A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit) in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea

Dressing up a bad argument in the rhetoric of a derelict academic philosophy does not make it interesting or correct. Especially when all you are doing is describing a concept rather than telling us why it applies in this case.

Besides, if there is a fallacy in the OP's statement surely it is not the assertion that teachers don't prioritize money so much as the assertion that engineers do. At least among the software engineers I know (and I suspect the same holds for most people on HN), engineers are as multifaceted in their approach to work as anyone else. Most people would happily trade off non-trivial amounts of wealth for other social values such as work-life balance or work on projects that have personal meaning. The most unhappy workers anywhere are those who can only choose between jobs based on their salary.

So true! Case in point: people considered it "oniony" for a top teacher to leave the state for one that pays teachers better. The metanarrative has made it risible for high-star teachers to shop around for better salaries like star basketball players would! That's ridiculously unfair, press them into a kind of charity role.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/6ktzx1/teacher...

Replacing one teacher in the bottom 5% with an average one got the student $250k more over their lifetime. So the average teacher is generating around $135,000 more than the poor teacher.

And equating teachers to engineers makes no sense, I've met dozens of people in some engineering school to make money.

That seems questionable. In a lot of school systems, the best teacher may be the difference between a kid ending up in jail or not, but kids that are flirting with that line aren't going to be particularly successful on aggregate. And American society loves sending black kids to jail. So, what's the value add there?

It's so much more complex than that.

Yes, this is talking about the "average class." Individual circumstances vary in both directions, that doesn't make it questionable. Though, the difference between going to jail or not pretty quickly adds up to the 250k number.

Yes, this is way more complex than my two minute writeup of a small chunk of a 94 page paper.

I don't think the problem is evaluating individual teachers. If you look at average teacher compensation it isn't that much compared to the value they add. We could let the school and the union work out how to spread the pay among the teachers at a school, I think they're underpaid overall and that has nothing to do with evaluating them individually.

How much value do they add?

All of it? None of it? Teachers themselves don't add value, teachers enable value addition.

I mean, obviously everyone adds value (from janitors up to doctors). And my person view is that all jobs should be compensated at the same hourly rate. But is there anything special about teachers? Like if they all quit society would go to hell, but that’s true of garbagemen and road workers too. The question is, does it matter who does the job?

Oh no, I meant teachers in general, i.e. the ones who teach. I guess broadly there's direct and indirect value adders, each group needs the other.

>And my person view is that all jobs should be compensated at the same hourly rate.

What? Care to elaborate?

I think the economy should compensate people based on factors they have control over, not ones they don’t. Someone who was born smart shouldn’t be better off for his luck. Your can choose how much you work. Maybe you can choose to do things like get an education (but not in our system where that is gated by standardized tests).

That doesn't equate to the same hourly rate though. Different jobs have different demands. In different roles I've been both lead engineer and painted fences. If the pay was the same I would probably paint fences and write code in my spare time.

Did you chose to have the aptitude to write code? Why should a person who can’t write code but can paint fences get rewarded less for giving up an hour of their limited time on earth than someone who can code?

I'm not saying current wages are fairly calibrated, but some work is actually more physically and/or mentally stressful per hour, and some work requires more training. Under your system, how do you prevent people from avoiding difficult work and/or work that requires extensive training? Central planning?

I may not have chosen to have the aptitude to write code, but I did choose to go to college to better learn how to do it. I also chose to work very hard in my industry to advance. Had this come with zero financial rewards I probably wouldn't have done those things.

Do you actually believe this or are you just saying something striking to illustrate an underlying principle?

> Do you actually believe this or are you just saying something striking to illustrate an underlying principle?

It’s where I get if I’m thinking about moral justice instead of incentives/the economy. I’m not saying my proposal is workable. It’s just my observation that the last decade has been a tale of two cities for millenials. My friends who are “good at math” have been living in a different economy from everyone else.

If jobs of all levels of difficulty are to be compensated the same, what then counts as a job? Would I be able to get paid for sitting around thinking?

It also sounds like you're basically proposing we give people free money. That could be a fine thing to do, but then why not give it out explicitly, instead of holding wages fixed?

Yes, it matters who does the job. Good teachers have measurably better effects on students than bad ones. Here's one essay with a lot of statistics: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/opinion/kristof-the-value-... . I also remember hearing a few years ago that a good teacher can teach about twice as much in a year as an average teacher, but I'm not sure if that's the same as the 40% number from this article or something else.

The effect is an especially big deal in math, because it is so cumulative. One of the worst things that can happen to a student is to have a bad math experience (whether it's the teacher, the other kids in the class, or whatever) one year, and then have future teachers never go back and cover the same material. That leaves students with permanent gaps in their knowledge, which hurts them later on.

> And my person view is that all jobs should be compensated at the same hourly rate. But is there anything special about teachers?

Some nations tried that idea last century. It lead to war, famine and 100 million deaths. Aiming for utopia is a noble idea, but the results have been horrific thus far.

Off topic: are you, by chance, familiar with Participatory Economics [0]?

Like most utopian economic visions, it’s hard to get there from here, but it seems like it’s well matched to your stated labor market ideals.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

This is one of the biggest problems with trying to evaluate individual teacher performance (and reward / punish based on this evaluation), is that you need to watch out for incentives.

Rewarding teachers who have best highest test scores, for example, is a pretty good way of disincentivizing good teachers from helping less gifted children.

Sales people work their comp plan, especially if they're good. They tend to know what they're making and what the market pays.

They tend to leave for one of 3 reasons. 1: Product isn't competitive anymore 2: Comp plan has changed 3: Company is failing / run out of funding / has pivoted and fired their entire sales team.

Source: I recruit salespeople for a living.

> Rewarding teachers who have best highest test scores, for example, is a pretty good way of disincentivizing good teachers from helping less gifted children.

In the UK at least, they have changed the measurement to one of progress in a basket of subjects. Students are measured as they leave primary school, and the secondary school is rated on how much different their grades are to their predicted grades.

I don't know how they game that system here though, there will always be a way

I actually have a friend who taught in the UK for two years. While I'd have to ask him for the specifics, he told me there was a lot of gaming the system so people would get their bonuses.

> Unfortunately the effects of a single teacher are so noisy and indirect that it's basically impossible to measure their performance. The lack of firm data is why the debate about teacher compensation is so fraught.

The problem is not that it's hard to measure. The people is that teachers actually have very little ability to make a marginal impact on their students though their performance, except at the very tail ends of the distribution.

In other words, structural factors that teachers can't directly control, like family support or district curriculum standards, have a much larger impact on student performance than teaching quality does. (Except, of course, for the exceptionally bad teachers, but that's better addressed by firing them than by adjusting the compensation strategy).

> The problem is not that it's hard to measure. The people is that teachers actually have very little ability to make a marginal impact on their students though their performance, except at the very tail ends of the distribution.

That's essentially true for most sales people and traders as well. There are VERY heavy tails -- that one guy at the car dealership who sells 3x as much as his peers, or the trader at Citadel whose trades made over $1bn in a year.

But imagine how the teaching profession would change if 1) the gains could be accurately measured and 2) we assigned payment or prestige to teachers based on (1).

> That's essentially true for most sales people and traders as well.

It's definitely not true in most sales positions, particularly the ones that are highly commissions-based.

> But imagine how the teaching profession would change if 1) the gains could be accurately measured and 2) we assigned payment or prestige to teachers based on (1).

We can, and we do. The fact is: the gains just aren't that large. If you want to improve student performance, the best place to spend the money isn't by raising teacher salaries.

> We can, and we do.

Unless you can provide a link, I'm pretty sure whatever you're measuring is very different than what OP was talking about.

And stories abound of the very successful engineer, entrepreneur or scientist whose entire life was changed by one teacher.

That's right, we need more administrative staff, and laptops and iPads for all children. That should fix the problems in education.

> Public education by state rankings show that New York spent the most per pupil at $20,610. The next top five are District of Columbia ($18,485), Alaska ($18,416), New Jersey ($17,907), Connecticut ($17,745) and Vermont ($16,988).

http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/pu... https://archive.fo/DeBGH

A teacher's salary in New York isn't good enough but you can at least afford rent if you're smart. The reason why I tolerate laptop and iPad spending is because I don't know if/how we can cut costs and still get better results. Thus, when I see something that lets students learn without a one on one with a teacher, I imagine it saves money.

From the same page, we see that total expense is 617B or about (617 billion/18 trillion) three percent of GDP. I'll be honest. I have no earthly idea whether this number is too big or too small or if that's even the right question.

> Thus, when I see something that lets students learn without a one on one with a teacher, I imagine it saves money.

There is growing evidence to suggest that having laptops and ipads in class decrease learning outcomes. So you could be paying more for worse results.

A documentary I watched claimed giving laptops or iPads to students is correlated with worse academic performance for those students.

Sorry, don't remember enough for a citation, but the suggested causal effect was students just spending even more time on social media, games, and web surfing instead of school work.

i'd oppose that. For one that's disingenious given the parent argument, that about scandinavian countries leading (by some measure) in school education and them using computers in class.

And on the other hand, what if the test subjects you mentioned just didn't learn to use the technology responsibly? I'd argue, teachers and professors need to be given computers, in a metaphorical sense, first.

Based on national test scores, what we know works in a small homogeneous country at least is professionalizing teaching - raising the standards to become a teacher. They didn't raise salaries to the same level as other professionals like lawyers and doctors, it's about the same pay as the USA, but Finland managed to go from worst to the top in Europe in one generation. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/the-cas...

It's also interesting to note that children in Finland got a shorter school day, and mostly no homework at all. The shortening of the school day was especially prominent in for the youngest children.

But as in the UK teachers would game the system eg by having "difficult" kids in this case those of only average intelligence excluded from the school to make their position in the league tables look good.

That's a myth. The real problem is that the average teacher (relative performance) is so far away from being close to maximally performant (as proved in studies which rigourously control teacher behaviour) that the impact of variation about that mean is swamped by environmental factors. People conclude that since swapping teachers doesn't make an appreciable difference, teacher performance can't make a difference. When in reality the problem is that teaching is uniformly bad (compared to maximal possible performance, which is very difficult. this is why the answer is not to look for better teachers but to look for better, uniformly implementable, curriculums)

If teaching is indeed universally bad (which I doubt but lets go with the idea as a thought experiment) - then surely the issue must lie with training/the accepted teaching methods?

I disagree with the parent post and do not dismiss your suggestion, but no, that needn't be the only cause. The profession itself may be disincentivized in a number of ways against bringing in capable people.

It's not necessarily training and methods. Any environmental issue would create the same situation (curriculum selection, normative bias into testable results, etc), as would a self reinforcing cycle of undervaluing the professionals and competent people running away from the undervalued profession.

Yes, I agree completely. Though I would emphasise that teaching universally bad only when compared to what is achieveable from tightly scripted presentations. I think the actual task of teaching flawlessly while "winging it" is extremely extremely difficult, and beyond at least 98% of the general population, even positing a good working environment.

I might become a teacher and I don't want to be a bad one. I want to be exceptionally good. Do you have any suggestions?

Pick an area with a strong union that will cover your ass when you have to use your experience, skill, and knowledge to do what has to be done when the admin bureaucrats not only don't help, but even become your chronic obstacle. Make sure you don't try to be too heroic before you get tenure, though.

Also, try to get a subbing or student teaching position that will put you with the same group of kids regularly for at least a month to be more sure you can handle the stress of the job.

I would reccommend looking into everything written by Siegfried Engelmann, particularly "Theory of Instruction". Honestly though, that might not be enough. Maybe you have the brains and drive to do it, for me the only unquestionab success has been using scripted presentations written by people who are smarter than I am.

Disagree. The tails of the distribution are where the teacher effect is probably the least, because there are significant obstacles on the low end that make focusing on learning impossible and immense innate talent at the high end where the kid would learn if you put him in a closet with the textbook and a flashlight. The real problem with teacher success metrics is that they are outcome-based. It is no more useful to measure the success of a world class surgeon by including the outcomes of people who completely ignore the post-op care directions and instructions for lifestyle changes.

Not sure where the idea comes from that teachers are poorly compensated. Relative to some other professions yes, but hardly a low Paying job. Annual teacher salary in California is $73k/year [1] divided by .75 is $97k/year with generous pension an medical benefits that probably push that number up $25k-$75k/year...

[1]http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp

I'm curious why you would divide by .75 there (?)

Public sector salary pre-tax income is usually only 66-75 percent of total comp after adjusting for health insurance and pensions.

9 months a year of employment, which is a gross oversimplification of how many weeks/yr a teacher is working.

It was a proxy for the fact most teachers have summers off, so are only working 3/4ths the year...

Interesting, CA ranked 41st out of all states for its school system this year.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/05/california-schools-ear...

Though there are private schools that pay more; private tutors can make a lot more, esp to the super-rich.

[For a broader definition of "teacher", there's professional development seminars, and people who tour the lecture circuit. Though you're talking specifically about teaching children.]

Then, consider doctors (esp specialists and surgeons): there is an immediate, direct, measurable link to profound benefits, and though they are well paid, they aren't paid by commission... is it just because it isn't money?

Lawyers, esp barristers, are closer to the money, and do get a kind of "commission" (though some jurisdictions prohibit it).

> Any job where a person can argue a clear, direct, measurable link between their work and profit is a job that can be paid based on financial results

And anyone who can't will be, and should be, outsourced.

Know. Your. Value. To. The. Business.

I think MOOCs are the future based on my own experience. They allow the best teachers to scale their reach. Instead of aristotle giving a lecture to a room it allows an unlimited audience who can also rewind and pause if they don't understand something.

I've been able to learn machine learning and deep learning from Andrew Ng, one of the best AI researchers in the world, among other world class researchers, for free. It's incredible when you think about it, probably one of the most significant things in human history. I've been able to learn how to code by picking and choosing the best classes from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc without spending a penny. Why settle for mediocre teachers at state universities when these options are available?

The major thing we need to do is find some other way to grade people other than using a college degree as a benchmark.

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