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Comment by kevin_b_er | Hacker News Reader

As was commented when this last came up, CalTech had years to find or train a replacement. They were unwilling to spend the money to maintain their human capital. Neither were the nearby universities. They suffer as a result of their hubris. Many companies do too when they don't realize their human assets are actually part of a bus factor of 1 and let them quit or fire them, then wonder why they lost critical tribal knowledge. I'm sure CalTech has hired plenty of non-technical administrative staff and dedicated multiples of the glass blower's salary in the meantime.

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I graduated from Caltech in 99, and I worked in Emlyn Hughes's physics lab, doing some programming for his experiments with Rubidium spin coupling with He3. The apparatus for the experiment was custom made by Gerhart, and even then, 20 years ago now, the faculty was trying to find and train a replacement. Their standards were very high, to be sure, but the main problem wasn't so much compensation, but finding a skilled apprentice who was willing to put in years with no guarantees that they would be the successor, or even become master glassblowers in their own right, and master scientfic glassblowers who have gone through their apprenticeship are rare beasts indeed.

We see this scarcity in other industries that require traditional master/journeyman/apprentice systems, like master machinists, masons, or plasterers. That there is are no baseline jobs, like light bulb manufacturing in glassblowing, that allow a sufficient pool of talent to acrue so that the very best, the "10x" artisans, can be found. That pool also gives a fallback so that people who are trained but do not possess the talent or dedication to become masters can still be gainfully employed.

On the other hand, there seems to be no shortage of those willing to apprentice, with no guarantees, as "minor league baseball player" without a realistic fallback if they happen to not quite make it into the 750-1000 best baseball players in the world. The compensation at the end in the unlikely case of success sure seems to make a difference there.

Unfortunately I don't think the compensation at the end for a master glassblower is $42,000 per month, minimum.

While the 99th percentile is certainly more attractive, the mean and probably even the average are much lower.

It's funny how people are willing to bet against the lottery on their whole career.

Then again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

I sit in a very visible and mission critical seat at my company and I support basically all departments with a technical component, from CRM and marketing to IT and operations. And my compensation is less than half what other organizations pay for similar positions. Hence why I’m shopping around very heavily. It’s not even really about the money for me. My family and I are comfortable. But if the org isn’t willing to invest in its people then to me that is a bad sign.

There's nothing wrong with trying a moon shot or two throughout your career, but yeah there's no point in wasting your entire career on it.

Well, I guess future will tell us if America is better off by paying baseball players rather than glassblower these ridiculous amounts.

Come on.... this argument that athletes should make less is ridiculous.

Explain please? It seems rather backwards to me, and with some unpleasant societal implications, that a pro sports player (so a subset of entertainment) is more highly compensated than someone who holds an even rarer skill set (in a subset of science).

It is unfortunate, but that's how the market works. What alternative is there besides the government imposing salary floors and ceilings?

> It is unfortunate, but that's how the market works.

And we as humans control "the market". It's not some abstract impossible-to-reason-with force. The better that we understand this, the better our economies will work.

Markets in whole are irrational and very difficult, if not impossible, to reason with. They also tend to react poorly and in unforseen ways to direct interference.

> that's how the market works

I'd say instead "that's how the market DOESN'T work" since clearly there are a lot of market failures - master glass blowers being just an example.

Why do you need an alternative to these perfectly viable solutions?

An argument I've heard made is that professional athletes have compressed careers: for example, the median major league baseball salary is 1.5 million per year, and the average baseball career is ~5-6 years. This is actually on the high end, as Googling indicates that NFL numbers are much lower ($900k median over three years). It also doesn't factor in time spent in the minor leagues, which has a much lower payout.

So if you spread the contract out over ~30 years or so, the numbers look far different.

[1]: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/15126571/study-mlb-averag... [2]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070709131254.h...

Yeah, but the professional athletes can have other job while their baseball career is over. It's not like they need to make enough money in baseball, because after they're done they'll starve. I'd happily compress my software engineering career to 5-6 years to make $1.5M/y, where do I sign up?

Because sports are entertainment, and people have expressed a willingness to part with more money to watch athletes than universities have expressed to pay glassblowers...

I took this to mean that glassblowers should be paid more, especially the best ones in the world.

If it was known 10+ years ago that Caltechs glassblower made 300-500k a year, you can bet they wouldn't be in this situation now.

The million dollar salaries for baseball players entice entire generations of kids and teens to at least "try" the sport. It keeps the good ones motivated and the few elite athletes a payout for a lifetime of work.

We could argue whether this is all worth it for entertainment, but you can't argue with the compensation model, it flat out works. It attracts and retains the absolute best people in the world at that specific job.

You are underestimating the value of fun. Team sports are more fun that blowing glass.

Maybe, but hobbyist glassblowers exist.

You clearly haven't spent much time in a glass blower's shop. The torches alone are freaking awesome and it's a pleasure to watch the tradesperson at work.

Yeah, ridiculous. How could we live without them? They are the basis of a decent society, unlike scientific research.

All of that indicates lack of compensation sufficient to offset the risk of not becoming a master and opportunity costs of other employment options for those who can qualify. Put compensation at $1m+ cash and see if the position stays vacant.

That was my immediate thought: not the $1m, obviously, but:

1) It's a career with extremely limited options for progression, and you might work in the same place your entire life, or perhaps have a small handful of jobs (an increasingly alien concept in today's job market, and one that might make you feel imprisoned if you're not that ambitious).

2) (I suspect) The compensation is not likely to be terribly impressive, particularly early on, as compared with other viable options. Differences in compensation tend to compound over the years, so you'll always feel like you're behind the curve.

Factor in cost of living in California and I imagine it starts to look incredibly unappealing.

Yup they are asking the potential apprentices to shoulder all the risk of wasting their time in a dead end errand rather than compensating them.

I see two options to pull in candidates.

One is what you say: Lottery style. Provide huuuuuugae outcomes for some lucky people.

The other one is reduce the risk for everyone.

The universe does not care which one you choose, so I cannot argue using reason for one or the other, it's a choice. Still, I very much prefer society would adopt the second option. I think we made life choices way riskier than they need to be. Perceived risk still is as high as if we lived in scarcity of long ago times.

Okay, contrary to what I just said that I cannot argue with reason because it's the same outcomes, I actually question that the outcomes of the "luck based" system are as good as one where riskiness of some life choices is lowered. I'm not sure though, it can't be an all-or-nothing approach, if it means a lot more people doing ever more useless things that would be something I don't want to see either, on the other hand, we already have plenty of that (see Dilbert or recently discussion of "The rise of the bullshit job").

I think the guidance of resources of the current system leaves something to be desired, too many undesirable outcomes that are then rationalized using the very tool that created them (i.e. explaining them using the existing system while pretending that this system is the (same as the) goal).

Or society could just choose to not bother having any glassblowers. Does society really need them? Let some other society which values such things have them instead.

Did you even read the article? Or my comment, for that matter?

How about if they pay 10X average wage for the position? Sure the the person will make more than professors but would there still be no one willing to train and committee?

I see a lot of discussion about "fairness" of these salairies herez, but I think it doesn't make sense without first finding out: what are the alternatives to training an apprentice?

Can universities order custom glassworks from commercial companies? Ship them from China, where labour is much cheaper? 3d print them? Make do without them?

Make do without them seems like the obvious answer. Let China make that stuff, and then let China do the scientific work that makes use of it. This should work out just fine for America as it instead concentrates on sports and reality TV...

All of those suggestions have big downsides. I'm friends with the scientific glassblower that works at the university I attended and I'm somewhat familiar with the work he does.

A large part of his job is constructing custom equipment for specific tasks. A big part of this is figuring out what the user really needs or is trying to do. The glassblower has more experience than most of the people asking for equipment to be made. He'll often work with them to improve their initial design. You wouldn't get this if you were just sending off an order to a company to have custom glass made.

Another important part of his job is repairing equipment when it breaks. If you break an important piece of equipment in your lab are you willing to wait for it to be packed, shipped to China, fixed, and shipped back? Broken equipment may have been used to hold hazardous chemicals and there is often chemical residue on the glass. Most people in a lab wouldn't be able to clean the glass well enough to make it shippable without the equipment in the glassblower's office.

I don't think anyone has done any work on 3d printing glass. Even if you could 3d print glass that doesn't address the problems with poor design and repairing broken equipment.

It's possible to do without a glassblower but not a good idea for a top tier research university. If you can't get custom glass made then you can't do certain experiments. Not being able to do those experiments could lead to problems recruiting faculty and students that want to do them.

I and several colleagues retired over the last few years from a major electrical engineering company. One of my colleagues retired exactly at retirement age but no effort had been put into finding a replacement so the management suddenly scrambled to find someone with a fraction of the expertise who he could train over a period of about six months. Of course they failed to find a suitable candidate and six months was too short.

My situation was similar, I spent six months trying to transfer half a lifetime of domain and software development expertise to a very keen and competent young engineer, but of course this had to be done in between all his other nearly full time responsibilities.

This is what happens when organizations don't believe in the long term future, just next year's balance sheet.

It's not any different in government or non profit organizations, at least in my experience.

Because it's not any different to any other group of people. You can find evidence that we're bad at long-term investment or planning all around.

Caltech actually hires very little extra administrative staff, much less than other universities. They actually frame it as, IIRC, "we're resisting the temptation to hire more administrators."

Despair.com has a poster for this.

Mediocrity: it takes a lot less time and most people won’t notice the difference until it’s too late.

That site is absolutely brilliant.

Of all the things that didn’t survive the dotcom bubble bursting, I would have been pretty sad if despair had gone under. Maybe not fuckedcompany level sad but really close.

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