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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

During my Interaction Design master I had to read a paper about the interface design for tools aiding people in these kinds of jobs. The designers spent a lot of time observing them at work and concluded that one specific feature of this work environment was that it doesn't have a "normal" situation and "emergency" situation, it's a non-stop juggling of emergencies all the time. Which I guess is part of why they stayed calm: you can't switch to panic mode if you're already constantly in that kind of stress situation, and anyone who can't handle that will be filtered out of those kinds of jobs very quickly.

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Glassdoor says they earn $30k - $64k yet lots of us earn more in our comfy office jobs typing code into a text editor, kinda puts things into perspective.

It's amazing how much leverage an employer has when they have the legal right to simply fire everyone, and there is no recourse for the employees because the employer is the federal government itself.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-00...

Or Mozilla

For people who won't click, here are some salient facts:

this air traffic controller strike occurred in 1981

In 1955, Congress had made such strikes punishable by fines or a one-year jail term

a law the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 1971

You don't like it? Then don't take the job. Take a job where you do have the ability to go out on strike.

When you simply cater to union-protected municipal employees, you wind up with the following, discussed on HN twice in the last day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24350022

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342828

We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime

All paid for by tax dollars.

The highest-paid public employee in most states is a football coach.

As a Canadian, I'm horrified—HORRIFIED!—by the legal theft called "taxation."

Those pampered government employees up here with their unions and pensions and benefits. It's awful. All they do is make our country work. If only we could get rid of them all and let private enterprise take over.

Think of how much better our country would be if we scrapped public transit and let Uber and Lyft take over everything.

Likewise, we could get rid of our ridiculously terrible public health care and adopt a sane model where the market provides. After all, markets mean efficiencies, that's why Americans pay less for healthcare, and get better outcomes than socialist hell-holes like Canada and Germany and the Nordics.

If taxation is theft, we should not only be able to fire people who are paid with our taxes, we should be able to jail them as accessories to the crime, and make them stay there until they pay back every ill-gotten cent.

I have spoken.

To be really blunt, I reckon it's just supply and demand: there's not that many jobs (relatively few airports in the world compared to other entire industries) and a relative lot of people who love it, and would rather do it than earn a bit more at a lower stress higher paid similarly skilled desk job & hobby listen-in/plane-spot.

I don't think that quite holds up. Sure, lots of people want to do it, but lots of people want to be professional athletes or surgeons or [insert prestigious job here] as well. Similarly, this kind of work is extremely demanding, and very critical - the consequences of incompetent traffic controllers would be disastrous - so there's still a low supply of people who actually are a right fit for the job. In a sane job market that should still give these traffic controllers some bargaining power.

Then again, I guess braythwayt's comment[0] is real-world proof that we're not really dealing with a sane job market, so I'm clearly missing something crucial in my line of thought here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346728

I think glassdoor is full of shit.

https://123atc.com/salary

More like 70-180, and then the potential for significant overtime as well.

This makes way more sense. From the person I knew in ATC a while back, it actually paid pretty well.

Plus you're a federal employee, so the benefits tend to be quite good and make up for a lower salary.

I know all the ATC types I knew in the military were looking at pretty lucrative careers when they left active duty.

The hours can be pretty rough, though.

Would you be able to provide a link to the paper? Sounds like an interesting read.

It may well be this classic from my old office colleague https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Rich...

Thank you, his air traffic control paper was definitely one of the papers involved, but I couldn't quite remember the right name of the design field - "computer-supported cooperative work"[0] - so I failed to find it again. I also read few other ones, including one about the London underground that described a situation where these traffic controllers were both looking at their screens, but also constantly listening to their colleagues in their periphery. This let them adjust their strategies for handling emergencies on-the-fly as new information became known[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-supported_cooperative...

[1] http://www.academia.edu/download/48677152/Collaboration_and_...

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