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Comment by jimlikeslimes | Hacker News Reader

My programming teacher at age 16 directly answered this as a rhetorical question to the class. He just said, I love teaching, I love living here (no tech sector), and I love programming. He found teaching 16-18 year olds programming really rewarding. I found him a realy great teacher.

He didn't want the stress of moving to a city and programming for others. That was 20 years ago though. It might be different now.

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That was before a good developer who can pass interviews and get a promotion or two could make 3x (easily) to 10x (if a few things went their way) as a teacher.

There are some people who love teaching enough to make that trade off, and it’s wonderful that they exist, but they’re going to be exceptionally rare.

> they’re going to be exceptionally rare.

Disagree - at least in my experience in urban school districts, they were definitely the majority of good teachers.

But that's not the question, obviously most good teachers are going to enjoy teaching. It's doubtful that the intersection of good programmers and born lovers of teaching is large, just because most people that want to teach do teach, and people that like to program do program.

I'd argue that these salaries allow people to retire early and go into careers that are more rewarding than tech, teaching being one of them

I'm not sure about that. As a programmer, you have a lot of freedom to program but as a teacher you have very little freedom to just teach. You have to fit to a curriculum and make sure to give a bunch of assignments and tests even if that's not the best way for your students to learn. I love teaching but I don't know if I could ever be a middle/high school teacher.

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