Top Paid LA Lifeguards Earned Up to $392k in 2019
forbes.com
forbes.com
Boiteux is also a firefighter managing 900 personnel.
So yeah, I'm ok with him having a salary equivalent to a Staff Software Engineer.
That said, state pension contributions are a significantly greater part of state employees' compensation than 401k matches are for private employers, so it does merit something. Perhaps a phrasing like "Top Paid LA Lifeguard earns $270k plus a $60k pension benefit" or whatever would be most descriptive.
You can easily use that to compare apples-to-apples. And doing that this is still extreme.
Oh, you don't care about $10,000 in medical benefits because your spouse has them? Great, roll that into my base.
The only reason the author does it here is because the actual salary would draw traction as a headline, and his organization paid good money to get this editorial presented in Forbes.
And being a lifeguard itself isn't even a dangerous job.
Not even the top 25 most dangerous according to this chart. And notice that all of these people make 1/4 to way less than these lifeguards...
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...
Risk is meaningful to this discussion in that it deters people from taking the job. That reduces supply and boosts price. I don’t think lifeguards are paid a premium for being supply constrained.
California has a public sector compensation problem. (In particular, its unwillingness to investigate overtime fraud.) But estimating pay solely based on how dangerous the job is won’t be accurate.
This is low skilled labor! The only requirement is to be a strong swimmer and have basic leadership skills.
I don't think supply of willing lifeguards is a constraint here.
I'd imagine if LA county put out an ad to replace their top lifeguard and offered even $200k a year they'd receive thousands of applications from perfectly qualified people.
Agree with everything you said except this.
Teenagers lifeguarding at suburban pools is unskilled labor. For an urban beach, I want someone with medical training—say, a paramedic—as well as knowledge of the local oceanography and meteorology. They need to be able to pull people out of the water, yes, but also be able to close beaches when they become unsafe and anticipate when things will become unsafe.
Cars are very convenient, and necessary in many places. But we really underestimate just how dangerous they are, and how bad the US is at regulating them. Our society is nearly identical to Canada, yet we have twice the traffic fatality rate. Something has gone very wrong with US car culture.
California had to change the law to prevent ridiculous retirement payouts and that is where the ire belongs. There is no logic to public employees pulling down 100k retirements but this is where we are. People bemoan private employer payouts need to be watching their backs as they are fleeced by public employee salaries, boosted by overtime and other bonuses, and then their retirements. My favorite is Forbes's work on Illinois 100k club[1]
Look, the average pension for many public servants is not all that grand, it is the big money people who are fleecing not only the tax payers but other public service retirees. There is every reason a retiree should have a good retirement payout but when you start getting into multiples of what the average income of someone in your state is someone needs to step back and say, what gives.
Let alone the pension debt Illinois carries - this is not uncommon across the country
[0]https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-wo...
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/ill...
[2] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/moodys-report-illinois-pensio...
It's not a lifestyle I would choose, but I can see the allure of being top dog in a close knit team. I heard an NPR interview the other day with a CA firefighter. He basically admitted to working so much because 1) he didn't know how to function at home with his family and 2) he was a respected crew chief. When you're "married to the sea" you have a routine of people getting your coffee, etc., that I'm sure you don't receive at home.
This is outrageous, frankly. The job is really not that hard.
> Macko jumped into the rough waters in a remote Palos Verdes gorge and pulled a man to safety through potentially skull-crushing swells and over razor-sharp rocks.
> The 2020 Medal of Valor winner, Edward “Nick” Macko, an ocean lifeguard specialist, earned “only” $134,144 in compensation.
Teachers even in LA aren't making 1/4 of that even at the top of their pay charts they'd be lucky to just touch $100k a year.
We need good lifeguards, sure, but we don't need to pay them $300-400k a year...
Here is a list of all the head coach salaries in CA. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=head+co...
Also this $400k number isn't really what they are paid, it includes benefits that don't directly affect take home pay that most people wouldn't include when talking about a jobs pay
I wonder, why does that apply to lifeguards but not to a FAANG employee?
There are literally millions of Americans who are able to perform the duties of a lifeguard. Millions more that could "manage" lifeguards.
Having your job be spending most of your day on a beautiful beach in southern California? That's a dream to many people!
I hearing on NPR (maybe This American Life?) about a lawyer who works full-time at his own firm during most of the year, but during the summer months goes on sabbatical to work as a lifeguard in the NY area. He's been doing this since he was a kid. Working as a lifeguard is his vacation!
You can't say the same about a Google or Facebook engineer. There's only so many people that could do the job, and very few would consider it their "dream" to code all day for a giant corporation. No one would consider it a vacation!
FWIW we should pay lifeguards a living wage! But $400k for an low-skill job that doesn't even require a high school education? Wow.
I passed lifeguard certification in my twenties. I am not a 'gifted' swimmer and the first time I got into water was when I was ~14 yrs.
The companies go through hoops -- or rather, make you jump through hoops -- to get what they imagine to be the "cream of the crop". But the vast majority of them will tell you that they're not really that much more productive than the next developer who didn't make the cut. They're not sucking up all the 10x developers while the rest of us are stuck with 1x developers. Even if their tests really did get them the 10x developers, they could get a 9.9x developer for half the price.
Worldwide, it's certainly millions. Even just in the US, it's tens of thousands at a minimum, if not hundreds of thousands.
FAANG developers get paid mid six figures because FAANG companies make 11 figures. Lifeguards are not less skilled, more numerous, or less important. They just don't have access to the enormous pot of money. Same with schoolteachers, programmers in other industries, and lots of other people.
Being a programmer is great, and a lot of us are really good at our jobs. No reason to break our arms patting ourselves on the back. We're incredibly fortunate to be skilled at something that's making somebody a ton of money, and they're slightly unbinding the mouths of us kine who tread the grain. But we should remember that this is more about luck than our inherent greatness -- and that goes 10X for FAANG employees.
And remember, the people making these salaries are at the top of their field. They aren’t the lifeguards at your condo’s pool, they are highly trained ocean rescuers. The person at the top of the list is an Assistant Chief at the Los Angeles County Fire Department and manages 900 people. Few people have the experience necessary to be qualified for that position.
It’s not that I’m unhappy with my cushy tech job and the life style that comes with it, but making literally 5x or 10x more than a nurse or a janitor and pretty much anyone who does essential and often backbreaking work is fundamentally unjust and cruel.
Lifeguarding value is determined differently and is independent of pay.
Only in companies whose product is software. In other companies, IT and in-house/backoffice software systems are a cost center, just like the accounting department.
In essence, teachers aren't working >30 hr a week. They get 2 weeks winter break, 1 week spring break, ~2.5 month summer, most every Monday holiday off. So they work about 9 months a year.
On top of that, they receive the amazing lifetime CA Pension which is like 90% of your top 5 earning years.
I looked up my teacher's salaries from high school. They make more than my CA public university STEM professors make.
About 5 years into teaching, a high school teacher will make about 60k/year regular + 25k/year in benefits. Tenured will make 120k+ in base and benefits. That is pretty good for an average of 25 hour workweek, 9 months a year.
Nothing stopping them getting another job that works between the hours of 3-10pm during the school year, putting them closer to the hours a GS analyst would work.
You don't think they just go home and do nothing at 3pm, do you? They still have to grade the work and plan the lessons.
My wife was a teacher. She generally worked from 7:30am till 8pm, sometimes as late as 10pm. I would usually drop her off, go to my engineering job, and then go back to her school where I would spend a few hours hanging out helping her or working or watching TV while she kept working.
And in the summer they spend a bunch of time prepping for the next year and learning new things at conferences.
Anyone who thinks that teachers only work 25 hours a week 9 months a year are sorely mistaken. She definitely did more hours than I did at my engineering job, despite the fact that I made more than 4X her salary.
So many teachers transitioned to grading stuff strictly during class hours so they can dip faster than students could
Salary data is from 2019 and "Nick" won the Medal of Valor in 2020.
Primarily because 1. California has over $1,000,000,000,000 in unfunded pension benefits promised and 2. It only takes one year of employment to reap these lifetime pension and healthcare benefits.
I wonder what will happen in the long run, especially if high-earning tech companies continue to allow remote workers and the California exodus continues.
It's absolutely rampant in government and other industries with seniority based pay and assignment preferences.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bilks-nypd-unearned-ove...
I would be unsurprised if this weren't also true for other CA departments.
Though there is a likely positive feedback loop as increasing compensation with a fixed budget results in fewer hires, more work, and therefore more compensation.
Each person that is saved is arguably worth millions to their family (we're just talking money here not love etc...) and millions to the GDP over their lost lifetime (we're talking about people that can afford to live in LA).
Swimming is a calculated risk. While I appreciate what life guards do, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are more important that other jobs that save lives. You can avoid drowning by simply choosing not to go swimming. If we really want to base things on cost-benefit analysis, someone with some actuary knowledge could probably make a more efficient investment here.
That's a personal decision, not a community one. At the community level that would be equivalent to banning visiting the beach. But yes, the rest of your comment definitely applies.
However as of right now, LA's government does not believe this to be silly.
But saying something like "life is priceless" or worth millions or whatever, that's silly. That's not how we decide to pay for any other dangerous job.
I don't know what a reasonable pay for a lifeguard is, but Glass door seems to say that the market rate is about 20-40k. This job may be risky, and it has benefits to society, but so do a lot of other jobs.
Where is the line drawn? 1M$ a year for each lifeguard? 2 M$ a year? 10 M$ a year?
When is the pay for a life-saving job « adequate »?
So yeah, this article is incredibly deceptive.
Its another reason why CA government is dysfunctional.
CA tax revenues are so high, citizens don't know, for the most part, how much they're being ripped off.