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Comment by lhorn | Hacker News Reader

That's because our system somehow rewards real estate speculators, mortgage brokers, middle management, lawyers and healthcare professionals way more than it rewards engineers. I don't really know why this is happening, but I am sure you all have met a few MBA types who have "the vision" and looking for "just" a code monkey to build their fortune. This is also the reason why GE/Ford/Chrysler continued building shit for decades, giving out multi-million dollar bonuses to their top-tier management.

Someone suggested it's because we live in a "services economy" not a "product economy" and, therefore, the value of engineering is declining. There is some truth in that: google isn't an engineering firm, they are in the entertainment business, very much like ESPN, Fox and those annoying guys in big hats at your local Tres Amigos.

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That's funny, it's a routine complaint at Stanford that all the campus job fairs are filled with companies recruiting engineers and nobody else. :p

Our system also rewards engineers way more than teachers, graduates who go into public service, and-- at graduation time, at least-- anyone with a humanities degree. I'd worry about fixing compensation for teachers before rewarding engineers...

Google is an engineering firm, they just happen to make money from ads.

Compensation for teachers is fantastic, as long as you compare it properly to compensation for other workers.

To begin with, multiply by (12 months worked by others)/(9 months worked by teachers).

Then add in the value of the state health plan, usually fantastic.

Then add in the real value of a defined benefit pension plan (chances are you only get a defined contribution plan) available in most states.

Then add in the value of tenure, which I'll tentatively estimate as effectively doubling the salary (1).

All that is actually pretty good for a group of people who tend to come from the bottom of the barrel cognitively (http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...).

The idea that teachers are underpaid is a myth propagated by teachers unions and their lackeys in the media.

(1) Many tenured professors could easily double their salary by quitting, but choose not to.

Your doubling the salary for teachers due to tenure is questionable. The reason tenured professors don't quit is only partly due to tenure, also due to the fact that they find being a professor more interesting than the other work. Regular (grade-school to high-school) teachers don't exactly have tenure (though for those in most unions it is close), and they probably don't have the same employment options outside the profession.

I'd give a multiple of 1.2.

It's certainly questionable, I didn't mean to imply it was more than a rough guess. It's true, professor jobs at research universities have an "interestingness" premium, so part of the multiple comes from that.

On the other hand, lack of external employment options makes tenure MORE valuable, since it raises the risk premium the teacher would demand to quit the tenured job.

Since my financial math is rusty, I won't try to compute the actuarial values of these revenue streams, however.

Most teachers are not professors. Most teachers work for public schools in the k-12 arena. Many times tenure doesnt work out.

Teachers rarely get overtime, but overtime is necessary. The best teachers I know, and I know about 20, work 7-7. They work during the summer to setup curriculum, to tutor summer school students, to select books, to setup their classroom. And they do this all without any extra pay than their salary. They also supplement poor school budgets with their own money to buy supplies the students need to learn.

They are generally pressured to pay into a Teachers union that supports the misfits in their profession, and doesn't generally help them at all. These same awesome teachers are paid solely on the number of years they have been working -- not (at all) by performance, skill, or student/parent reviews. This translates into little reward for awesome teachers over not to awesome 8:15-3pm teachers.

But I digress.

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