Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

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Not "high value", but rather "high skill". Some examples of occupations that need a professional degree in order to be filled.

  Information Technology
    Software engineers
    Database administrators
  Teachers
    Primary
    Secondary
    University
  Health care professionals
    Physicians
    Nurses
    Dentists
    Psychologists
  Engineers
    Civil
    Chemical
    Mechanical
    Industrial
    Surveyors
  
  ... and Fashion models

With an auction approach, would the software engineers completely at big tech companies (or consultancies capable of demanding big tech compensation) continue to be able to drown out the other professions?

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+schoo...

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&...

The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."

It might be my naiveity, but, shouldn’t highly-skilled and in-demand professions be the highly valued ones? Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.

Compensation is often coupled with revenue generation - not skills.

Teachers generate no revenue.

Compare the compensation for big tech software developers vs those employed directly in public sector. Its not that public sector are less skilled, nor less in demand - but rather public sector doesn't generate revenue and its budget is a different path.

I would contend that this isn't "teachers and public sector software developers are necessarily poorly compensated" (though I will say that teachers should be paid more) but rather that the revenue that is coupled with a software developer in the private sector is disproportionately high and so companies in that domain can compensate more highly.

The control of teachers salaries are based on what funding the school district gets which comes from taxes. The public tends to prefer low taxes and models which do not allow tax dollars collected in one spot to be used in another which depresses the compensation for everyone in public sector (including teachers).

Unless you are at or near the top and have control of the budgeting, rarely will public sector pay on the same scale as private sector.

>Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.

Its because the state has a near monopoly on hiring teachers, so they can keep wages artificially low.

The school has a budget that comes from property taxes (in most cases) that people tend to be resistant to raise.

Let's double the teachers' wages, but first you need to double the budget, and for that, need to first double the local property taxes.

Put doubling the property taxes on the next ballot and see if that passes. If not, there is no money to raise the wages for teachers.

Where wages can go up is when teachers move from a cost center to a profit center ... such as with a private school, though that is still limited by the amount that people are willing to pay to go there.

A local private high school (midwest - median household income is $75,000) is $16,000 per year with enrollment of about 500 students. You have $8M to use. There are 100 people on staff (this includes grounds and maintenance). Let's apply a broad stroke and say that this is 75 teachers and 25 kitchen, maintenance, grounds, and secretarial jobs. Pretending that all other expenses are $0 and that the non teaching staff is $0 also... $8M into 75 is $106k. That places an upper bound on the amount that teachers make there ... unless we raise that $16,000 tuition or find other revenue sources.

The idea that private schools could serve anywhere near the amount of kids that public schools do and that would somehow result in higher wages for teachers is rather unserious on its face.

The parent comment was confused how demand is high, supply is low, yet wages are also low. I explained how these wages are fixed. You're the one coming up with these new assertions.

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