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Comment by derivative7 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

One thing to keep in mind is teaching is a psychologically demanding job. A good manager will provide the tools needed to succeed professionally and may provide you with the tools to deal with personal issues, but they ultimately have the option to cut an employee loose if they cannot make positive contributions to the workplace. Contrast that to teaching. The measure of success of a teacher is the success of the students who they teach. They often learn details of a student's life that few managers would ever learn of their employees. A well functioning adult would have difficulty dealing with these things, never mind a child or teenager. These are things like children who have had a parent who committed suicide, teenagers who are aging out of the foster care system, students with psychological conditions that would preclude them from most workplaces. These, and many more things, leave teachers working in an environment where a portion of the students are not ready to learn no matter how skilled the teacher is at motivating and delivering the curriculum.

Teachers have to do much more than that. While maintaining their own mental health, which is challenging given the environment they are frequently working in. (Even more so since most teachers enter the profession with optimism and compassion.)

You definitely don’t know any teachers.

If teaching paid what programming does and vice-versa, I’d… think about becoming a teacher. But I still might not. It sucks, a lot.

Then why aren't you teaching? Go spend a few years teaching in a public high school and report back.

Who has the financial ability to switch careers like that on a dime? The only place that such a move is feasible would be a state that doesn't require a degree to teach.

So...Arizona, California, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. Otherwise, pony up the cash for another degree and probably put your other career on hold.

Anyone in the US with a CS degree, or anything technical where they took enough math, would easily be able to get a teaching license in most states. I have a CS degree and was able to get qualified to teach while getting paid as a full time teacher. That was in 2006, and they're even more desperate for teachers today.

That was Colorado. Anyone with a degree can get certified in New Hampshire and then you can easily transfer to other states.

If it's so easy, you should easily be able to pay off any loans you take out to switch to teaching.

> cushy jobs

Compared to what? Coal mining? Sewer maintenance?

> well-above-average remuneration

No. Below average remuneration.

Median Public School Teacher Salary in the United States: $57,947 [0]

Average salary in the U.S. in 2024: $59,384 [1]

[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...

Teachers in the US are famously poorly remunerated compared to other developed countries.

Healthcare, pension and extra vacation make this harder to calculate for teachers than for other jobs. It's not 1:1.

If we have to nitpick over a few dollars down to that level of detail, I think we can all agree it's not a particularly high paying job.

Health coverage is nitpicking? And two months of vacation every summer?

Health coverage is only worth a few thousand dollars. It's not a $50k bonus. They earn well below a typical developer salary. It's not like our cushy jobs. Yes they have extra vacation time but have to use a lot of that on unpaid planning time or additional study for ongoing certification requirements.

This thread wasn't comparing vs programmers but vs average I think. Most jobs get paid less than teachers.

Stats show teachers get paid around average.

I agree with you. That's why I replied to a person that said they get paid below average as 1) they get paid around average as you say, and 2) they have a bunch of additional job perks that make it harder to calculate exactly.

The bureau of labor statistics is clear about the fact they are not paid less than average. Elementary and High school teachers make $73,890 mean wage compared to $65,470 for "all occupations":

1. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/featured_data.htm#largest2

2. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm

You can make this more complex and say that people with equivalent training get paid more, and they do, but then they don't have the perks I mentioned, like huge vacations, having the pleasure of teaching (there's a reason so many people want to teach and supply of teachers doesn't dwindle), pension after you retire, healthcare, and so on.

Yep, even accounting for that, it's still in the ballpark of "average salary". Nothing special.

No, the data show they are at average before accounting for the extra benefits. Since benefits are non-zero, they are above average.

"Ballpark Figure" means roughly or approximately. It is roughly around the average income. Within a standard deviation, therefore within the average salary range. A few dollars of benefits doesn't make a significant difference. Salaries have a distribution. It would be overly pedantic to say a salary is 1 cent higher than the exact average salary figure, therefore it is above average. That is not meaningful in the context of salary distribution.

"Cushy"? Tell me you've never been a teacher without telling me you've never been a teacher.

I'll defend some of what [flagged] was saying.

The pay is pretty fair. They're teaching material that every high school graduate should theoretically be able to teach, so the barrier to entry is low. Most of the prep work can be reused for the next year. Their hours are OK, and they line up with when their kids are in school. Plus they get summers off. It's a shitty job if you actually care, but pretty cushy if you check out and just do what's required.

Teachers don't actually get a 3 month vacation in summer, they just do a shitton of unpaid labor to prep for the next school year while being told they should be grateful

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