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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, on the engineering side, is rough for high-end software engineers, but let's be very real: it pays better than the vast majority of careers available in America, even right out of college, and while it's stressful so is being a teacher or working in the food industry, and those jobs pay peanuts compared to an Amazon SWE. It is fortunate to get a job there. It may be even more fortunate to get a job at another high-end software company but that doesn't change the fact that a job at Amazon is life changing money for most people.

To pre-empt hyperbolic responses: I live in Seattle. I personally know plenty of people who have worked at Amazon. I know plenty of local teachers. The teachers work as many hours for a tenth the pay and burn out just as fast.

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You might be right about the hours the teachers work, but they're not doing it to avoid being fired. It is entirely self-imposed stress. Teachers have unions and tenure. I'll help people, but I won't martyr myself in a hospital, let alone a frickin' tech company.

I don't consider 60 hour work weeks a privilege to be coveted, especially if I'm capturing less than 1% of the value I produce. I'm sorry man, but white collar serfdom is still serfdom.

If you're really going to keep begging this hard to be a serf on someone else's fiefdom, I'll tell you what: you can keep overworking yourself as serf on fiefdoms in which I might own shares, and increase the value of my portfolio for me, so I can draw even more passive income every month. I formally withdraw my protest to your "Protestant" work ethic.

I'm not trying to be an asshole, but I'm just hoping you take what I'm saying burns into your subconscious and something in you changes: that work into which you've placed so much of your self-esteem is just funding other peoples' passive income to either not work or live ostentatiously. If that's a great privilege to you, God bless you. I'm sure my wife would love it if I just retired- please make it happen, she would love me even more for it.

EDIT: P.S. Your "privilege" of working for Jeff Bezos' portfolio sounds a lot like a biblical curse. Specifically, 1 Samuel 8:10-18 and Psalm 105:44.

"He gave them the lands of the nations, that they might inherit the fruit of others’ labor"

> It is entirely self-imposed stress. Teachers have unions and tenure.

You don't have the first idea what teachers do or what their jobs require.

If you really think all teachers have tenure and are supported by unions, you also have not the faintest, foggiest inkling of a clue about the job market or professional environment of most teaching in the US.

I think it's also worth pointing out that, even as you repeatedly label others "arrogant," your comments in this thread are themselves breathtaking in their arrogance. I rarely run across HN comments so condescending, dismissive, self-righteous, or self-congratulatory.

Very true. You are right. I also felt those comments about teachers being in union , job safety and all sounds like it is frozen in 1960s America. To think software jobs (forget even Amazon for a moment ) are horrible compare to tons of teaching, medical, legal and so on is indeed arrogance of first rate.

Evidently, I'm just imagining all the times my teachers went on strike in Illinois in the 2000s. There have not been any "right to work" laws in Illinois passed affecting teachers or firefighters since then. Evidently, it's all in my head that most blue states like IL, MN, MA, and NY have legal protections for public schoolteachers.

I never said I was opposed to it, either. Quite the contrary. In fact, I think public schoolteachers and firefighters have a great idea about unions, and software engineers should follow their example and unionize.

I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread, because you completely missed my point. I don't care who has it worse. I care about who is making it bad, and what we as software engineers are going to do to make it right.

> Evidently, I'm just imagining all the times my teachers went on strike in Illinois in the 2000s. There have not been any "right to work" laws in Illinois passed affecting teachers or firefighters since then. Evidently, it's all in my head that most blue states like IL, MN, MA, and NY have legal protections for public schoolteachers.

> I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread

This isn't productive. It's belittling, snotty, and disrespectful. You're also clearly more than intelligent enough to recognize that you're putting in people's mouths claims they haven't made.

When you can't make a point, just resort to name calling and tone policing.

I'm definitely on point that most teachers in blue states have worker protections, job security, and lax hours that no software engineer has despite comparatively low pay. In Illinois, the top end of high school teacher salaries even crosses into six figures.

I can't recall one software engineering job with tenure, let alone tenure that vests after 5-7 years.

I also can't recall one software engineering job listing with a benefits package that has the same vacation as a child and civil servant-grade health insurance, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. If you find a job posting like that, let me know.

If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.

Roughly half of public-school teachers in the US have tenure. According to my reading, teachers below the university level typically receive tenure in three years, not 5-7. And yet nearly half of teachers still don't have tenure. What does that tell you about turnover in the field? And can you think of any reasons why turnover would be so high?

Private-school teachers receive none of the protections that public-school teachers receive, and not all teachers are primary or secondary-school teachers. At the university level, teaching is increasingly the work of non-tenured staff, who have no job protections or job security, beyond guarantees that cover at most the current academic year, and their benefits are a bare shadow of what tenure-track faculty receive.

Teachers work longer hours than software engineers. This isn't self-imposed. Those are what the demands of the job require. There is no way to fulfill the average teacher's responsibilities with 40 hours of work per week. Their hours are longer, by necessity, and the stress level is far higher.

I'm a software engineer with experience in teaching. My benefits package as an SWE is vastly better than anything I received at my teaching job(s) or any of the teaching jobs I interviewed for.

So I can only repeat what I've already said: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

> If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.

And this is odious.

>You might be right about the hours the teachers work, but they're not doing it to avoid being fired. It is entirely self-imposed stress. Teachers have unions and tenure.

No, and no. Your perception of modern labor markets is dated and disconnected from reality. Schools are constantly facing budget cuts and a huge chunk of teachers aren't even full time (instead getting things like a 60% time position - less pay, no security, but enough hours that good luck working a second job). Those that get full time positions still face the elimination of their positions.

I guess I just assumed teachers have the same protections in deep blue Washington state that they have in Illinois and Minnesota.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. However, there's a fix for that: move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.

I was a teacher in blue California for four years. You don't know what you are talking about.

Where in all of this discussion did I say anything about California?

>assumed teachers have the same protections in deep blue Washington state

California is just as "blue" as Washington.

>move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.

There is no such state. Nearly every state is in budget crisis and cutting school funds, and a certain vocal segment of them are actively attacking the entire concept of education, banning books, prosecuting teachers who provide support to their students or talk about how the world works, and more.

Illinois and Massachusetts are definitely not slashing public school spending. Deep-red Florida is also increasing its educational budget, and so is deep-red Texas.

It's not like I have family or friends with kids going to public school or anything in those states, what do I know?

Florida and Texas are spending because they make life for educators utter hell and there are plenty of other good reasons no teacher wants to go there. Illinois may be a single counterexample, but this is akin to saying "if you watch Craigslist for a few weeks you can get an amazing deal on one car" - the plan does not scale, and if a non-trivial number of the people in the market for [a used car / a better education job] tried to go for that target it would instantly dry up as there aren't enough to go around by many orders of magnitude.

Do you have receipts you would like to share, or have I just been unwittingly hosting an NPR vent line this whole time?

Florida is criminally investigating teachers who dare to call students by their preferred name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxINwPrff0Q

They've criminalized such awful things as having libraries in the classroom with books not approved by dear leader: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/florida-teachers-could-face-fe...

Texas is doing the same: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-senate-bill-sb-4...

Definitely worth moving to a different state where just being a good teacher risks felony charges.

> you can keep overworking yourself as serf on fiefdoms in which I might own shares, and increase the value of my portfolio for me, so I can draw even more passive income every month

Yeah, I guarantee you that the guy who worked at Amazon as a Principal Engineer for 10 years has a bigger portfolio than you.

levels.fyi says $967k/yr average compensation at that level.

Yeah, but I didn't have to work at Amazon to do it. No micromanagement, no verbal abuse, no work calls at 3am, no PIPs, no door desks, no cult indoctrination.

More importantly, the time I spent managing my portfolio taught me how to better manage my portfolio. If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is richer than Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch, it does not change the fact that Warren Buffett and Peter Lynchs' path to success is much more reproducible and reliable with a much lower barrier to entry.

If you made that kind of money working for Amazon, then good for you. I wish more members of the middle class would make FU money and save their money so they can hold greater leverage and take home a much larger portion of the value they add to society.

"The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will."

-Henry George

P.S. FWIW, I don't need that much to be happy. Last March, I visited my wife (then fiancee) in Hiroshima and spent 3 weeks in a 250sqft weekly-rental apartment in sharing a twin bed, living off of Ogura toast and miso soup for breakfast, < $5 meals at Ramen and Udon shops, making Katsu curry together, and going on walks, and it was the best time in my entire life.

Pardon me if you thought I was trying to convince you I'm rich or humblebrag about it. Far from it, I'm just finally financially independent and happy about it. I never wanted to be rich, just rich enough to say "fuck you" to growing someone else's grapes and pressing someone else's wine so that someone else can wear fine silk.

I achieved my goal of no longer needing to be a software engineer to maintain a lower middle class life. That's all.

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