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Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

When your job ads say "not much pay, but you get to carry a big gun and scare people with it," this is what you get. I wish cops and primary/secondary teachers were paid enough that the people reading this post would consider those jobs, because they kind of matter.

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Higher pay doesn't address the problem with cops. They pay cops VERY well in my city, and yet they are still in the news constantly with the same sort of antics. The problem is that the job of law enforcement is BORING. There's simply very little intellectual challenge to driving around all day looking for trouble. Beyond the occasional zen master, you're going to end up with primarily one general kind of person who can tolerate being in law enforcement, and it's not the sort of person who craves sophisticated intellectual stimulation.

I've met some genuinely decent cops, e.g. state troopers, who probably make decent money and care enough to take a pay cut versus what they would make as tech middle management. Driving around issuing speeding tickets and occasionally shooting homeless guys isn't intellectual work, but convincing people who were abused by the last guy in your job that you're trying to make their lives better is tough. Would you be up to it?

Seems like a chicken and egg problem.

They barely deserve the salary they get now with all the incidents going on, but they won't get more intelligent people applying until the wages are increased.

Probably best to start with the teachers so theres a larger pool if educated people to hire from.

According to BLS, coders make something like $93k/yr [1], while policemen make about $57k [2], and primary school teachers make $53k [3]. How much of a pay cut would you take to accept one of those jobs? How much more in taxes would you pay to hire/train better people to do those jobs?

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/S...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Protective-Service/Police-and-detecti...

[3] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Education-Training-and-Library/Kinder...

why should I take a paycut? if we end the war on drugs, we could pay fewer officers more money to do more effective and humane policing, with more training. win/win/win.

Lose for the prison industry, the pharma industry, the military arms industry, the black market drug industry, and police unions. All of which have huge power, and all of which will continue to bribe to keep the blood money flowing.

I'm not able to find the BLS methodology used to come up with that $57k figure, does anybody know? Unless they're drawing that from the IRS, I really doubt the accuracy. Cops generally make quite a bit of money from overtime and generous pensions. They also frequently moonlight and get paid well to do very little: any business that employs a large number of temp workers will have an off duty cop hanging out in a back office, for liability reasons. This demand for off duty cops is a result of cities taking on liability for the off duty cop's actions - instead of the business. At one place I worked, security alerted the off duty that somebody was on the roof late one night (presumably to steal copper from the AC units). The cop made a phone call and within minutes a police helicopter was launch and circling the building, that is another reason why off duty cops get paid so well - the employing business gets a little taste of state power at the tax payer's expense.

They survey employers:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#overview

(The OOH uses OES data: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/about/occupational-information-includ... )

It specifically does not include overtime:

http://www.bls.gov/respondents/oes/payterms.htm#overtime_pay

Ah, thanks. So yeah, I'd interpret the information as only accurately reflecting the results of the survey - not reality :)

You'd think the BLS would be able to get anonymized IRS data.

Cops make crazy money. A relative is a lieutenant, make $120k, and overtime brings that up to almost $200k. If he doesn't make the next promotion in a year or two, he'll be retiring at 42 making around $100k.

Unless you work for some hick department, a cop will easily make more than 80% in coders outside of the Bay Area, and unlike in software, you don't get nuked when you get old. That said, it's a brutal job that takes a toll on you.

"Cops" is a broad term. For police officers in general, $120K/year base salary is extremely high, and not representative of the average. To get your conclusion you have to compare the highest paying jobs for police officers with the average paying jobs for software developers.

Here are more details from the BLS about 'Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers' for 2013: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm

  mean annual wage - $58,720
  50 percentile - $56,130
  90 percentile - $90,700
  New Jersey mean wage - $88,220
  California mean wage - $86,040
  San Francisco mean wage - $99,000

A lieutenant falls in the category "first-line supervisors of police and detectives": http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes331012.htm .

  mean annual wage - $82,710
  50 percentile - $79,190
  90 percentile - $126,320
  New Jersey mean wage - $121,670
  California mean wage - $122,680
  Oakland-Fremont-Hayward - $139,980
  New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ Metropolitan Division - $110,580
  San Francisco mean wage - $134,600

(It's very likely that your relative works in one of the major metropolitan areas, as those are almost the only ones with a mean salary around or above $120K/year.)

For "Software developers, Applications" see http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm :

  mean annual wage - $96,260
  50 percentile - $92,660
  90 percentile - $143,540
  California mean wage - $112,180
  Washington mean wage - $111,380
  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara mean wage - $131,270
  San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City mean wage - $114,400
  Seattle-Bellevue-Everett mean wage - $112,990

The states with the lowest mean wage for software developers (ID, ND, AR, KY, etc.) pay $49,620 to 80,470. This is comparable to the national mean wage for police officers.

For "Software Developers, Systems Software", see http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151133.htm the wages are higher:

  mean annual wage - $104,480
  50 percentile - $101,410
  90 percentile - $150,760
  California - $119,180
  New Jersey - $114,630
  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara mean wage - $132,030
  Oakland-Fremont-Hayward - $119,810

Now that there are numbers, I'll evaluate your claims:

1) "Cops make crazy money"

I don't know what "crazy money" is, but it's clear that only around 15% of first-line supervisors of patrol officers, and only a handful of patrol officers, make 120K/year. Your relative is on the very high end of a lieutenant's base salary, and probably lives in one of the major cities.

2) "Unless you work for some hick department"

I don't know what constitutes a "hick department". The 75 percentile for patrol officers is $73,710 and the 75 percentile for first-line supervisors is $102,600. There are about 6 officers for each supervisor, so I'll say that non-hick cops make around

  (73710*635380 + 102600*101320) / (635380 + 101320) = $77,683/year.

There are also higher paying police officer jobs, but I think this covers enough of the category "cops" to be meaningful.

It's hard to say what overtime might bring in on top of that. I don't know how many police officers get overtime.

3) "coders outside of the Bay Area"

I don't know what you mean by "coder". I chose "software developer" in the above. There's also "computer programmer", but the BLS says that there are only 6,000 computer programmers in the Silicon Valley area, and 28,980 "software developer, applications" (and a further 23,810 "software developer, systems software"). There are other categories as well, but those seemed the best fit for your statement.

The BLS doesn't list "outside of the Bay Area", but it does show that California pays the most of any states, and it lists the total number of software developers (I'm using the "applications" one) in California, in the US, and their mean wage. This is enough to figure out the average non-California mean wage:

    (643830*96260 - 95510 * 112180) / (643830-95510) = $93,486/year

If I further remove the second highest state, Washington, I get $91,612/year.

I trust that this is a close enough approximation to your statement?

4) "a cop will easily make more than 80% in coders outside of the Bay Area"

That does not appear to be the case. While certainly some cops will make more than 80% of coders, in general, coders will make about $15K/year more than police officers.

Again, overtime may change these numbers, but not enough to say that "cops" as a general category get paid "crazy high" income compared to software developers working the same number of hours without overtime.

5) "unlike in software, you don't get nuked when you get old"

The BLS doesn't have those numbers. The career paths are different. To get the $120K/year job requires being at least a first-line supervisor. A software developer is not a supervisor.

For example, a software developer might become a "Computer and Information Systems Manager", which has a mean wage of $132,570, and the 90 percentile is above $187,199/year. (It's off the BLS charts, which stops at $90/hour.) The mean wage for the 10,660 such managers in Silicon Valley is $183,870.

It's therefore very hard for me to figure out the career numbers. I would love to see the analysis you did to draw your conclusion.

Your ignoring the value of an early pension with Heathcoverage that can easily add 30+% to base pay. Also, coders rarely qualify for overtime so that can be a 50% pay cut right there based on 1.5x to 2.0x pay during overtime.

Now adjust for cost of living and taxes which hammer the Bay Area coder's the disposable income and things don't look nearly as good as you might think.

You are correct in that I didn't include early pension. I also didn't include stock options. It's very hard to do a full cost analysis. I would be pleased if you could present better numbers.

Spooky23 specifically excluded the Bay Area ("coders outside of the Bay Area") so your point doesn't apply.

Sorry, that was less clear, the same thing that hurts bay area Developers are just as relevant in other areas.

Sure, the bay area is a very expensive area, but so are NY and DC which also have lots of software developers. Police are paid more in high cost of living areas, but they are also far more widespread spread.

Consider Virginia: Northern Virginia has higher cost of living and a disproportionate share of developers. The police in that area are also paid more to compensate, but if you look at things state wide you’re going to miss out in a massive cost of living discrepancy.

As to pension numbers I don't know of a good way to calculate that. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia EX: Deputy Sheriff Retirement System lists $113,574,000 for 954 active members. So 100k per person. But there are active inflows and outflows of cash it's not directly calculable with those numbers. Per the U.S. Census, in FY 2011, employer contributions to West Virginia state and local government pension plans were 5.01 percent of all state and local government direct general spending. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia#cite... So pensions being ~10-20% boost to base salary seem to be in the right ballpark on average, but Police get early retirement so 20-40% of base salary seems more appropriate.

All of what you are saying is true, but it's on a different track. I was addressing what I thought and still think were incorrect statements by Spooky23.

I did not restrict myself to state-wide numbers. I also listed information about the metropolitan regions with the highest officer, first-line management of officers, and software developer salaries.

I am unsure as to what your point is. Should I have included cost-of-living adjustments? That seems unduly difficult for the point I was trying to make, which itself was an order of magnitude above the written effort by Spooky23 in making those statements in the first place.

The numbers I reported already seemed tilted since I excluded the two highest paying states (California and Washington). Even then, software developers were still making 15K/year more than the 75 percentile of police officers (patrol and first-line). The full analysis would also have to define what "hick" means; I arbitrarily decided it was the bottom 20 or 30% of salaries. I strongly doubt this is true.

There are 954 people in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System of West Virginia. this is essentially confirmed with https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html which says "DSRS currently has approximately 990 active members and 299 retired members."

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_wv.htm#23-0000 says there are 3,500 "Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers" for West Virginia, and 410 "First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives" with median wages of $37,830 and $54,910, respectively.

You can see that Deputy Sheriffs don't make much ( http://woodcountywv.com/page/page149.php says Annual Salary $32,603, http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Berkeley-County-Sheriff-West... says $36K, http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/tri_state/west_virginia/... says $36,048.)

Thus it cannot be that most of the police officers employed in West Virginia retire in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System because some 75% of the police officers are not deputy sheriffs.

As a further refinement of your numbers, https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html reports "Active members contribute 8.5% of their gross monthly salary pre-tax and the Sheriff's Office contributes an additional 12.5% of the member's gross monthly salary... A member is vested after completion of 60 months of covered employment. ... A regular retirement benefit, paid in equal monthly installments, is an amount equal to 2.25% of a member's final average salary multiplied by the member's years of credited service." This is in line with what you estimated.

I then went to https://www.wvretirement.com/Forms/2012-CAFR.pdf . On p187 it says that 1 pensioner made over $60K/year in pension, 1 made over $48K, and most (168 of 272) made under $24K/year. It also says that plan is set up to earn 7%/year. The math to see if that all works out is not something I want to do now.

Under my earlier numbers, I estimated a software developer salary of $93,486, which is about 20% higher than the officer salary of $77,683. With access to the same pension savings fund, doesn't that make the two salaries roughly equivalent, and give the software developer a chance to retire after 20 years?

Of course, there are no software development unions in the US to oversee such a retirement fund. Our loss.

IMO that's really the point. A police officers base salary is significantly lower than a software developers base salary. Add in pensions and there reasonably close. Add in Overtime and the officers may in some cases make more. Granted, a tiny fraction of software developers end up making far higher salarys, but the total/hour worked gap is not exacly all that huge.

PS: Of course some developers also make tiny salary's.

The original point was that a police officer get paid "crazy money." Without a segue into your new point I didn't recognize that you were starting a new conversation.

How many software developers retire as software developers? How many police officers retire as a first line supervisor or higher?

That's a really interesting question; I know plenty of developers that move on to making less money. Either though Developer -> (part time) Developer, Developer -> Teacher or in one case Developer -> Raft Guide. But, I don't really know what happens as an industry.

However, I seems like a lot of officers retire early and either just retire or take a side job with higher pay and little benefits or just something to pass the time.

Honestly, I have no idea what the average is, but there are probably some interesting trends.

You're missing a few key things:

- Overtime. In many cases, police overtime exceeds base salary. Example from Schenectady, NY, which is city of 50-75k people in upstate NY. ( http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Schenectady-cop-s-pa... )

- Actuarial value of pension. Even using the BLS base salary data without overtime of $58k, you need to valuate the cost of a $30k annuity for 30-40 years, as most police have 20 year retirement options at half pay.

- Actuarial value of healthcare. Most jurisdictions provide no-cost healthcare for retirees, at least until recently.

When I say "crazy" money, I mean that being a police officer is a very well paid profession, both in terms of salary and total compensation with pensions & benefits. It's one of the last really good, broadly available blue-collar jobs. That said, the trade-off is that it is a very stressful job where you're exposed to significant risks.

On the flip-side, software developers are rarely unionized and get a lousy deal. How many software developers are paid overtime? Almost all police are.

I didn't miss overtime. You wrote "A relative is a lieutenant, make $120k, and overtime brings that up to almost $200k." I only evaluated the base pay.

That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.

Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.

It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.

You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.

Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.

I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?

I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.

I think that police get lots of overtime in addition to the basic salary, and there are often perks, like extra pay for motorcycle cops to clean and polish their motorcycles, etc...

It doesn't help that departments don't want intelligent officers and can refuse to hire people based on high IQ scores.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836&page=1#.Tv-OZSNWplw

> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.

I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.

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