Comment by legitster

There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.

The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. It's a super US-centric view, and not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).

Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?

In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.

Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.

Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.

It's totally non-obvious this is true.

> Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.

This was already addressed in the original post. Why write in this "spelling it out for you" style when they already addressed it?

> Do you know why people go through the pain of becoming a doctor? Because they make a lot of money when they get through the other side.

This is really reductive. There are multiple reasons:

- very stable employment

- very prestigious job, and has been for centuries. Conveys authority. Your family can boast that you're a doctor.

- very interesting tales come out of employment, and your family probably

- very easy to feel good about being a doctor - directly helping people etc

Not all of those for everyone, and they no doubt don't all turn out to be the case, but doctors apply for multiple reasons, and many of them aren't in high-paying areas at all. Doctors (in America, which I assume is what you're focusing in on) are paid well partly because they have high expenses in terms of liability insurance.

> Sounds like a doctor?

Not disagreeing, but the US also has a doctor shortage for at least a decade that it is seemingly unable to fix.

> Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified?

Another way would be investing in education (instead of dismantling it, or mixing it with religion and politics), making it more accessible so more people come out who are better equipped to take on "complex jobs"

> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.

Or pay people enough they can afford to work part time. A stressful job is less stressful if you only have to work 2 days a week.

> Offer more compensation.

> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.

I highly doubt that solving the problem with just money will get the right people.

A high salary becomes the goal in an of itself, and everything else falls to the wayside.

Do you really care about safety? Applicants may say they do, but only want to retire after 10 years and will lie through their teeth.

Money is a corrupting factor. I don’t like to take this side of the argument, since I want people to be paid fairly, but there’s something fundamental to seeing unpaid volunteers having the best intentions and most love for their craft

> Do you know why people go through the pain of becoming a doctor? Because they make a lot of money when they get through the other side.

I think the guaranteed respect and admiration that comes from the title is actually a more powerful draw. Don't get me wrong, the money is good, but on par with senior manager in any large tech firm. Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry.

You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC.

> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.

Don't underestimate just how high-stress these jobs are and what it does to you. People quit these kinds of jobs for 2 reasons

  1) They can't deal with the stress mentally, or don't want to.

  2) They were not smart enough to choose option 1 and their body just physically gives up and they are no longer capable of performing their job as an ATC.

I know someone who is now legally handicapped because her lungs don't function properly anymore due to the stress and was forced to retire early.

> Too much stress?

Not just that, but having a shortage means each ATC does more work which is inherently stressful.

Sure, let's have FAA reject qualified ATC applicants because they answered "science" as their worst subject in high school and/or "history" in college. (The core crux of Brigida vs FAA 2015 lawsuit)

Or the passive visual skin color test (Brigida vs Buttigieg 2021 lawsuit).

That'll be about 4,120 qualified ATC applicants that won't be coming back: would you come back if a sizable class-action award is forthcoming?

If that was the plan (to lock up and away FAA ATCs, to inflate supply-demand, that's a shrewd economic move, but I don't think so).

i dont think offering more compensation solves the problem.

the people you might want mignt

1. always have a better option elsewhere and if your raise the offer, competitors will offer something even higher instead, beyond the pittances the government is willing to spend 2. never be willing to take on the job as specified - huge responsibility and risk of killing people, with long hours and no recognition 3. never finds out that the pay is high - nobody talks about it, or sells its existence as an option. 4. doesnt have a parent in the business to teach them what to do

raising the payment seems to fail a lot, even though its suggested naively all the time as the solution to all labour problems.

alternatives might be to increase outreach, immigration, enslaved prison workers, stronger unions to make the job more like what people are willing to work, etc

> Everything you have listed above could be solved with money.

Except that when money was on the table, Reagan fired them. ATC is remote from most people's day-to-day awareness unless planes hit each other, but medical help that's held back is really in-your-face.

Granted, that's decades in the past. No way anyone would jump in and try to gut the public service like that today [1].

[1] sarky.

I respectfully disagree - there's always money in the banana stand.

> Everything you have listed could be solved with money.

No that's actually not true. Government jobs are soul crushing. The way the bureaucracy works, its all about social standing, politics, and seniority. In these jobs you trade your sanity for money, and they have a long reputation for being just like this which is why few ever apply.

No reasonably average intelligence person is going to do that unless they are absolutely desperate. Its a dead end job.

You must be an economist. :D

- Can you swim now?

- No.

- What if I give you money?

> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.

I feel like this could be counterproductive. If people retire after 10 years instead of after 30 years, you now have to hire 3x the amount of people over time.

RE "...The first time a plane goes down carrying a dozen congress critters and ...."

Is it realized it almost happened in the recent helicopter / aeroplane crash. As it was said the helicopter was used for moving VIPS ....

I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most of these systems are complex, but not as complex as e.g. an operating system.

But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does require a commitment to try to understand the thing you're managing.

Politicians don't hire competent administrators because they believe that building a solution yourself and buying a solution from a contractor are basically equivalent, which anyone on this website can tell you is not true. This is an easier problem to solve than most think, but it's not trivial. And it's really hard when you have clowns like Elon Musk purposefully destroying institutional knowledge for no good reason.

with more money you will attract greedy people and greedy is contradictory with being responsible

Paying too much can be counterproductive, if the job is demanding, people don't find it inherently rewarding, and most people are not qualified for it. If you earn enough to retire after 10 years, you also earn enough to feel financially secure after 3 years, quit, and find a better job.

> Technology hasn't changed is a political problem due to lack of... money.

Tell me you haven’t worked in aerospace without telling me you haven’t worked in aerospace. There is plenty of money sunk into all corners of the field but progress is slow because the risk of change is lives lost. At some point, the risk of not changing means more lives lost… and that’s when things will change.

mid 100k salary... not worth it for that level of stress

Sorry. But people in general do not choose to study medicine because they can make a lot of money after the study.

I have had some experience with family, girl friends, friends and med-students. And it was definitely not the primary reason any one of them chose that path.

I don’t think money is a strong enough single motivator for med-school or any other long term hard study/job.

I think you're simplifying the frame far too much here. My wife works in medicine as an ENT surgeon. There is an ENT surgeon position open in a rural hospital outside of fresno CA that pays 1.1M dollars/year, or about 2.5-3x the salary a large hospital in a major metro would pay for the work. The position has been unfilled for 4 years. As best I can tell, the two main reasons the job goes unfilled are a combination of (1) it has a stressful call schedule and (2) its in an remote and undesirable location. ATC jobs have a wide geographic distribution. You need ATC at the commercial airports in Klamath Falls OR and Elmira NY and these are places people are generally moving away from, not moving into because they are run down and have low opportunity and general prevalence of rural poverty. Paying more money doesn't automagically fill these roles, and there is an upper limit to how much you can pay someone and have it be a net benefit.

part of the problem is the structural problems caused by high turnover are themselves causing high turnover. people can't take vacation, people need to work 6 days 12 hours a week.

there is also the issue of location. where applicants are and where controllers are needed is often two distinct circles and once you throw relocation into remote areas into the mix it becomes really unattractive.

I think this is a naive way of looking at the problem. People that start working in banks, generally do that as a starting point. ATC is the end of the road for that career.

Working in a bank is the start of a quite lucrative career, working as an ATC is the end.

Indeed, we can offer more money to ATC, but there is not a lot, progression wise.

Honestly, how would a junior ATC look like, compared with a senior?

The million dollar salary thing is compelling. I would certainly switch careers from ML engineering for a million bucks of cash comp, especially in a low CoL location :) Also, the "30 years old" thing mentioned in the GP seems excessive, surely if they were really desperate to staff up, they could loosen that age limit.

It's a different kind of pressure. Lives aren't on the line making trades, not like air travel. This lends to a different type of stress.

Losing millions for your boss, losing your job != killing hundreds with a single mistake made in seconds.

> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools

The mass of unemployed CS grads?

> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools

I don't think any sane person would be against raising ATC wages. But to refer back to my post, the situation might be different if it there were not also a massive pilot shortage as well! If these two pools of talent mostly overlap raising wages on one will probably just pull from the other.

It's probably a combination of raising wages and putting more money into recruiting teenagers considering vocational programs.

Ofcourse it would. Capitalism is all about dealing with shortages in exchange for money.

So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.

That was quite the rabbit hole. Thanks for sharing.

Maybe occasional free pizza, casual Friday's, and an employee of the month plaque would help?

"Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees?"

Baumol effects. Our economy is incredible, extremely high productivity along with full employment. Its why we have ordering kiosks at fast food restaurants, pay 225k for bucee's managers and 20 dollars/hour to flip burgers at fast food restaurants. ATC is a low productivity growth job, technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage. As other jobs and sectors of the economy improve in productivity, people migrate to those sectors from low productivity sectors like ATC because on average high productivity sectors can pay more. The salaries of ATCs rise because there is more competition for the limited pool so you end up paying more but getting the same or worse outcomes over time.

> You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?

The UK has a controller hiring/retention problem at the moment, too. The less lucrative airports keep losing controllers to the bigger players and can’t replace them. Periods of service reduction are common.

The general problem here is that we need to do something about the government contracting process. It has been thoroughly captured by large government contractors who do mediocre work for enormous sums of money while excluding anyone who could do better from the process through corruption and red tape.

Which in turn means that important systems become frozen in time because upgrade attempts become boondoggles that can't meet requirements until they're so far over budget they get canceled, or never attempted.

One of the major problems that should be fixed immediately is that the government pays for code to be written but then doesn't own it, which makes them dependent on the contractor for maintenance. Instead they should be using open source software and, when custom code is necessary, requiring it to be released into the public domain, both for the benefit of the public (who might then be able to submit improvements to the code they're required to use!) and so that maintenance can be done by someone other than the original contractor.

* the voters need to be willing to not scream bloody murder if long term ATC investment raises taxes or airfares by $0.01

If anything tech upgrades could potentially just make the job less stressful for current traffic controllers - which might end up (long term) with big benefits for everyone.

The government is making that investment. Upgrading the legacy system will take decades regardless of how much money they spend.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

SpaceX moved fast, broke things, and still did pretty well on their safety-critical Dragon program, all things considered.

But SpaceX is solving a simpler problem because it’s a greenfield program (aside from docking with ISS, but there’s a spec and they implemented it). ATC involves interactions with the entire existing enormous worldwide fleet of aircraft and pilots.

All that being said, a system that allocates certain volumes of airspace to aircraft and alerts aircraft if they are on a trajectory likely to encroach on someone else’s allocated airspace seems doable and maybe even doable in a backwards compatible way. But this, by itself, would not meaningfully increase capacity.

And I agree this is silly and unfortunate. SFO, for example, has two parallel runways, and airplanes can only land simultaneously on them if visibility is very good. Surely modern GNSS plus radio (which can do time-of-flight and direction measurements with modern technology!) plus inertial measurement could let a cooperating pair of planes maintain appropriate separation and land simultaneously, safely, with zero visibility, even under conditions of active attack by a hostile system. But that would require a kind of competence and cooperation between the government and vendors that does not currently exist.

There are some small airports that don’t have an ATC. You could start with those

    > must have 20/20 vision in each eye, no contacts

The page doesn't say that. It says:

    > Applicants must demonstrate distant and near vision of 20/20 or better in each eye separately. The use of bifocal contact lenses for the correction of near vision is unacceptable.

Some light Googling will tell you that glasses or contact lenses to fix distant or near vision are fine.

Do you have a source? Because that doesn't pass the smell test to me.

If they're hiring 10 people and have 20 good, qualified applicants then sure, maybe diversity efforts would mean that a straight white man gets overlooked.

But we're talking about the context of them complaining that they can't hire enough people, and absolutely no diversity program anywhere is saying "well we need to hire people, and there aren't any good applicants left except those who don't tick diversity boxes, but still let's not bother hiring them". It really doesn't make sense at all unless those 900 people actually weren't good enough applicants and are wrongly believing that diversity is the reason.

> I am completely naive about the challenges presented.

The problem isn't collision detection or predicting movement. They're not a bunch of particles on simple ballistic trajectories. They're powered objects traveling in a turbulent and difficult to predict medium. In emergency conditions they can turn from a powered vehicle to an unpowered one. They can need to land immediately when flight worthiness changes in flight. A situation on the ground can make landings unsafe or impossible and an aircraft needs to diverted disrupting traffic at another airport.

Automating ATC works until one or more exceptional conditions arises. Then it's completely unsuitable and everyone from pilots to ATC need to work against the happy path automation to keep people alive.

> We have video games like Fortnite that can handle collision detection across a hundred players with bullets flying everywhere.

With Fortnite, Epic pushes one update and a week later virtually every gamer has the update for free. And when an update goes bad, or the game goes down, usually nobody dies.

With aviation? Lifecycles there are measured in decades, and the changes needed for new control systems in an existing aircraft can be so huge that the entire aircraft needs a new certification. Hell if you want and can acquire such a thing, you can fly aircraft that's over a century old. Many avionics systems still in use today fundamentally date back to shortly after WW2 - VOR/DME for example is 1950s technology.

For tower control systems, you'd need a system that's capable of dealing with very very old aircraft, military aircraft that doesn't even have transponders activated a lot of the time, aircraft that don't have transponders at all (e.g. ultralights), has well defined interfaces with other systems (regional/national/continental/oceanic control zones)...

Oh and someone has to pay for all of that.

TCAS exists. It doesn't always work and of course not all aircraft have it.

Everyone likes to imagine the controller has a screen with perfect information on it. They do not. Especially when light aircraft are involved.

Fortnite is a closed system, everything controlled by one company. ATC is not.

But yes, presumably there is scope for improved tools.

I work on ATC software in another country. In my experience the biggest hurdle is the way the software is being developed and sold. ATC authorities and service providers buy these systems as a product but they don't have the code. Developers of the products (people like me) constantly have to maintain different versions deployed all around the world for different areas or countries or service providers. And there are hundreds of different systems working in parallel for no reason. For example there is an airport with 5 runways here and they installed a specific software just to monitor the speed and altitude of the planes taking off from this runway. They already have 5 different survelliance monitors feeding this info as well as direct view from the tower. Every new software now also has to consider and integrate with this specific system and many like it.

but what if it ate into a doctor or surgeon's talent pool instead?

The use of "bifocal contact lenses" is not allowed. Bifocal glasses are fine.

Yeah the under 31 surprised me. That alone would bring a shortage.

Radar sweeps, it takes time to get back, it takes time to relay information and it takes time to respond. When you have aircraft moving at hundreds of miles an hour crossing in close proximity the trajectory can change and result in impact before radar can gather data, assess it, make a prediction and relay that information.

> Cameras

You might be interested to know that the video feed (the marketing one at least, not the one for engineers) for the recent boom supersonic flight was just a phone and a starlink in one of the planes following. Things can be done.

there is an insane overhead to any improvement that can be made to these systems.

ATC here, I love that documentary :-)

(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)

I have some wild stories, but unfortunately sharing them would dox me.

The most inaccurate thing though is a transfer CPC (fully-certified controller at their previous facility) plugging in and being able to work without months of training in that area.

You must be younger than 31 to qualify for training as an ATC: https://www.faa.gov/faq/what-are-age-requirements-individual...

A lot of pilots seem to retire into commercial aviation after their military careers. They already have all the training and flight hours. After 20 years and a pension they're keen to keep on flying, but not as high-speed.

There is a maximum age for atc applicants (31) that unfortunately makes this infeasible.

What is "low stakes"? This is quite literally life-or-death.

Also, just FYI -- airports don't hire their own ATC; it's all FAA (or the equivalent wherever you are located.)

Sounds good! Maybe you can start a business and have a low-stakes regional airport work with you. I think the main way to do it is as an add-on/assistant for the existing toolset.