Comment by ryandrake
3 months ago
> I would argue an ATC employee is worth every penny, but I also don't think there is a magical amount of money where you are going to suddenly double your pool of candidates willing to do this kind of work. These people are already very well compensated, and at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools.
It wouldn't happen overnight, but surely if ATC had a similar compensation reputation as, say, investment banking, we wouldn't have the pipeline problem that we do now. Surely banks don't have a problem finding young, quick thinking minds to put through their pressure factories. I don't think the ATC candidate pool is currently even close to the limit of people who could take the stress and do the work. Offer controllers starting salaries of $1M/yr and see how things start to change.
Your point in the other thread about marketing the job to teenagers is also good. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people interested in ATC aren't already "aviation adjacent" to some degree (ex-military, family are pilots, and so on)
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.
> There is an ENT surgeon position open in a rural hospital outside of fresno CA that pays 1.1M dollars/year
while 1.1m/yr sounds like a lot, it isn't the right number to consider. The right number is the difference between this job, and a similar job else where that has better facilities/amenities and comfort. If said surgeons who would qualify could've gotten a similar job in a major city for a similar amount of money, they might prefer it there (near family/friends, amenities etc).
So how much _over_ the typical pay is the 1.1m/yr salary offered?
The commenter did say up to 3x, so up to ~730K higher than that job in a major city (with possibly better facilities but who knows)
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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.
And not allowing people to take anxiety meds is nuts. Some of those meds seem perfect for this job, putting you in a very mellow, but focused state.
> Some of those meds seem perfect for this job, putting you in a very mellow, but focused state.
Many drugs, especially some anxiety medications, produce false feelings of sobriety.
I can’t believe I have to write this, but: Feeling mellow and focused from drugs does not mean you’re okay to perform well at mentally demanding or safety-critical tasks like driving or directing air traffic.
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Or smoke cannabis after a hard stressful day at work
I find the moderation here frustrating at times when people will down vote but not explain why.
There may be a very go reason to not allow anxiety medication, I don't know enough about it myself.
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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?
Look at how much a senior airline pilot makes, compared to a junior.
English might not be my native language, but I think we are not talking about pilots here.
ATC salary increases with experience. The better ones are promoted to supervisors.
Hahahahahaha....
ATC here, opinons are my own and not necessarily (definitely not in this case) that of the FAA.
Thank you for the laugh.
Out of the 10 supervisors I've had, one was amazing, one was average, and one I attended the funeral of after he drunk himself to death.
ATC salary only increases with the sub-inflation 2% or whatever presidential raise and 1.6% union-negotiated raise, each year.
No one is promoted, they have to apply, and the good controllers don't apply because if they hate it and go back to controlling, they lose their seniority (this is the union's rule). The bad controllers apply to be supervisors so they don't have to really control (they do the minimum 16 hours a month on a empty sector in the morning). Maybe this is a feature - a way to get bad controllers away from traffic.
promoting someone to their level of incompetence i see?
Technical jobs should not be promotion driven at all. It should be a combination of seniority, and technical expertise/experience. Their metric should be something like number of accidents under their tenure, vs accident free hours under operation.
A supervising position might not see problems as fast as someone actually doing said job, which wastes the experience acquired by said supervisor!
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What job have you ever held where the management was consistently better than ICs?
Hopefully they don’t throw juniors on to the busiest runways in the country
Where else would they learn how to handle that kind of environment?
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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.
20/20 vision in each eye (no contact lenses) is also a requirement. I have a feeling thatll rule out a lot of software engineers on this site.
I believe this is incorrect - your vision just has to be correctable to 20/20 in both eyes: https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/FAA_Order_39... (Also you can't be color blind.)
Still a bit of a risk though - if your vision ever degrades you might be out of work unless you can get transferred to a desk job or something.
I assume plenty of people will be happy to go through LASIK for that
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My own experience tells me that past 30 years old my thinking is slightly slower in the form of slightly longer reaction times, and slightly longer time to recall specific facts. This hardly matters in my current job but perhaps ATC would be different. Perhaps they are taking that into account.
What they're taking into account is their mandatory retirement age (56), which is indeed related to things like reaction times for people as they get older; and then they work back from that to say you need to be young enough to have earned your pension by the time you're forced to retire.
So a rules change could improve things on that front, as they could for example allow working from 40 to 56 to count as enough to earn a full pension, without any change to their safety policy on the age cutoff for finishing working as an ATC - but it wouldn't be cheap, as you not only are massively increasing the cost of pensions across the board, but you're also paying the same amount to train a 40yo applicant as a 30yo one, but getting fewer years of valuable work back from that training cost.
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.
Yeah, the closest I ever came to life-critical software was payroll projects.
I discovered by accident that people will notice a one-cent change in their paycheck.
> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools
The mass of unemployed CS grads?
What makes you think CS grads would be good candidates for a high stress job that requires excellent communication skills?
Ability to rapidly process information and react to changes.
Communication is a learned skill.
Ability to handle stress and thrive under pressure is the key.
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They won't be, which is why it's funny to me.