Comment by tw04
3 months ago
Everything you have listed above could be solved with money.
Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified? Sounds like you need more applicants? Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.
The training and onboarding is incredibly long? Sounds like a doctor? 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.
Technology hasn't changed is a political problem due to lack of... money. There isn't an issue with new technology, there's an issue with the government refusing to invest in upgrading the technology. Canada doesn't have this issue and they're far smaller than the US.
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 do absolutely, 100% think that this is a problem that can easily be solved with money.
I also think our politicians will flounder around making excuses about how the problem is unsolvable because it doesn't directly help their chances of re-election.
The first time a plane goes down carrying a dozen congress critters and their families, you can bet there will magically be money in the banana stand.
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.
Maybe we should TRY paying people more. Like just once. Just to see what happens.
We do? Is there a reason you believe otherwise?
There are nearly infinite studies in infinite fields on this, and despite claims here, the results are mixed at best.
Certainly not the utopia consistently predicted.
I'm sure someone will next just say it's not enough money, rather than bother to read any of the studies and whether they tried to account for this or not, or ...
I'm going to ignore those comments, since it doesn't seem like a discussion anyone wants to learn anything in.
If you want to push your preferred position, that's sort of silly. There is no winning or losing here. If you want to actually learn something, happy to discuss it for real.
3 replies →
Why not at least try to pay people more? Everyone gives exactly your argument without ever trying to raise the base salary for new hires and give existing workers a boost in pay.
You can't say it doesn't work until you've raised the median salary in the field and observed the effect. Managers and bean counters aren't willing to do this so it will never happen.
Again, we have?
I knew, of course, this would be the response. But i'm not sure why, in the history of the world, people assume we haven't tried paying people more in various fields, and that "managers and bean counters aren't willing to do it".
It's amazingly silly.
It would take you less than 60 seconds to find at least 100 studies on this, across tons of fields.
The next thing that happens is that when you point out studies (and there are plenty good and bad), they will start arguing with any study that doesn't support their already preferred position, rather than trying to ever spend time considering alternatives.
There are nearly infinite studies on infinite fields and the results are fairly mixed.
Certainly not the amazingly positive expected value that constantly gets paraded around.
Some of y'all are so money driven you just can't possibly contemplate that not everyone is driven by money.
All salient things being equal, which pretty much have to be the case for ATC (it will always have very high demands), adding more compensation will get more applicants.
Do you have other ideas on what constraints can be relaxed?
> Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely
Pay cuts are not important; profit is! If I get paid 100 less, and spend 90 less because of no commuting, I'm gaining more than before.
This is completely true.
I make less working remotely in a LCOL area than I would in the HCOL area where my office resides. The differential in COL, though, is so high that I'm saving a lot more. In other words, I'm making less but I'm building more wealth.
Most of the money that goes into living in a HCOL area and commuting to office is just pure waste to satisfy the egos of upper managers who want to preside over a big floor of workers.
2 replies →
i think you have your numbers flipped, but for me personally no commute is worth the drop in stress and increase in free time
1 reply →
Bruh
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
This is true for individuals.
With a sample size large enough, the probability that no one will be up for it given the increased pay, is extremely low, tending to zero.
Sure, but increasing that sample size would require doing more than just paying them more.
IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.
It is more useful, for example, to take the people who wanted to do this, and you stopped from doing this before for dumb reasons, and offer them more money to go back to doing this.
1 reply →
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
Would you mind listing 2 or 3 examples? All the jobs that I do not want to do that I can think of, are actually poorly compensated.
I'm from the US, and the ATC problem is in the US, so a US-centric view is completely in play.
Plenty of people in the US have finical goals, and providing them a means to more quickly reach their goals will motivate them. Will you convince everyone to apply to a job with more pay? No, but you really just need to convince a few more qualified people.
> In fact – plenty of [smart] people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
Yep, I dropped to a 4-day week prorated (so a 20% cut, a little less if you consider that changed my position with respect to tax boundaries, for 20% less work) a while back, to deal with family health issues and my own burn-out. As things are fixing up I'm considering keeping to this routine despite the fact the extra money would be useful – the extra time is _very_ nice too.
[Not sure how far into “smart” territory I'd be considered though :)]
Do you think this is a counterargument? The implication is that for 20% + n% you'd go back to a 5 day week.
2 replies →
> not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).
So, you're claiming that there's empirical evidence that supports your claim. Please link it.
>why would they do this, even if you paid more?
The complaints in the article were all about too many hours. More pay, more workers, less hours.
I didn't see anything about not liking the job. At least not in the article.
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
If you think that, you aren't considering paying them enough money.
> Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?
You ain't thinking about offering them enough money. Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have.
> In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
True, but also the same people will take quality of life cuts if you offer enough money.
Also, in general, the best way to improve one's quality of life is... through more money.
> 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.
Counterexample: add four zeros to the salary offered, and watch how many of them won't be happy to uproot and move with their whole family to your location within 24 hours.
> 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.
This assumption is sound in theory and almost always true in practice, it's just rarely attempted, because you need to spend money, which people absolutely hate.
Almost all cases of skilled staff shortage can be solved with multiplying the payment by 2-10x (and convincing people you mean it - at the 10x end, people may start having doubts, precisely because it's so uncommon to see). Do that, and you'll have your competitors' staff jumping ship, and a wave of skilled applicants from abroad, committed to relocate if you let them. If the market for the skill is growing and you're able to sustain the pay bump, people will retrain and entrepreneurs will start schools for future candidates.
And yes, with that much extra money available, other entrepreneurs will try and pitch all kinds of software and hardware that will reduce your need for skilled labor, hoping you pay them instead.
Of course, 2-10x bump might make the whole endeavor stop making business sense on your end. It's often the case. But in this situation, saying there's shortage of labor is a lie. It's only a shortage at the price you're willing to pay.
This all just follows the same dynamics everything else in the economy does. If you believe employment is a special case where this doesn't apply, you're still not imagining paying enough money :).
This is again, so reductive i don't know where to begin.
You really just assume everyone, at their core, is money driven enough. So to you, everything is about whether they are beign offered enough money. You even use the amazingly circular reasoning that if you discover them saying no, it just means you weren't trying to pay them enough.
There is apparently no limit to this, and anything gets solved by more money. This of course, can't possibly be disproven, since you will just say to increase the limits.
Meanwhile, as I've said, this is an intensely researched thing. I have yet to see a single person constantly pushing the infinite money angle make any reasoned argument, backed up by any study or data.
As I've said, plenty of studies have explored the effect and limits of giving more money on happiness, on recruitment, etc, on tons and tons and tons of fields.
Rather than just making reductive arguments that don't really get us anywhere, why don't you make a reasoned one?
also consider, just for a second, the possibility that not everyone is this money driven. Seriously.
"Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have."
That doesn't always exist. That's the whole thing about not everyone being money driven.
1 reply →
>There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
Name a few.
> 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.
> This was already addressed in the original post. Why write in this "spelling it out for you" style when they already addressed it?
The supply of labor for a given job is related to the market price of the job. This is literally ECON 101.
It's still a simplistic view. If you increase salaries the pay has to come from somewhere. Does that mean making flights more expensive? Or raising taxes? Either way it's not as simple as "just increase salaries, dummy".
2 replies →
In most fields of study, you eventually learn that the information from 101 classes are broad oversimplifications at best. I would be surprised if economics was an exception
2 replies →
Unfortunately you've completely misunderstood. This is where they addressed it:
> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools
Nothing to do with raising pay causing/not causing more supply.
2 replies →
New vocabulary, thanks.
Reductive
-tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.
Doctors dont have interesting tales to tell, nor should have due to things being private by law.
Stability of employment is something that traffic controllers could have, this is just a question of "working conditions" and solvable by money.
I really do not see why traffic controller could not feel good about being traffic controller. They do more "life saving" jobs then any of us on hacker news.
> Doctors dont have interesting tales to tell, nor should have due to things being private by law.
Identifiable tales are illegal, yes. That's not all tales. Surely you know a doctor and they've told you stories before?
I'm listing other reasons doctors like being doctors over just money. I don't know what the rest of your comment has to do with this.
> Doctors dont have interesting tales to tell
You must know few doctors, or they must work in very boring locations.
> nor should have due to things being private by law
You wouldn't believe how amazingly easy to tell stories without any patient identifying details. Think of any of your best stories - could you tell them to me without providing me breadcrumbs about any identities? I bet you could with nearly every story you have to tell.
Jokes on you I am working on ATC software solutions (safety modules exactly aiming to predict and warn about this kind of events)
1 reply →
> 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.
There are multiple reasons for the doctor shortage but it's at least partly intentional. The primary bottleneck on producing new physicians is the number of residency program slots: every year some students graduate with an MD but are unable to practice medicine because they can't get matched to a residency slot (some do get matched the following year). Most residency programs are funded through Medicare and Congress has refused to significantly increase that budget for years. But here's the trick. By limiting the number of doctors they also hold down the cost of Medicare claims. If a Medicare beneficiary can't get an appointment because there are no doctors available then no claim will be generated and the federal government doesn't have to pay anything.
https://savegme.org/
I love how that page is from the AMA, the organization that is largely responsible for pushing Congress to institute the residency caps in the first place because they feared too many physicians would drive down existing physician's incomes.
5 replies →
This is fucked.
[dead]
My simple understanding is that the width of the bottleneck is controlled by existing doctors who are (unfortunately) monetarily motivated to limit the supply of new doctors.
Nope, your understanding is mostly wrong. It's primarily controlled by Congress in the form of Medicare limits on residency funding. And to a lesser extent by the management of teaching hospitals. Most of those people aren't doctors.
At one point the AMA lobbied Congress for those funding limits but they reversed position on that years ago.
https://savegme.org/
1 reply →
The USA restricts the number of positions for medical schools and residencies. It's a problem that money could solve.
There is no restriction on medical school admissions. It's really just residencies.
4 replies →
The supply of doctors is limited by the AMA and state MA, to avoid excess doctors = price competition
And part of the problem there is that money and profit got introduced in the healthcare system.
In other countries people become doctors because they want to heal others. Not because they want to become wealthy. In the US doctors spend half of their time haggling with the insurance companies.
I mean going to school for 10 years only to be in debt for 100K-300K+ dollars, and not have a good idea of whether you will be able to pay that back... is a massive problem. Most countries don't have this issue, for example. They have an abundance of doctors and engineers, because people who actually want to do those things, are able to pursue those careers without financial investment. We are snubbing an entire generation of people and then acting surprised when the very obvious consequences of those actions start to come back to bite us. Its the definition of insanity.
It's hardly "most countries". The USA is about average for developed countries in terms of physicians per capita. We're higher than France, Belgium, UK, Japan, Canada, etc.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?most_rec...
> They have an abundance of doctors and engineers
They are usually paid several times less than people doing the same jobs in US.
11 replies →
> 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"
I generally agree with your sentiment for improving education, but I don't think the limiting factor for ATCs has to do with it, but with innate qualities in individuals.
You can see the list of criteria here: https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
I think most people underestimate the amount of "innate qualities" from patience to creativity etc. that actually are influenced by education, parenting, etc. rather than being defined at birth by genetics.
Education isn't just about changing the quantity of knowledge people have learned - a country with good free education, along with other things like mental health support, good parenting resources/education/support, etc. will lead to more people having the qualities needed to be ATCs despite not having learned them by going to specific "managing stress 101" classes.
(Edit: It's possible I misunderstood you and by innate qualities you literally just meant the things in their explicit requirements list like being under 31 and being a US citizen, if so apologies but I'll leave my comment here anyway.)
1 reply →
- Be a United States citizen
- Be under the age of 31
Well, they restrict the pool pretty harshly right from the start.
I don’t think being a good applicant for air traffic control has a lot to do with classical education. It demands a lot of stuff you don’t really need for university, and a lot of experience and education in university won’t make you a better traffic controller.
Once upon a time in a country of the Universe some wise leader decided that there should be twice the number of graduates than before, so they made the education more accessible, accepting twice as many people than before. However, one - evil and ugly - department in the unversity was a barrier. They failed much more students than before with their old and ugly exams, so with some convincing they improved their exams reducing the level of expectations and voila, there were much more graduates designing buildings and other critical infrastructures than ever before, everyone lived happily ever after.... ?
> 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.
This also applies to doctors and any stressful job really. Long hours compound the stress problems, making the job really unattractive.
I suspect this would probably be counterproductive, for a couple reasons. First, you’d be encouraging people to take on a second job with all of their free time, which would lead to more overall stress. But I think you’d also see a reduction in efficiency and overall quality of work when you’re only “practicing” two days a week, especially after five days off. I mean, when I come in to work after a long weekend, I can hardly remember what the hell it is I even do!
> 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
Corrupting or motivating? Thin line I’d say.
The other side of the coin is you won’t get the candidates you want if they can get the same money for less taxing jobs. Game theory 101.
> 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.
> You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC
You would if it was known to pay $500k/yr+
Earning highly does not universally command respect the way being a doctor does. Some would even see earning that much as being immoral (i.e. actually negative)
21 replies →
>"Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry."
Used to be. Not anymore. Nowadays many doctors act as a smartass business people.
In my city it's an underpaid work-a-day job that half of them hate. There is something about being trapped that can make any job sick the life out of you.
I remember a former CEO who would come into work each day and let out a heavy sigh before unlocking his office door. I learned that he was trapped in the job until he retired for various reasons...most of his own making.
4 replies →
there's something about the guaranteed aspect, whereas a senior manager is at the behest of office politics and the business cycle
> 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
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.
This is the same problem doctors have, which pushes a lot of people away from the profession. It's a self-reinforcing problem.
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
Of course it solves the problem. People will prevaricate and blow a ton of money in so many ways before they acknowledge the easiest fix.
The extra expenses will also encourage actual fixes to the system like better automation or whatever to reduce costs.
Money talks. No amount of outreach makes a mispriced offer attractive.
> 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.
> A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend.
They genuinely cant. They can make a sorta kinda prototype of something that costs Google several million dollars.
You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-consuming, and the infrastructure is designed for scalability and performance, not flexibility or iteration speed.
There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.
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.
> There is plenty of money sunk into all corners of the field but progress is slow
… because of mismanagement, just like other large software rewrites that you are probably familiar with.
It’s the same problem - updating a complex system - except there’s no other vendor you can switch to.
Other large software rewrites have unit tests.
ATC has human operators and people are non-deterministic and non repeatable and you can't just run a few tests and conclude it's fine.
The issues you're trying to stop may only occur once a month globally across all airports or something, and only be noticed once a year.
Maybe the technology part can’t be fixed easily with money but sounds to me like all the other aspects of the money argument are still valid.
Like “too much stress?”
Money only does so much to improve your life. Stress is a way to shorten your life. Long term chronic stress literally makes you ill in ways that medicine can’t fix.
1 reply →
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.