Comment by robertlagrant
3 months ago
> 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".
Making flights more expensive would also address the ATC shortage, by reducing workload. Good idea.
(Econ 101 again: increased price -> reduced demand, i. e. fewer flights.)
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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
Fact: If the job paid 10X what it does, we would have more than enough of applicants.
Fact: Somewhere between 1X and 10X is a salary where we would have enough applicants.
It's objectively true.
Whatever prior assumptions prompt you to second guess this obvious, objective truth are ripe for reanalysis.
microeconomics holds up amazingly well.
things get complicated of course as the situation under analysis gets further and further from the ideal setup, as data gets more scarce, and so on.
but the job market is pretty darn close to the simple model, and this question is also close to the ideal (how much more price need to rise for supply to meet demand, we draw the graph based on data from other professions, and boom, there's our answer, if we want to get very fancy we can do various models to try to estimate the curves.)
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.
Total non-issue. They hired ~1800 air traffic controllers in '24, which would be 0.06% of college grads in a given year and a much smaller number of the total workforce.
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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)
This is wonderful. Anything built that long ago that's still around is a testament to the amazing engineers who made it, and also it probably should be replaced or severely upgraded!