One of the more interesting possible outcomes of a UBI I hope to see in my lifetime is the ejection of many of the seat-warmers currently occupying IT positions in western public sector organisations.
Anyone on a power trip is playing this game with passion, more than a merely seat-warmer.
There has been massive interest in modernizing these systems.
It’s the beliefs and attitudes of leadership that cause well intentioned engineers who are willing to take a lower salary to leave
They got upset when I suggested we donate 20 dollars to cover microwave budget for entire school for the year.
I think that really says more about the absolutely absurd cost of living and non-rational real estate costs in the SF bay area than it does about the school district. In many places with normal cost of living, if your US W2 take home is $129k a year, you can live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. Whether or not you have a spouse or partner with their own career and your combined W2 gross income might be $210k a year.
Same as what I said above also applies to absurd real estate and cost of living in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, etc.
Salaries are higher in higher cost of living areas. You have to compare the salary to local living costs to be comparable.
This is not accurate in a globalized economy, where purchasing power parity (PPP) becomes a bit of a lie. No one is going to ask you if you're from Cambodia or another country, when you'll want to rent a server from AWS, or buy an iPhone, or maybe even a car. Global corporations aren't running charities and are instead concerned with making their products profitable - if anything, they would only use your location to increase the prices of products further if you're capable of buying them, but that's not a widespread practice nowadays for a variety of reasons.
I actually wrote a bit more about it in my blog article, "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings which showed how much money i've made over the years while working as a software developer in Latvia (currently around 18'000 euros a year), which means that my ability to make savings is ~5x lower than many of the software developers in the US or other well paid countries - which directly impacts my ability to create a startup and pay for external services/infrastructure, should i so choose.
Of course, on the flip side, one can also talk about how much you're disadvantaging yourself by catering to a clientele of local companies: i generate my company ~20x less profits than an average engineer in Google would for their company.
But the fact of the matter is, the costs that make up the largest portion of most people's lives are locally spent.
blaming education administrators specifically for not having enough funds to pay competitively is drastically different than saying there is a structural problem with the local economy such that only industry X can competitively source IT talent.
in these conversations, comparing tech job X vs other job Y is relevant, because we are talking about 'jobs and wages within local economy as a whole'
I’m in a very reasonable market. 210 is fine, but nowhere near very comfortable upper middle class.
Of course, you should be able to cut a $129k/yr DBA if you just spend the millions needed to streamline the IT systems.
1. Edit, source: https://www.zippia.com/school-administrator-jobs/salary/
It is malicious intent the whole way down.
An old friend of mine teaches the first year CS curriculum at a local university. By all reports he’s phenomenally good at his job. He truly cares and his students adore him. But he’s making a fraction of the salary he could be making in industry. At some point he’s probably going to quit to do a job he’s not as good at, and doesn’t enjoy as much. Why is he paid many times less than he’s worth? Because the university wants to pay CS lecturers who teach 2000 students the same as they pay people who teach poetry to a class of 5. So my friend can’t get a competitive salary without entire departments revolting. Who’s fault is that? I don’t believe it’s malicious intent. It’s just a boring, systematic failure high up in the org chart leading to bland mediocrity. The only people who can do something about it don’t care about outcomes enough to fix the problem.
Maybe I'm wrong, but does University gain more profit from a class of 2000 students? If so, could it be the case that your friend does not sell himself at a market price for the teaching position? Probably there's another place which pays more for similar teaching.
There's no blame at all, sometimes people like to sell their time mostly not for money, but for emotions, that's completely understandable.
But I can also see an argument that more advanced classes in later years (eg Advanced AI) are at least as valuable for the university compared to earlier subjects. They might have smaller class sizes, but if the subject material is more difficult, it'd be harder to find sufficiently knowledgable teachers. And the availability of classes like that (arguably) sets good schools apart from bad ones.
Its certainly a difficult problem. But it sounds like they aren't solving it well, and I think they're slowly driving out one of their best teachers.
In other words, malicious intent the whole way down. Though I'm sure it feels good to blame the faceless "bureaucracy" and leave it at that...that way no one has to take responsibility.
Its possible we're using different definitions though. Malicious intent sounds to me like "I am glad you are underpaid because I enjoy your misery". Or "You might be suffering but I don't care." I can count on one hand the number of people I've heard about in the workplace who are like that.
On the other hand, go talk to people near the top of any medium-to-large org chart. You'll find a mountain of people who feel like they're overwhelmed by the minutia of the company's day to day concerns, and they don't have time to do strategic leadership. That they aren't meeting the demands their role is placing on them. Or they're failing the people below them in the org chart due to their own vague mediocrity.
I don't think hating people in this position helps. Your scorn isn't going to magically make them better at their jobs. I see it as a symptom of our crappy organisation structures failing at larger sizes. We habitually centralize power into the hands of a few people. And then the people at the top of the org chart are overwhelmed by choice and indecision. And the people at the bottom are knowledgable but powerless, and are structurally forbidden from solving their own problems. (Or, sadly, people develop a learned helplessness about solving problems in the organisation at all.)
One thing to note is that hiring skilled IT workers is often outside budget capabilities. It’s not that they want to hire someone incompetent, they simply can’t afford to hire someone competent.