There would be more people interested in aviation choosing to be ATC than a pilot if our pay matched that of major airline pilots.

There are people going through the training and then quiting when they realize that can't get an opening in their hometown because that spot is reserved for a random person one week behind them in the FAA academy, and the pay won't make it worth moving away from their family.

There are more examples, and appropriate pay would fix most of them.

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

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.

There are only so many competent people in our society, and that talent pool is being spread thin across all sectors of society which require such candidates.

There are looming doctor shortages, too. Professionals of all stripes.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/ag...

Look at 1980's population pyramid. Look at 2020's. 1980 is how societies with mild population growth look. 2020 is how populations with below replacements look (see the graph end?)

It doesn't matter how many Americans are under 30. It matters how many are between 20 and 60. And my comment was about "coming up". Over the next 10 years.

There is a very significant shift in our populations, all across the entire planet. The US isn't as bad as some regions, but it's still bad. Moving from "lots of young people" to "the same amount of young people as old", means more taxes, fewer people working in society, and so on.

Older people require more doctors, too. So you have fewer people in the working pool (as a percentage of the overall population), but with doctors you need more, the more aged your population is. And it's not going to get better, it's going to get worse and worse, with such low birth rates. A downward spiral.

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

In the US, ATC are federal employees, aren’t they? So they are regularly furloughed, too. In the current political climate, facing the wrath of politicians doesn’t seem that unlikely, either.

The US has form in this area, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Even if the federal government were to “pay up”, they cannot be relied upon to honor favorable contract terms since they also have the ability to change the law.

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)

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.

There may be a very go reason to not allow anxiety medication, I don't know enough about it myself.

You’re getting downvoted because your comment is dangerously misinformed. Air traffic controllers aren’t allowed to take those anxiety medications (benzos, etc) because they impair your performance and judgment, even if you feel fine while taking them.

Don’t confuse the way a drug makes you feel with the objective impairment of a drug.

I appreciate you providing reasoning. I think the best way to deal with misinformation is good information and up/down votes are sometimes a good signal, sometimes it is an agree or disagree button.

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.

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?

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!

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 pitiful 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 fault). 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).

…kind of. In reality, there is always a qualified individual ready to physically stop you from doing the wrong thing, and there are multiple independent safety systems, interlocks, etc.

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.

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.

The mass of unemployed CS grads?

Communication is a learned skill.

Ability to handle stress and thrive under pressure is the key.

This isn’t meant to belittle or scoff at people’s lived experiences, but the difference between “if I get this wrong, my company will lose millions of dollars” and “if I get this wrong, hundreds of people die” is VAST.

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

I discovered by accident that people will notice a one-cent change in their paycheck.

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?

Doesn't mean you can't keep upping the rate and getting one anyway, but probably it becomes more cost effective to literally ship the rural patients instead of the doctor.

Isn't it 20/20 corrected vision?

Just train an AI on ATC recordings and other data, maybe throw in some reinforcement learning,and then test it in low-stakes commercial airspace (like a regional airport)

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

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.

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 obvious downside to this is that hardening code becomes a potential large amount of effort/overhead that could normally be concealed behind binaries and proprietary code.

This is not a downside, it's a benefit.

Suppose an adversarial country eventually gets access to the proprietary code. Do you want members of the public to have found and patched any obvious vulnerabilities before this point? Yes you do.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

The first proposal to break out the regulation of air traffic control with the provision of the air traffic control was done by the Clinton administration. Support since then has been bipartisan and opposition has also been from members of both parties for various reasons. (I read somewhere that one of the biggest long time opponents of breaking out the air traffic control has been the associations of owners of private jets as they currently pay about 1% of the cost of ATC, but are closer to 10% of the flights in major airports. In reality, owners of private jets can likely afford to pay a more proportional percentage of the costs they impose on the system.)

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

But yes, presumably there is scope for improved tools.

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.

Upgrading to the latest avionics costs tens of thousands of dollars in the cheapest case. Multiply that times the number of aircraft, and the weeks or months it takes for the upgrade to be completed and you're talking about a staggering economic impact.

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.

My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.

I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?

Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.

This is already out there. You can go research how Airbus and their automation works in practice.

You can also listen to air traffic control recordings to get an idea of what types of emergencies exist and how often they happen. I'm sure the FAA has records you can look at. :)

Now that apply that to something 3 orders of magnitude more complex.

I would say this is actually the most likely scenario for an edge case. The sheer number of variables make it unlikely that the same unexpected event would happen twice.

In an emergency situation the combination of, the emergency, ground conditions, weather, visibility, instrumentation functionality, and surrounding aircraft is most frequently going to be unique.

(and just to be clear, no I'm not talking the "AI" genie but rather straightforward search algorithms that enforce the needed invariants)

Just another perplexing case of humans insisting on doing a robot's job for no good reason.

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.

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

https://savegme.org/

At one point the AMA lobbied Congress for those funding limits but they reversed position on that years ago.

https://savegme.org/

Resident doctors are doctors, exactly as junior SWEs are software engineers.

(UK doctors have for some reason long objected to 'junior' and recently become 'resident doctors' over exactly this. All the more confusing - throughout and still there's been 'Senior House Officers', because 'house' used to be what it was called, like US residency, doing house, there were junior and senior house officers, so why not just revert to that? Who knows, but now they're all resident doctors - and some of which are senior house officers - until they're registrars/consultants, and they're happier with that than junior doctors.)

One answer would be to raise GP salaries, but that's difficult, especially if you're self-funding residencies and already paying out the nose for specialists and other inflated expenses deemed necessary in modern healthcare systems. Kaiser California imports medical school graduates from abroad for their in-house residency programs, which is presumably cheaper than raising salaries to draw more US resident candidates.

Kaiser arguably points the way forward. As an HMO--a vertically integrated healthcare system--there's greater financial incentive to self-fund residencies. When insurers, hospitals, and doctors are all at arms length from each other, the financial incentives don't align very well, thus the "need" for outside funding (i.e. the government) of residencies.

Note that unfunded residencies are also a thing, where the resident is responsible for sourcing the funds for their salary and expenses.

They are usually paid several times less than people doing the same jobs in US.

But we wouldn't be starting from nothing. There's a large group of people who would lose income and who will lobby against that.

Also taxes are generally much higher in these countries as well.

> Taxes are usually higher, but not incredibly so

So again.. would you rather make 60k and pay 45% in taxes or make 100k and pay 35%?

> nowhere near what America spends

Sure, if you are above median higher will likely more than compensate the higher healthcare costs (unless you’re very unlucky of course).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?most_rec...

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 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 would if it was known to pay $500k/yr+

I have respect for lawyers, and i have respect for investment bankers (who make huge merger/acquisition deals work).

Many people believe investment bankers are a net negative for society.

In the case of lawyers, a necessary evil. I have respect for people, not a profession.

Frankly, while I acknowledge their necessity, I have a poor (default) view of both bankers and lawyers. I don't see them as bad people, but people in their professions do many bad things.

If my son brings a banker home as a prospective mate, well, let's say they're not earning status points from their profession.

You (may have) and I (do) have respect for people in tough jobs like see workers. Doesn't mean my mom wouldn't prefer I date a nice doctor. My point being that social respect does not come with your personal respect.

It's very much relevant to this conversation. Without specific negative factors like a "predatory" aspect, increasing earnings will increase prestige. ATC doesn't have those factors.

So yes it is irrelevant in the specific context of that sub-conversation. Which isn't to say that your point arguing why that might not be applicable to ATCs isn't also a relevant thing to say to being the conversation back to the main topic of this thread.

Being relevant to either of those is enough to make it overall be: relevant.

Also, secondary equity issuance is pretty non-controversial, and an important fund raising option for publicly-listed corporations.

And... uhm... software developers.

Banking? Sales?

> Outside of anti-capitalist circles ofc

Well that's quite the point. Maybe those circles are small in the US, but they aren't in most of the rest of the world.

Let me just say that if I called my parents and told them that I had gotten a well-paid job at, say, a hedge fund, they would not be impressed and would likely think less of me for it.

All of them. Respect is not commanded because you make lots of money or have a certain job.

Used to be. Not anymore. Nowadays many doctors act as a smartass business people.

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.

There's certainly a lot of paperwork that has to be done, but doctors aren't doing it.

"What they learned was that during office hours, half the time — a huge chunk — was allocated to desk work, like documentation in the electronic medical record (EMR), reviewing test results, handling medication requests, and filling out forms. What was remarkable was that even during office visits, doctors interacted with their patients for only half of the time; the rest was EMR and paperwork. As a matter of fact, for every hour of face-to-face patient time, another two hours were spent on desk work." [1]

The paper mentions that was the amount of time spent for doctors with "documentation support" (various forms of automation/streamlining) that would generally be absent in something like a primary care physician's office, meaning he'll be spending substantially more time on paperwork. The paper also (at a quick skim) did not mention out-of-office work, where doctors often spend even more time filling out paperwork. And there are also regulations meaning doctors themselves have to be the ones filling out much of this paperwork.

[1] - https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/physicians-paperwork-and...

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

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.

They genuinely cant. They can make a sorta kinda prototype of something that costs Google several million dollars.

There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

- Allow people to retire after a decade rather than several decades of work

- Allow (or require) people to only work part-time (eg 2 days a week, or 5 days of 2 hours a day, or...) while still earning a full time equivalent salary

- Allow a work day to be 10mins on, 50mins resting for every hour (requiring 6x as many staff), while paying as if the full hour was work

- Pay for therapy, stress-management lessons, etc.

- Pay for a professional cleaner at home, a part-time chef or lots of restaurant/takeaway meals, or whatever else helps to minimise the amount of work you need to do outside the job

- Probably other ideas that haven't come into my mind in the two minutes I've spent on the subject of how more money can help fight issues caused by stress

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"

You can see the list of criteria here: https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications

- Be under the age of 31

Well, they restrict the pool pretty harshly right from the start.

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.)

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

The extra expenses will also encourage actual fixes to the system like better automation or whatever to reduce costs.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reductive

-tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.

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.

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.

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.

The supply of labor for a given job is related to the market price of the job. This is literally ECON 101.

(Econ 101 again: increased price -> reduced demand, i. e. fewer flights.)

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.)

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.

> 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.

- Can you swim now?

- No.

- What if I give you money?

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.

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.

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.

If every part of the US became equally expensive and convenient for work, VHCOL areas like the Bay Area would still be immediately oversubscribed for reasons unrelated to work.

The Bay Area has arguably the best climate (cool Mediterranean) of any major city, unique proximity to a diverse set of outdoor recreation (Big Sur, Napa, Yosemite, Tahoe just to name a few), and all the desirable amenities of a major metro area.

That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly happy life in other areas if you have different preferences, but the cost of living is ultimately a market, driven by the aggregate preferences of all people.

I think you are right.

Do you have other ideas on what constraints can be relaxed?

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.

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.

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 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.

Why is money the only thing to do here? Why do you assume that is the driver, despite tons of data suggesting it's simply not the only driver?

Can you please, please, take like 10 minutes, and go read any of the 1000's of studies on this, and then make some reasoned argument that is more than just what you are doing now, which is:

A. I think money is the only thing that matters and refuse to present any evidence that it is.

B. I will also claim that we never try it, despite it actually having been tried.

C. When someone takes the time to show me that we do try it, i will simply, without any further evidence, claim we aren't offering enough.

This sort of discussion is just kind of silly to have.

You know what - great, you figured it out. The real problem is that we just aren't paying enough. That's the only problem. It's not that the qualifications are too high, or the job as is is too stressful, or anything else ....

You have, without any data, evidence, etc, figured out the one simple and true solution to a very complex problem that lots of people have spent lots of time trying to puzzle through.

You won hacker news! Congrats!

I actually hope they offer an infinite amount of money to ATC controllers, so we stop having this particular reductive variant pop up in discussions.

It's fine if you want to argue money matters, i even believe money does matter. I just don't think it's the only thing that matters, nor do i believe you can solve a complex problem like this by just taking a single variable in that complex system and pushing it to the extreme.

The most likely outcome seems to be you increase the rejection rate from 90% (which is what it is now) to 99.99999%, given how the process actually works right now.

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.

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 :)]

There are three forms of pay cut: reducing pay for the same time spent working, reducing pay for the same work done (when pay is awarded piecemeal rather than by time), or indirectly by a reducing in work. Ask anyone on a zero-hours contract who unexpectedly gets a zero-hours week: it feels like a pay cut to them more than a joyful temporary freedom from work.

There are a number of companies experimenting with a 4-day working week with no change in pay or other conditions, some are finding the reduction in working time often doesn't reduce useful work output. A 20%-ish drop in income for a 4-day week is a pay cut when compared to that.

"The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. ... It's totally non-obvious this is true."

But perhaps you were just responding to the narrower assertion that some people will be happy to trade money for more leisure time. Apologies if I misunderstood which point you were addressing.

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.

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.

Citation needed, because...

> 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.

...if you're asserting that offering one quadrillion dollars as the salary for ATCs would not decisively solve the problem, that's insane and there can't be further discussion.

However, if your point is that this might be true, but the statement isn't useful, that's false too - it is useful to say this, because if true, then it means that there some function that describes the relationship between compensation and qualified applicants. And now that we've agreed that there is a function, we can then have a reasonable discussion about the inputs, and specifically the tradeoff between making the compensation higher vs. changing the way the training is structured and the artificial constraints on supply.

If you can say "to increase trained ATCs by 50% you can either make the salary $450k higher for 1k employees, or you can do a tech modernization that will cost $10M and keep your tech recent for the next decade" and provide a specific tradeoff between financial compensation vs non-salary factors, then you'll be able to have a logical argument about the two. And if the numbers are as skewed as in my example, you'll be able to convince the majority of logical people that increasing the salary is the suboptimal strategy.

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 :).

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.

The original claim was this:

> Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified? Sounds like you need more applicants? Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.

You then dishonestly moved the goalposts:

> 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.

Maybe before accusing people of being reductive, you should respond to the actual point being made instead of moving the goalposts.

> 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.

None of which you have linked. Go ahead, link a study that says that even offering an unbounded amount of money isn't enough to get enough applicants within the amount of time it takes to go through the training pipeline.

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.

So, you're claiming that there's empirical evidence that supports your claim. Please link it.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

So what happened? Why did the FAA upend a stable hiring process, undercut the CTI schools it had established to train its workforce, and throw the plans of thousands of eager would-be air traffic controllers into disarray?

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

There certainly some automation involved, but not at the level where we can just let the all the people go home and have it take over.

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

This will be more and more of a bottleneck as time goes on; growing up in-doors and looking at computer screens all day will increase nearsightedness.

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

    > 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.

    > The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

Isn't this, ultimately, the real problem? Improved technology with radically more automation would both improve safety and reduce workload on controllers.

What's really needed is some sort of "next-generation ATC" moonshot project. But of course, in such a safety-critical and risk-averse domain, generational improvement is really hard to do. You certainly can't "move fast and break things", so how do you prevent such a project getting bogged down in development hell?

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.

> cannibalizing other talent pools

If we accidentally paid ATCs so much that it ate into the investment banking or high frequency trading talent pools I think we’d still be ok

https://www.montrealgazette.com/business/article267028.html

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107917

    > about money

Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees? You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?

    > The real need is new and modern technology that automates much of the mistake-prone, human-centric tasks. But nobody wants to risk introducing changes to such a fragile system.

The link that shared is excellent. When I looked under the medical requirements area, and section "Eye", I see:

    > 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.

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.

which should put pressure on the entity managing the ATC to increase an ATC's productivity via tech. And yet this hasn't happened. So why is that?

I say at a guess, that capitalism isn't working for the entity that manages ATC, because that entity is immune to the pressures of capitalism - ala, federal gov't doesn't care that these ATC isn't as "profitable".

In a scenario where different ATC zones are managed by separate, private entities that are looking to make a profit (e.g., the higher number planes in a single ATC zone, the more they profit) would spend to improve ATC's individual capacity.

    > technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage

Loosely related: I cannot remember the website now, but someone posted here in the last 3 years an insane website that showed (visually!) the new approaches to London Heathrow Airport (world's busiest two runway airport). It was batshit crazy. I am sure they spent months designing the new approaches. It looked like multiple DNA helix'es where planes circle to wait for landing slots.

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.

I'm getting close to doxxing myself, so without getting into specifics... controllers often bring in food to share, and we dress pretty casually every day. There used to be a professional dress code years ago, but that was negotiated out by the union.

Why technology still does not track every airplane at the airport and flag runway incursions.

Why there still are not cameras constantly recording flight ops at the airport. Why are we relying on accidental dash cam recordings?

Why the cockpit voice recorder still does not record video.

All well within what we can do with radar and computers and radio today.

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.

Not.

This stands out to me:

> Be under the age of 31

> 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.

This almost seems like a catch-22 give than approx most adults (80%+) will experience presbyopia by their mid-40s. So even if you're a qualified candidate, you've likely only got 10-15 years max before you are disqualified.

More broadly, I suspect some of these vision requirements could be reconsidered in the face of improved display technology and UX improvements (e.g. accommodations for certain forms of partial colorblindness).

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.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

Ok what's the top-5 list of technology things that need to be changed? finally rolling out the decades-delayed ATCC upgrade (currently delayed to 2032)? real-time transponders? satellite location? using digital radio instead of VHF, for better audio quality? Is https://www.city-journal.org/article/reagan-national-airport... accurate?

(Total ATC salaries are 14,000 ATCs * median salary of $140K = only $1.9bn, so they could certainly hire more and pay higher.)

The goal here shouldn't be to have a small set of brilliant people-machines that perform always 100% under various stress and understaffing, the goal is to have a larger set of good workers that are easily replaceable (ie if they call in sick, have accident or other sudden events).

Money and probably just a mild change of approach how such team is created and maintained. If you pay those folks more than lawyers and doctors, then many of those and other high performers will apply for such job. Also it would be one of the more moral high paying jobs out there.

Given how much is constantly at stake money and people wise its still peanuts, feel free to take away 10% budget from completely useless airport security ala TSA - here literally everybody would win (apart from security folks, but those jobs are crap and they hate it AFAIK)

Government has historically been far behind the pay scale curve for things like this, but that isn't the main driver of people not going into these fields.

There is a huge talent pool that simply will not apply for Government jobs. That is because the work environment is toxic. A special kind of parasite that walks upright on two legs rears its head where everything is about standing, and seniority, rather than production and results, and DEI is a big part of that.

The restrictions are also very high, for any G-man job. Government jobs have gotten the worst reputation, because quite literally any good person doing those jobs eventually trades their sanity for them. Its filled with personal cost.

It also doesn't help matters that the government actually created these problems to begin with. If you don't know what I'm talking about google the 1981 Reagan ATC strike, and how Reagan broke the backs of the ATC union labor movement overnight.

The system is fragile because its centralized. Single points of failure, and front of line blocking are some of the worst types of problems to deal with in highly complex systems because they often are not obvious except to the people whose job it is to design resiliency into the system.

The turnover part is usually solved by salaries and working conditions. High turnover is consonance of bad working conditions and low salaries. So, this point can be solved by money.

The other points are just repetition of the same thing - people doing this job must be capable.

Becoming a doctor is a long, expensive and arduous process in the US, with a very narrow funnel (much too narrow but that's another topic). But if you make it through residency, you're mostly guaranteed to make good money for the rest of your life (if you don't screw up, etc.)

Start by tripling the ATC salary and see what happens.

Then, reduce ATC hours to reduce stress and errors. That means hiring more people (==higher incentives).

But my instinct tells me some filters happen too early. Don't know about the US but in France for example you need to be an engineer to become an air controller; and to be an engineer you need to go to prep school; and to go to prep school you need to have majored in physics in high school (not just math).

Which means that, if you choose not to take physics in 11th grade when you're 16, that's it: you will never be an air controller in France, whatever your other motivations or qualities.

But it would seem some personal qualities, like the ability to switch context easily, be resistant to stress (or even enjoying it), etc. should be more relevant to this job than just having studied physics in high school.

There is an iron law of nature that, hiring is never a problem of shortages, just insufficient pay. If you don't pay them enough they will get a job doing something that pays more and/or has better working conditions.

Labor isn't any more immune to market forces than any other good. The only people who are qualified for the job and willing to do it for cheap are the ones on the right side of the bell curve. Pay moves that bell curve and exposes more of it.