Folks in those $100k+ jobs, corporate types, office workers... What would you say you actually do?
I work as a prek teacher. I go to work, clock in, and spend 8 hours actively engaged with kids teaching reading, writing, math, social skills, science, games, and more. I don't have "down time" at work; I'm always on, because I have to be. There are demands of me every moment I'm there.
But what about you corporate folks? I can't seem to figure what you actually... Do?
My dad worked such a job (VP in pharma) and I could never get a real answer from him. He would always just say "I'm busy", he traveled a lot, and as far as I could tell his "work" was just meetings.
Other business folks I interact with, it's the same. They're always playing on their phone, or (my favorite) constantly talking on the phone when picking up or dropping off their kids at school, and ignoring them. A buddy of mine is a senior exec and was able to complete baldur's gate 3 during work hours because he's just sitting around in meetings all day.
How is that work? How does that justify earning 4x+ what I make?
I'm genuinely curious because I've never gotten a straight answer and my impression is that in these jobs you don't actually do anything, but that can't be right.
Sorry if this is a dumb question.
I started working in a frontline help desk role, and worked up through various technical and engineering positions, manager, director, and now executive leadership.
When you are a direct knowledge worker, your job is usually to get something done. Whether it is accounting, software development, network engineering, etc, you take something given to you in "state A" and work on it until it is in "state B."
When you become a manager your job shifts, and becomes about delivering the work to the team in "state A," helping them get it worked on to "state B," and being a bridge. When you become a director, you take an even broader view, and you spend your time thinking about how to maximize the productivity of the teams you manage, because no amount of direct work product you create will equal what the 20+ people you are responsible for can accomplish, if you get them the resources they need, and remove the blockers from their path. So you spend your time in budget meetings, working spreadsheets, making timelines, and playing politics to get those blockers out of the way. You also put out fires.
As a senior leader, you take a wider view still. You are very much in the realm of being paid for your knowledge, patience, speaking skills, and vision. You spend your time in strategic planning sessions, thinking deeply about cross functional processes, maybe external factors. You're identifying the targets that your directors will then go seize.
So you start to slow down a little more, because each time you go up in the org, every wrong target you aim at wastes more and more resources. In my current role, it is better to take an extra week thinking about things, than to launch an initiative half baked.
That said, many leaders fail to assign proper risk to inaction, which can paralyze decision making. So you need to balance all of that.
Edit: the question of pay has many parts to it, but it rarely boils down to whose work is "harder" or takes more effort in an absolute sense. Often it comes down to judgement and responsibility. I'm paid for my ability to make the right decision in the face of complexity, whether it be financial, legal, regulatory, etc.
That said, teachers are criminally underpaid. They require the ability not to strangle children and parents at their absolutely most deserving.
This is a sensible way to look at it. More responsibility and more challenge if things don't go the right way. I still don't feel that those at the very top (or bottom) are paid what they are actually worth, but you've given another perspective to give the issue of "Why do you get paid so much to seemingly do so little".
I also appreciate how you broke it down at different levels of management. Thanks for taking the time to lay it all out.
I'm glad it was helpful. I would agree that the distance between the highest and lowest compensated jobs is too large. I would like to see laws that caps executive pay as a fixed multiple of the lowest paid position, asking with an increase in minimum wage.
Have a great day!
100% agreed. There's a bourgeoisie class in America. They go to private high schools, then ivy league schools, then rocket straight to a multi-million dollar business investment. The investors want people like themselves (ivy league, etc.) to be the CEOs to reinforce the idea that the owning-class deserve their wealth. It's that ivy league degree that's making these people successful because it's just that good of an education /s.
What is really happening is the laws are set up so that people who get somewhere first (founding a company, buying land) are in complete control of how equity in that property is distributed. They can keep it all for themselves, even as employees do more and more of the work. Sure, as a 1-person startup the founder is absolutely grinding away, busting their ass. But if they're lucky then after a few years they could have hundreds of employees. How many of the worked hours then belong to the CEO? A tiny fraction.
I believe there should be an incentive to setting out on a new venture. But it does not make sense to enable absolute greed through law.
I echo the sentiment though I'd hedge my comment. Folks that make highly are typically compensated proportional tp their ability to make (or save) a company money.
Things that are public goods (teachers, forest service, soilders) are typically not compensated because no one is making sufficient money to advocate for them. It sucks but it's the best explanation I've heard. (David Graeber has other thoughts in "Bullshit Jobs", but that doesn't try to give economic justifications)
So, I'm in IT, but I've moved (mostly) away from the hands on day to day work and now am one of those people that are seemingly contributing nothing to society (i.e., management). :).
My day is definitely back to back meetings. I spend most of my day just talking to other people. A lot of this is because big corporations love making decisions by committee (because everyone is risk adverse and afraid to make a decision on their own).
Most of these meetings I attend are a complete waste of time. I'm in the meetings to 1) make sure a completely stupid decision isn't made that will have long term impacts to my team, 2) make sure people aren't forgetting things that will have impacts to my team, and 3) make sure no one is expecting my team to do more than we have staffing for and make sure those things aren't outside our area of responsibility.
Basically my day is spent navigating the politics, meetings, and back room deals with a goal of ensuring my team doesn't get negatively impacted by all that stuff.
I’ve definitely come to see management as defensive-line positions between workers and executive (if they’re good managers!), so that tracks. Thanks for taking care of your people!
When I was a manager and director, I spent a lot of time translating leadership decisions to the team to help them make sense of why certain decisions were being made. So protecting your people, definitely, but hopefully also helping them make sense of the larger org.
The best managers are the ones that will push back against bad management decisions. The worst just give initial advice to their next-level and then accept whatever decision comes down from above.
I've found having a backchannel link to the CIO to jump over a few levels does wonders for mitigating bad decisions.
I would say the best ones are those who have enough of a feel for the org and the business, that they can propose win-win situations, rather than dying on a hill.
I've seen many well-intentioned managers get chewed up because they are trying to protect their team, but don't have the business savvy to propose a meaningful alternative that accomplishes what the bosses need. It's a tough spot to be, and I try to mentor folks in that situation.
Very well said. If the only thing a manager ever communicates - whether they're using these words or not - is "that's stupid, we're not doing it," they will quickly be either removed or sidelined. Either way, they're not helping their team.
Been there, done that, proposed the alternatives, but got chewed up in the politics of a very toxic organization that rewarded dishonesty and had no effective internal controls. I crossed an ambitious and corrupt (known for taking vendor kickbacks) director who had knives out for anyone who got in their way, including the CIO. The IT organization was gutted of many good, skilled, dedicated people thanks to that director.
I hope none of those in decision-making roles face similar situations, but it's not the first time I've seen charismatic sociopaths in leadership triumph over sound engineering and business practices. After that experience, I'm done with management and never looking back.
It's more of a "I want something, you want something, let's meet in the middle" because when it comes down to it, the one higher up in the hierarchy can technically just enforce a decision. Sometimes you are just a bearer of bad news and that's by no fault of your own.
Also IT, also management, exact same experience with back to back meetings, exact same purpose in them.
Honestly I can’t wait for many corporate knowledge worker jobs to be automated, maybe mine will be one of them!
I get to also be a "Subject Matter Expert" and a minor tag along of "Product Owner" (though I wholly reject it) and yeah basically the same. More so our as dev/operations appear to be going slowly spiraling out of control and there is no one left among them that fully grok the product to understand what making a change does or how much impact it has.
C-suite seems to still believe in witchcraft though and believe that all things are solve-able with AI.
Ah, I see we work at the same company. AI initiatives as far as the eye can see, no matter how dubiously useful they end up being.
This actually explains a lot. Thanks for taking the time to walk it through - some other commenters have stated the same and looking at how the structure in my school works it's sort of the same as having the teachers interface with owners through directors, or the owners working with corporate and smoothing out ruffles between their (generally terrible) decisions and boots-on-the-ground experience.
Yeah that's just about right, with perhaps a sprinkle of writing something down that was said because a decision was finally made.
I'm a CISO. I worked my way up from the trenches, starting with helpdesk type roles, so I've been in virtually every IT position from the very entry level to the top.
You're right that I don't actually do any work. That is, I don't produce anything tangible. The output of the time I spend at work isn't an object or a piece of paper you can point to. It's not really even a service; customers don't directly benefit from the work I do.
My day to day almost exclusively consists of being in meetings, mostly with other management type people; sometimes with the engineers that work for me or on other teams.
The reason I get paid so much is really the same reason why anyone gets paid what they get paid; market dynamics. There just aren't that many people that can be effective at this job. It takes a specific mix of introversion and extroversion, technical knowledge paired with leadership and interpersonal "soft skills". My org was searching for someone to sit in this role for six months before I got hired. That's not to toot my own horn or anything; most of those skills I acquired over my career were by dumb luck.
Even though I don't do what many people would consider work, it is very mentally taxing. I have a huge amount of responsibility, and constantly have concerns about the business in the back of my mind. Any cybersecurity incident, from Deborah from accounting clicking a link in her email and getting scammed out of $1000, to a targeted credential theft attack that results in hundreds of millions of dollars of loss are ultimately my responsibility. I have to answer for all those things and give reasons for why I allowed them to occur and be able to justify those reasons. The output of the decisions in those meetings is thousands of man hours of work. Making the wrong decision in any of them can result in gaping security holes that will be quickly exploited and harm the organization, or result in hundreds of people wasting time and money doing pointless things, or both. The weight of that on your head is just exhausting and draining to regularly be involved in.
I have been in roles like your friend describes; mostly as an individual contributor more than a manager though. That mostly happens in very large organizations where people are very siloed into a specific role. I worked a ton when there was a new project or initiative in my field, but when there wasn't? It was just keeping the lights on and working 10 hours or so a week realistically.
Those kinds of "bullshit jobs" are kind of the nature of the beast in the corporate world. Senior management would love to figure out a good way of eliminating them, but so far no one has found an effective way. If it costs 200k to hire and train a new firewall engineer, and you need 10 of them during your project implementation period which is usually on a 3 year cycle and takes around a year, but only 5 of them during a BAU period, and you're paying them 100k yearly, it doesn't make sense to constantly lay those people off and regularly incur an additional cost to constantly ramp new people up, so you just keep 10 people on that regularly don't have a whole lot to do.
That's just an example; but it happens all the time in larger organizations. They're not structured to be efficient, they're structured to be profitable.
All of this is definitely unfair. There are people who work as landscapers that work harder and longer than I do in the heat, wrecking their bodies, breathing in fumes, and they do it for $30,000 a year. Pay in a market economy is completely divorced from how hard you work; and anyone who says otherwise is patently lying through their teeth to push some agenda. Pay is solely determined by what the market will bear. If you have a job that a lot of people can do just as well as you can and are willing to do it, you won't get paid as much as someone that has a job that not a lot of people will do, or not a lot of people are willing to do. That is the sole thing that determines how much you get paid, and most of the time, it's just determined by sheer luck and circumstance.
Fellow security person here (Information Security Officer) and never want to be a CISO mostly because of all the things you listed in this thread. I do think I have the correct balance of technical, managerial, and soft skills but I already know that the mental pressure of the job isn't for me. I was the primary IT admin for a department for 15 years and the stress of being on call 24/7/365 eventually burned me out. Switched to security awareness for a bit, and now this role.
I feel for anyone that wants to be a CISO. You're basically the figurehead and scapegoat for all IT security things, and as you mentioned, events wholly out of your control can land you in the unemployment line. All you can do is try your best to keep everything as secure as possible and everyone as informed/educated as possible.
Keep up the good fight!
Typically “keep paying me more” lol. Or maybe “One day I’ll benefit from this system so I want to keep it in place.” Because unless you’re a surgeon then what’s the reasoning?
You're my customer. I do what I can to make your life easier but nothing I make will ever remove the feeling of sitting under the Sword of Damocles.
Nothing any of these people do is worth 4x what you make. Just like Jeff Bezos is not worth 10000 times what I make. Capitalism needs winners and losers in order to work. We're the losers.
As a six-figure salary earner, I agree with this. I'm grossly overpaid for what I do relative to my contributions to society. Obviously my company values what I do, but my overall societal contributions are way less meaningful than teachers, sanitation workers, firefighters, paramedics, and other roles that are critical to a healthy and functioning society. I try to make up for it in other ways.
I support medical imaging software. Mostly helpdesk type stuff for a very specialized piece of software. Most of my day is listening to music and reading logs while assisting the younger team members in their cases. While my brain is working throughout the day, (as long as no one is having a stroke while our software is not working correctly) I can walk away to take a break whenever I need.
I've always said the lowest paid people do the most actual work. The higher paid someone is, the less they need to use their brains or muscles to complete the task at hand. I'm not saying that folks who make a lot of money, aren't necessary in society or aren't doing any work. I'm just saying that the work they do is less strenuous.
As a parent, and an American, I'd like to remind you that your job is more important than any VP is. Our children's lives depend on you. You foster love of learning, you teach child how to work with others, you literally keep our children alive for 8 hours a day. I cannot thank you enough for what you do and society would collapse without you and your follow teachers.
This seems to imply that brain work is not 'actual' work, which I don't agree with. It is definitely work. It is just that you cannot see it in action from the outside. Some people don't even recognize it happening in their own head.
Whether one type of work is harder than the other, or one should be paid more than the other, is worth a discussion, but both are 'actual' work, I think.
The brain work can even be the worst part of the job sometimes. It's very very hard to just shut off the thoughts and stop thinking about anything related to work. Not just in a "I'm stressed about work" way but also in a "I wonder how I could solve this problem..." kind of way.
I often joke that work should comp my mattress for how often I dream about solutions for difficult problems!
If I had a dime for every evening I drifted to sleep (or laid there for an hour half-awake because my brain wouldn’t be quiet) thinking something along the lines of, “tomorrow I should probably try X and Y and if neither of those work fall back on Z… but how is N part of X going to work?”.
It’s insidious, it can sometimes take at least a whole day of not touching anything work-related to completely clear my brain of work-thoughts. Most of the time it’s not a problem but it can be exhausting.
The last paragraph irks me a little bit and reminds me a time when I ran into a soldier in uniform at the food court at the Philly airport and I asked him where he had served and some other very light questions and then someone else comes and is all effusive about “Thank you for your service, can I pay for your food, …” which caused the soldier to cringe a bit because you might think you are honoring somebody that way but really you aren’t.
There are many educators I have respect for and in fact I work in higher ed today. A high school science teacher may have saved my life. I know it is a really tough job, most of the teachers I know today have had times when they’ve come home and cried because of the stress of the job and the burden of their student’s problems.
But when bullying is part of the curriculum of the public schools, educators are in a unique position to not just tell you you are worthless but show you you are worthless and prove to you that you are worthless. So on a bad day I can feel about teachers the way a prisoner feels about prison guards because quite literally elementary school teachers would show allyship to bullies by forcing me to remain in a place where I would be harassed on a daily basis and frequently assaulted with no recourse or justice whatsoever.
The corruption and rot goes very deep. My son’s elementary school had a principal who (unusually) filed correct and complete reports about violence incidents at the school and got fired for it because the school district wanted to cover it up. (The Superintendent’s first words when he talked about it were “we’re appealing to the state” and not “we’re going to make your school safe”) That was one reason I pulled my son out.
I have never gone to my college reunions or given money and usually burn the alumni newsletter as soon as I get it because the dean of students allowed a gang of gay-bashers to stage terrorist attacks against anyone (including myself) they thought supported gays. Two people committed suicide not because of the direct harassment but because the school again was demonstrating their worthlessness by taking no action to stop this terrorism and I’m pretty angry that the dean of students still refuses to apologize. I know the ringleader of the group did time for later crimes and if he got out and “went straight” I’d actually be supportive of him because I know how hard that is to do but I have no love for that college administrator and very much want to know the answer to “What would you have done if it was your daughter?”
"when bullying is part of the curriculum of the public schools"
This seems to be a very specific critique for a specific instance you dealth with. Not trying to be a dick I just don't really have a sense of your overall vewpoint.
(1) I have a neurodivergence that maybe 5% of the population has that primes people to be victims of bullying in elementary school. (Hint: if you have self-diagnosed ADHD or Autism you are probably a schizotype)
(2) Bullying has lifelong impact on victims and causes wounds that don’t heal: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29803971/
(3) Bullying (of teachers by other teachers) is endemic to the education industry, which is the second worst industry after health-care: https://workplacebullying.org/download/bullying-by-industry/?wpdmdl=2670&refresh=65fdd05719e8e1711132759
(4) My parents were able to get me one year in a private school where I was treated as if I had human rights, made friends, actually learned something in the classroom, etc. Then they sent me back to the jungle and I only got out it by pulling an Ender Wiggin.
(5) What I’ve learned in a lot of study is that I’m not alone (as much as the school district tried to gaslight us about it) and there is one kid in every classroom who is a target.
Telling people that they are alone, their experience is invalid, is a classic technique of bullies and their allies.
For what it's worth, I'm angling to get into public school and help neuro divergent kids like I was. I have a special place in my heart for them. It's like a challenge to me, to prop them up and give them the help and support I didn't get enough of when I was younger.
I'm sure it's going to be a hell of an uphill battle, but I've been cutting my teeth in private school for over a decade now, and I want to help the less privileged.
I'm a software architect for a Fortune 100 tech company. I design software and lead a team of about 70 developers around the world to build it. I spend a lot of time in meetings with stakeholders to gather requirements, and members of my team to go over the designs and lay out the requirements. I like my job, but work/life balance isn't great because of the time zones I have to work with. It's a lot of late nights. But they pay me well enough that I enjoy my lifestyle and I'm planning at a very lucrative retirement at 50.
It still seems that in Dev and IT there's actual tangible products you can point to as "this is a product of my work, without my input this wouldn't have happened" which doesn't always seem to obviously be the case.
Another commenter pointed out that they play as a sort of interface between the C-suite/execs and the actual workers, and that their product is more about their interactions with people and politicking. Would that be the same in your case as well?
In my specific role, it's a combination. I along with our managers do have to interface with our execs to understand the business requirements for whatever we're implementing. But that feeds directly into the design that I give to the development team to implement. I also do some hands-on contribution and troubleshooting whenever I get the opportunity, but it's not the majority of my time like it is for the actual developers because of my other responsibilities.
I’m curious if you’ve thought about living your working years happier (less hours, less stress) and retiring later? It’s a decision I’ve made and landed on happier in the present as I am able to work few hours with good pay and in a field I enjoy (although I’m not quite at “never work a day in your life”).
Yeah, I've thought about it. But at this point in my life, I still feel that the money is worth the extra hours. I don't think I'll pursue any kind of executive track, though, despite my VP's continued suggestions over the years go move over to management.This is about as high up as I can go while staying hands-on technical. I wouldn't enjoy my job nearly as much I do it I had to trade my IDE for more PowerPoint.
The money means that the time off I do take is meaningful. 4 weeks a year plus 12 holidays means that when I do go on vacation, I'm able to afford something quite nice. We also have a vacation home, in the form of a cabin out in the mountains where we can escape suburb life and just be out in the quiet woods. So I'm able to use some of this extra money to make the rest of life less stressful.
I get that it's not for everyone, and I spend a lot of time defending my team members who don't want to move up to management who expects them to continually try to. But I'm overall happy with my lifestyle and the sacrifices I make to maintain it, along with the savings for early retirement.
I've been able to find a life where I don't think I'd be living too differently even if I was retired. I've spent a couple of months funemployed and honestly by the end of that I craved having work to do. It helps that I don't like traveling too much, at least not outside of the US. I'd still want to do something useful and productive if retired, and I genuinely enjoy programming and am good at it. For almost 6 years now I've been able to work close to part time with full salary - and this has worked across multiple companies. There are many times per year where I reflect on how upset someone like OP would be if they knew how good I have it. Combine that with unlimited vacation (that I actually take) and the major ways to improve things are now outside of work. I haven't escaped capitalism, but I have entirely escaped the rat race. I'd like to find a life partner, have one or two kids, get a dog, etc. Owning multiple properties and amassing wealth has benefits, but I'd have to give up too much to go down that track.
The ideal would be to find a partner who has a similar situation. Then we could alternate taking care of a kid throughout the week while making dual incomes and not pay for childcare.
Yeah, I totally understand your position. I have friends who are the same way, and we've discussed the pros and cons of our different lifestyles. My wife and I do like to travel, but to me retirement doesn't mean that I'm going to sit around all day or travel 100% of the time. But it means that I'd have the freedom to do absolutely whatever I wanted at that moment in my life. And to me, that's the dream. Sometimes, that might mean working a job or a gig that seems interesting but pays shit. Sometimes, that might mean volunteering. Sometimes, it'll be traveling. But to be beholden to nobody is something that I want, and I'm willing to work harder now to obtain that earlier in life. All I know is that when I "retire", I will be doing something other than programming. It's no longer a hobby for me, but it's still a kick-ass career.
You’ve definitely been lucky enough to pick one of the better options. I’m not the laziest, but I am pretty lazy by my nature. So never going above a stress/effort threshold works best for me.
If there's one thing I've noticed of my superior is that their hours are at least 1.5x as long as my hours 😅
Yeah, 60 hour weeks are the norm for me. It just comes with the territory. But to me, it's worth it for the money.
I'm a software engineer (aka software developer). I'm in a low cost of living area, so I'm not making crazy California levels of pay, but I'm making a lot for where I am (well over 100k USD plus stock grants). I spend most of my time writing code. I work on massive embedded projects, so everything moves at a snails pace. Deadlines are measured in years, so it's a very chill environment.
There's no way I'm working 4x as hard as a teacher. I'd say my work is more 1/4 as difficult as a teacher... or pretty much any service job. My wife used to work in education, and she'd bust her ass for less than half as what I earned as an intern.
You’re thinking of SF, not Los Angeles, where the average income is 30k and the average family income is 65k. SF is an aberration because it’s tiny and filled with highly paid knowledge workers - if Manhattan were its own city, it’d have a pretty high HUD line as well.
For that matter, although correlative, HUD is calculated simply as 30% of the median household income. It’s more a statement that people make a lot of money in that area. Some areas have high col with low income.
Throw justification out of the window, it doesn't matter, this is the world. Teachers in America (or elsewhere if you live somewhere where it also pays poorly) are paid badly because of politics preying on teachers liking what they do and putting up with the situation for as long as possible. Office workers get paid more (the ones that do get paid more) presumably because companies haven't been able to get away with paying less, nothing more nothing less.
Anyway I work in software development, what I do in a day: write code, review other people's new code, sit in meetings talking about features and such, monitoring metrics and making sure things aren't breaking or going to break, investigating issues. I get paid a pretty penny, and that's because of a labour shortage in qualified software engineers, causing companies to have to pay more to attract talent, also due to the way software companies tend to work out, they get a lot of investment money, scale up quite quickly, have low margins, and are able to have a lot of cash on hand to use stock buybacks and handing out RSUs as a way of bolstering compensation for employees.
It could change though, lord knows capitalists would love to get away with paying as little as possible. Outsourcing to low cost of living countries is one way companies have tried, with varying degrees of success. AI is going to be another one, trying to replace expensive people with inexpensive software to do the job.
Yep. Trying to lowball these employees is playing with fire, because they can and will walk… especially those with experience.
In software development especially there is an ever-present insatiable demand for experienced professionals who can hit the ground running, which means that if push comes to shove, such individuals can get hired elsewhere without too much trouble. Aside from that, losing these employees usually also means a loss in productivity and tribal knowledge (regardless of documentation efforts) which can instantly change a team from high performance to low performance.
They’ve been trying to turn software development into a cheap commodity for decades now, and while I can’t predict what the future will hold it’s a very messy thing to try to accomplish because as much as an engineer’s value is in their ability to architect software and write code, it’s also in understanding requirements and taking context into account when gluing all the messy human-interfacing bits together, and so far outsourcing and AI have been rather poor at the latter half of that (outsourcing strips context, AI doesn’t actually understand humans).
I quit my job on August 1st, 2023. I started looking for a new job on October 1st and had signed a contract with a company that checked every box I wanted (pay, location, work style, company size, field of work) by the end of the month having only talked with 4 companies. This was during one of the worst moments of the software engineering job market in recent memory. It was easy largely because I'd successfully built a semi-famous business's web app from scratch a couple years before.
I haven’t changed jobs in a long time, but even through the midst of the rounds of layoffs in the past year and change I’ve continued to get pings from internal recruiters via email and LinkedIn. Don’t have much in the way of publicly visible personal projects, but have similarly written and rewritten apps and have nearly a decade of listed experience, which I think counts for a lot.
I’m grateful to be in this position and do not take it for granted. It might not always be this way so I’ve been doing what I can to be ready for that rainy day, should it ever come.
Even if AI does take my job (and honestly if it takes mine it’s taking most knowledge workers’ jobs) I’m glad that I made it. I got to work in SV as a web dev just like I wanted to as a kid.
Sadly this is something I've come to recognize. It's just demoralizing. There was another thread here yesterday about a teacher shortage and one of the main issues is lack of decent pay for educators. I wonder how market forces would adjust for that, given that public schooling is a function of government and thus not quite as subject to direct market pressure. Private schools are a thing (I work at one) but the pay there is often worse than in public schools.
I'm not a VP, but I do work in pharma doing research. I develop analysis methods for early phase research compounds. I spend some time running experiments, a lot of time doing data analysis/documentation, and some time in meetings. Most people I work with are chemists and biologists with PhDs (not me though). Apparently that's worth over 100k.
My impression is that VPs in research largely attend meetings where people present them large amounts of data, then make decisions about what to do moving forward. Then there's a bunch of administrative stuff like running larger group meetings, approving budget items, dealing with personnel issues, etc. The VPs I personally interact with all seem like really smart people, above average even among scientists and are indeed very busy.
My dad certainly is quite capable, and I get the feeling he's one of those taking in that large amount of raw data and making sense of it to point companies in new directions. That seems like something which is becoming increasingly replaceable with AI though? At least my dad seems to think so - he's mentioned how AI is increasingly becoming omnipresent in his field.
Actually I think it's the opposite. It's my job that that's at risk. AI is good at making sense of data at a low level, but it's bad at understanding at a high level while including context. Since I'm at a disadvantage in this field without a PhD, I've been studying AI and ML so I won't get left behind.
I don't have quite enough context to fully judge your dad's job, but I don't think any AI analysis fully replaces management. While some things like picking promising areas of research can definitely be enhanced by AI, the nuts and bolts of which departments and ventures to fund are still signed off by a human somewhere.
I'm a web/software developer for a medium sized company, which seems to be pretty common here, so I don't need to explain much there.
I think its almost criminal how low teachers get paid for the amount of work you do and value you provide. Why I was paid so much more than some of my friends who went into education always confused me. I don't think it 100% justifies the inequality, teachers NEED to be paid more, but as far as those "office jobs" go, employees generally aren't compensated well because of the amount of work being done, but the amount of knowledge the person has and brings to a company. I noticed most people in this thread have a specialized skillsets, are familiar with a specific software/language, or something like that, so I think it holds true that companies just tend to pay well for that sort of stuff.
This question always makes me think of the apocryphal story of Tesla’s invoice for marking a spot on the wall.
There’s something about certain kinds of knowledge work that can make output scale differently. I’m not exactly discounting the value of teaching pre-k, but in a sense there is a physical cap — no matter how good a teacher is, they teach some 25-40 students. There are variations in the quality of that teaching, but it’s not like that can somehow scale to teaching 2500-4000 students, nor I suspect can they increase the learning rate of those 25-40 students by a factor of 100.
On the other hand, there a lot of jobs where the right person can deliver 100x performance over the wrong person. The right CEO can be the difference between a fortune 100 corporation and bankruptcy. The right software developer or engineer can automate hundreds or thousands of jobs. The right biochemist can save millions of lives.
Oh this is an interesting point that I'll have to mull over.
One issue that jumps out immediately - while educators may not then warrant seven figure salaries, their cumulative effects cannot be ignored. If we chronically underpay these roles, attracting low quality people into those roles (since higher quality candidates would surely look elsewhere) then we are losing potential in the future as well.
I may only teach 25 students a year, but the quality of those students is measurably above norm. Imagine if a larger proportion of teachers were like that, the trickling effects it would have across society.
There was a discussion yesterday about a teaching shortage, this issue was one that came up.
I don't know that there aren't teachers who warrant seven figure salaries. I do think the current system does not provide a means to utilize that level of talent in a way that makes paying that salary economically reasonable. I'm not sure what would be a means to do it though -- identifying and teaching gifted students who have higher potential, education researchers to lift the efficacy of the entire system, or something else.
That’s public funding for you. An issue that plagues all things publicly funded is that the amount is tied to politics, not any correlative metrics. That being said, education is a positive externality market, so we don’t really have a choice.
Teachers should be paid more, but externalities are hard to measure and justify, and there’s no political appetite. Democracies are democracies, in the end.
I'm a low level it manager. I wonder what I do a lot of days. Most of my job now is people stuff. I meet with all my reports for a half hour every week and keep up on what they're doing. It's probably 10 separate projects at a time they're juggling. I need to know low level details of all of them as much as possible. But I've given up on that often and just facilitate "joe will know about that!" Or "jim had the same problem you're having a month ago, ask him".
Anyway 1:1 meetings eat up an entire day+ but are critical to keeping them happy and getting them promotions and stuff. I also meet with some people above me to report on it. And we own some systems that are hubs for others so waste another day probably dealing with complaints and issues. All just meetings though. Understanding the problem. Finding the right owner. I never actually solve anything. So many fucking meetings, but they have to happen to resolve conflicts and keep stuff going.
Occasionally I go to design reviews and try to throw out bombs. "Why don't we do this or that? Have you thought about this thing that could cause issues?" Etc. again, doing nothing palpable, but there's 1000 systems interplaying. Having both low level and high level views represented and looking for issues has to happen. Having people who will embarrass themselves and throw out bad ideas or complaints is critical. The lower engineers are generally either too focused on small things or too nervous to talk which hampers them.
It's not worth 4x what a teacher makes. It's not worth the 4x I make over my reports. I do have to make critical decisions. I am way way way more on the hook for bad ones than my reports. It's stressful. But also, capitalism is a bitch who doesn't care what you do and tends to reward gambling mosy of all.
Good on you for doing the hard work most managers skimp on. Weekly half hour 1-1s, making moves in design reviews, etc. That's the hard work people skimp on and it comes back to bite them when they have no documentation to support promotions, etc. Best of luck!
I live in Canada and I make over $100k, but I assume you're in the US so I'm closer to $85k USD. I work in retail. Like anything, the answer to your question will depend on the person and field. Due to the nature of retail, my boss only shows up once every 5 weeks or more. I could easily go into work and do nothing for 8 hours but I would go crazy. So how busy my day is will depend on how many issues come up I have to address and how many meetings I have (the bane of my existence).
I have never worked in an office but I assume it is similar. Some people do most of the work and the others skate by on that work and it all comes down to who you know or who likes you enough to keep you around whether intentionally or just too lazy to fire the person.
I don't quite make 100k but I make about 80k with a side job that pushes me over 100k. My day job pays me far over what my job entails to be quite honest. It's on a contract supporting a government agency (and recently a second position open on the Fed side in my same position, which had previously been a contract position, and I looked into it and it would've been a pay decrease... so I'll stick with the contract).
Anyway.
My job title is Technical Writer but I am doing very little technical writing. My job is actually to monitor the documents our office produces or is asked to review and make sure the relevant stakeholders read it over and offer comments or sign off on it. If there are edits, I combine those into one document, and then ask the next tier of people to review.
That's it. That's my job. I have to follow up with offices when they're late on a document, or review the initial submission to make sure it aligns with our standards, but really my job is just making sure everyone else does their job when it comes to documents and document management.
You've got people skills! You take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers! (Or your secretary does)
Sorry, couldn't resist getting an Office Space joke in this thread somewhere.
I mean, honestly yes lol. I have an MFA in creative writing that made me desirable for this position because they wanted someone who could spot check the documents because a lot of easy errors were getting through. But I also have years of coordination experience from my side job (I run a literary magazine) where a lot of my responsibilities align with the goals of this position -- emailing people to make sure they get their things to me on time.
I also have Desktop Support experience, so those soft skills with people are pretty crucial.
A) are you hiring lol. Because someone on tildes literally told me I should check out technical writing. B) do the 1099 taxes not just drive you insane?
I think the job posting closed last month lol. It's a boring job and I spend a lot of time looking for other jobs because I really would rather be utilizing my writing skills in a more direct and noticeable way. But it does give me the time and financial support I need to run my lit mag (which is my side job and something I'm far more passionate about). Honestly the worst aspect of my job is the fact that I need to be on site two days a week. It's really pointless for me to be there. I'm never needed, nor do I speak to anyone in person.
Technical writing is sort of a weird field to get into. I didn't have any formal job experience in it before I got this job, but I do have an MFA in creative writing. Many (not all) technical writing jobs are looking for people not only with strong writing skills but also with experience in the field that the job covers. There are two other technical writers on my team who are above me, who do the actual editing aspect, though neither are subject matter experts. But in their position they don't have to be, because they are editing what the SMEs draft.
If you're a good writer with a strong grasp of grammar and style guides, I'd suggest looking for short term contracts to build a portfolio to start.
B) I guess I'm just used to it. I've been doing the side job for coming up on 7 years now, before, during and after grad school. I've had all sorts of income sources over those years, but that one has been steady. The annoying thing is remembering to pay estimated taxes. With the day job right now, I'm actually directly employed by a contracting firm, so I get regular paychecks and W2 at the end of the year.
oh that's beautiful—yeah if someone else was remembering to pay my taxes I would take that deal too! Thanks for the perspective, I'll keep looking; I already have one job like that haha, there would definitely be pros but also cons to getting another one.
As a software dev in a small town I’ve had three remote jobs well above $100k, long before the pandemic when remote work became fashionable.
One was at a startup based in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills where I think people had a real PMA but there was a lack of a real vision and a lot of disorganization. My little “skunk works” probably delivered more value than the rest of the team but I would attribute that not to my skill but the lack of cohesive vision. We never really launched a product. A lot of the staff got let go but I could probably have kept working for them but no, I went to work for…
A company with a deeply toxic culture where I had a 40 minute build process and there was nobody who could answer questions about a highly complex and cutting edge search engine we were building based on neural networks long before neural networks got “cool”. I got endless abuse (e.g. wrote a ticket about the 40 minute build, got asked “how does this benefit the customer?” and I say “the customer would have had the product 6 months earlier if I had a faster build”) I got the product in front of customers, it was so good that the PTO called us asking for a license the day after we put up a demo. I did another round of upgrades and then got abuse from the person who developed the product and quit. Six months later they told me they couldn’t find a replacement for me and I told them nothing was going to get better if they didn’t fire my boss. A week later I saw he was looking for work on LinkedIn.
I worked for another startup that had a better vision and alignment than the first but it was still pretty bad. I have to admit I made a lot of mistakes. On the other hand we were running around like chickens with their heads cut off to accommodate the demands of big enterprise customers (the like that any B2B startup wants to be working with) when we didn’t really understand our product. Because I was older and a good speaker and we had a lot of all-hands meetings I could easily upstage the CEO which ultimately led to my downfall. I believed in the vision of the company because I’d spent a long time being unemployed between this job and the last trying to get a company together to develop a very similar product and I’d tell other employees that if worst came to worse we’d get bought by one of our customers. It happened after I left. I thought it was going to be the likes of Airbus or Deloitte but it turned out be Nike. I like to joke that all the schwag I got from that company turned into Nike gear the day they got acquired.
—-
Some running themes are
(1) No labor union, No occupational licensing, no social support. (To be fair there is a certain kind of widespread cattiness and pathological politics that seem to be endemic to education; maybe you can’t fire someone with tenure but you can make their life hell)
(2) Having to solve complex and ambiguous problems that are not routine; in some sense if you are a software dev you should not being doing anything routine, anything routine should be automated and you should be dealing with the residual bit that can’t be automated.
(3) I’ll reiterate some effects of (1) that we don’t “see” any more than fish see the water they swim in. Imposter syndrome. Incompetent coworkers, often belligerent. A general resentment that the rest of the society has about “software eating the world”.
(4) Balky technology such that something that ought to take 2 minutes occasionally takes 2 days.
(5) Continuous tensions between making things that appear to work in the short term as opposed to understanding the problem and implementing a real solution. Being run ragged by the first and sometimes facing hostility from people when you attempt the second.
In another comment in this discussion I talk about my experience being bullied in school and how teachers showed support and allyship for the people who harassed and assaulted me. This has a lifetime impact
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29803971/
certainly I dealt with all the situations above much less well than I could have because it was drilled into me at an early age that I am worthless, have no right to set boundaries, that social situations are dangerous, etc.
As everyone has already said: nothing I do is worth any multiplier of the work teachers do. It's all politics and supply/demand.
I'm a "director of analytics." I am forced to come into an open concept office each day so in a sense I'm always "on" as well, but it's different. My days are filled with:
Honestly I hate it. It might be bearable if I my team could WFH but that is out of the question. I'll take a pay cut just to escape. I've worked as unionized hourly labor in steel production, retail, in libraries, e-commerce, been a lead dev in start ups, and taught in universities. This is highest paying and most soul crushing job I've had. There is both no amount of money worth this job and also the most stupid useless job I've seen.
Edit: for a less cynical take. Since we manage a population of 270k employees globally and payroll is the largest cost to the business. Any improvement in employment metrics nets the company... hundreds of millions. My team provide visibility to that data as well as tactical decision making and assists with workforce strategy setting. That's how we justify our cost.
I completely agree that teachers are underpaid almost everywhere, the occupation doesn't get the credit it should in society and consequently too few of the brilliant people we want to work as teachers do. Society loses out, both in terms of democracy and having an educated populace vote, and in terms of "value created" because educated people can do more to benefit society, but also in terms of letting people make the best decisions for themselves as the pilots in their own lives.
Sorry for a long post that's about me in mostly flattering terms. It's not my favorite thing to share, but hopefully that's more of a direct answer to the good and important question asked in the OP.
That said, I'm not bragging when I say that I'm worth the silly salary I'm paid to do the job I do.
Both in terms of bringing jobs and value to the company I work for and the area I work in, and compared to if you'd hire someone with a fraction of my salary, who could do the job, but wouldn't perform as well.
Say I'm paid a million a year more than you could hire someone else for. I bring in more than a million in pure profit (not revenue) to the company than any replacement who'd take the job for the million less a year. You could not hire three people for 300.000 each a year and get the same response.
I ran a one-person network company. "We" got bought by a huge multinational with the agreement that I would have to work for the new mother company for some years. The mandatory years have passed.
My skills and attributes are worth the salary I make, because coming in second place means someone else wins the entire contract/bid for a customer, we're out of work, don't profit and someone else, maybe in India, do instead.
A manager's worth isn't measured in hours worked, but getting and edge and making the very right decision under pressure in the situations where making the right call is all or nothing. My value comes in strategy, planning and the execution of those plans over time.
I manage several employees, develop strategy, have ideas, pitch solutions to problems, or plans to meet customer demand specs.
The most important task I do at work is sit, or run, or walk or swim, or play a computer game, read random stuff online, browse tildes or whatever, and have the best idea I possibly can to solve a task. Then we need to operationalize that idea after ensuring that the thinking is sound.
Sometimes I sit in my office and stare at the wall for a couple hours, simply thinking. Most of the time my best work comes when I'm just living my life, and I pull out my phone and write down these thoughts immediately so we can capitalize on them later
Other days, I have a bunch of meetings, internally with the employees I personally manage, with other managers or c-suite folks. Some days I waste travelling because customers want to meet physically. Other days I have efficient meetings with clients to assess their needs and ensure that we can supply the best solution to their needs, not the solutions they think they need.
Previously, I actually networked, or "did work" rather than talk to people. I still have a technical skill set that my company leverages regularly.
Now I mostly deal with emergency issues for our largest clients when they're in the "what do we do with this immediate problem" phase. I work in a field where you can't just throw more people at a problem to solve it faster. To solve things faster, you need to have the best few people work on things in parallel. Sometimes digital systems work so that only a single person can work solving the issue at the same time.
When I do this "actual work", rather than just be a corporate type in an office, more and more I'm especially in demand when the issue the client has identified isn't actually on our end, or even with our systems in any way, but I can work the rest of their infrastructure due to past work.
If I make a bad call, tens of people can be out of work. I get paid for living and managing that responsibility. In just the same way, teachers should be paid more for managing the responsibility of educating our children for the future, to the betterment of them individually, and for society.
People can say "no-one's skillset is worth 10x someone else" or "no-one can do the work of 20 people, so they shouldn't be paid 20 times more" or "someone else can do the same job for less".
Often those sentiments are simply wrong. If you have the second fastest runner, you don't win gold. If there's only one prize in the contest, you go home with nothing for second place.
I'm in no circumstances saying that I'm worth more than a teacher. Our salaries do in no way reflect our worth as humans, people.
Garbage-collectors and those who take care of the elderly, those who deliver food to stores and all sorts of other functions are necessary for society to function. Many people are vastly underpaid for their time. Society is organized in ways that are unfair, that vastly underpay some of those who add most value to society, like good teachers. The difference between having an adult in a classroom and a great teacher cannot be overstated.
But there most certainly are situations where someone's skillset in some way or another can be worth 4, 10, 50 or 100 times more than someone else in that same role.
Do I feel like an imposter sitting in an office all day, making seven figures, sometimes just sitting around drinking hot chocolate? Who in their right mind wouldn't. But some days, the triage I do for 40 minutes for a customer who's having serious issues can be worth millions to them in getting their factory running again, or millions to our company because we win a large contract, or millions to society where we live in jobs and tax revenue that would otherwise go to a company in a different country.
I could have five times my salary, and I'd still be a good deal for my employer; I'd still add more value to the company than the extra amount I'd be paid compared to someone else in the same role.
I'd gladly pay more tax than I do to contribute my fair share. I volunteer in many capacities to try to make up the difference. I hope some of my skills, mostly gained at work, can contribute in small ways to good causes that way too.
Just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the in-depth response. You put a lot of thought into this.
Indeed, I don't disagree at all. If you're able to earn your company more contracts and profit than the next best guy, then you have earned that increased pay. It's difficult to judge what people "should" be paid by referencing one industry against another, especially when there isn't a tangible result or results are dependent on myriad other factors (such as in teaching or elderly care or what have you.)
I've taken the time to read through all the comments here (as of now) and I've been able to learn quite a bit. I am grateful for the perspectives offered and have quite a bit to mentally chew on. Thank you to everyone who responded, and I hope its fostered some good discussion and thoughts among us.
One thing to clarify, is that looking back I feel I came across a bit as complaining, and that wasn't my intention. I'm thankful that most seem to have understood the intent of my question - to learn more about duties and responsibilities of a set of jobs I will likely never experience. Thank you for enlightening me.
I'm a programmer or software engineer, depending on how fancy I want to sound. (The latter is my actual job title.) I work remotely from the midwest US, but for a company in San Francisco. I make software that other companies apparently find very useful and are willing to pay thousands of dollars for.
I have tickets assigned to me describing bugs that people have run into, and I investigate them and fix them, or justify why they're not bugs. This requires lots of knowledge of the inner workings of the software, which takes months to build up to a useful level. I suspect a large part of our salaries is just incentivizing us not to leave because replacing us is a pain in the ass.
Between those, I work on new features. This looks mostly the same from the outside: I'm staring at the screen for long periods thinking, and occasionally typing something. A lot of the thinking is combining product knowledge (both internal and external) with "how to make software that doesn't immediately break" knowledge, and that's what I'm really being paid for.
I don't think the actual thing I make is worth the comically high salary (~$180K/year) I'm paid. It's certainly not more valuable to society than what teachers do. But my employer disagrees, so I'm not going to correct them.
If someone unfamiliar (and likely uninterested) in my line of work, asks me what I do, I just say "meetings."
But you are asking a fundamentally deeper questions.
Most meetings are useless, and the more attendees they typically have (100+), the more useless they are to me individually. Those are the best meetings to skip or to play baldur's gate 3 in.
The useful meetings involve figuring out how to do stuff. Learn. Make. Sell. Use. Profit.
If your arithmetic and reasoning skills are sharp, you might wonder, why do organizations have 100+ attendees, all getting paid 4x your salary, all apparently playing baldur's gate 3, while they all barely listen to someone blather corporate bullshit bingo.
The reason is, motivation. It's hard to motivate hundreds of people to aim towards the same target. But if you build a cohesive corporate culture, you might get somewhere. Unfortunately, that means a lot of meetings, with a lot of people, and they are all are apparently playing baldur's gate 3.
As for money, what you earn has nothing to do with your contribution to society, or your impact to the world. A stay at home mother gets paid nothing, but contributes more to their childs well being than any amount of money ever will.
There's nothing dumb about asking why pre-K teachers in the U.S. are comparatively paid so little these days. I'll posit two things that haven't come up yet:
Public services, particularly teaching, have been under right-wing assault for decades. The services of the state (with the exception of policing and military) have become almost definitionally "socialism" and therefore bad. The propaganda and legal campaign has also weakened unions, which were the great wage scale equalizers of the 20th Century. My mother retired from 40 years of unionized teaching making well over the equivalent of 100k in present-day dollars. Workers and unions need better PR.
Teaching, especially early education, still suffers from the cultural assumptions of unpaid women's work. It doesn't matter that you have specialist training and experience in wrangling dozens of the little monsters at a time, forcing social and factual knowledge into their heads to make them into functional human beings. You're both replacing an entire extended family/village, and enabling the kids' parents to be maximally productive. Public schools are far more productive in an industrial society than pinning down a quarter or more of the potential workforce at home doing basic childcare. It's shameful that teachers don't partake of a bigger fraction of the surplus value they create for everyone else.
As to what I actually do for $100k+, I'm paid for 20+ years of cumulative experience in IT, primarily in healthcare. I design and configure workflow, analytics, and safety solutions that require some knowledge in many different areas - networking, EMR and other interfaces, UI/UX, programming, clinic and hospital operations, databases, security, server and cloud architecture, etc. I'll also get involved in sales engineering, support, documentation, and vendor/end user training as needed. [Sorry, further details not available on request - it's a small industry and I'm not interested in de-anon.]
Although I've done project and IT management, my time is now more valuably spent asking the questions and doing the work to ensure reliable outcomes tailored to the customer's needs. The installation at a single hospital can affect millions of patient visits and all the staff that support them.
I spend less than a quarter of my time in meetings that don't have an immediate engineering purpose. My role in most of those meetings is making sure we're identifying and fulfilling all of the expectations for system design, and providing technical guidance in decision-making. However, I also do boots-on-the-ground site visits for physical design/installation, calibration, quality assurance, and go-live support.
So, is my salary justified by comparison with a teacher's? In terms of hours of labor, I'm at about 50 - 55 hours/week now (yay, layoffs! /s), not counting 5 - 10 hours/week continuing education to stay current on the underlying technologies. Based on what I saw of my mother's work, the time commitment is similar.
However, I'd say the stresses and direct responsibility of caring for children are much greater. I work with a great, close-knit team of people who are all very skilled in their areas of expertise and highly collaborative. We don't have to deal with much administrative overhead, confrontations with irate customers, or public scorn. There's less ambiguity, more direct control of what we do, and thus the burnout rate is far lower.
So I'd say that I'm fairly compensated, but teachers should be making about twice what I am, and maybe doing half as much work.
I guess I'm not the corporate fat cat you're thinking of but I'm certainly management.
I either spend my days doing next to nothing other than filling out a couple of forms and approving things or 16+ hours of meetings, calls and coordinating messages. I don't "do" any work but I'm responsible for reporting to the C-suite level on if something is done, so it'll be something like "assign five people projects, meeting, meeting about something else, get updates on/quality control for one of the projects, sync on one of the other ones and then go to another meeting about that one."
The top wants information, I'm there to assign the bodies, explain why I assigned them, and explain why, despite how good they are, that Rome can't be built in a day. If I do my job well, it generally seems like I do nothing all day but that's only because I've gained a reprieve for our team or I'm just out of my office "in meetings" which means no one sees me around. My team understands I'm working but other sections are firmly in the "well, I don't see him so he must be doing nothing."
I'm a so-called "full stack" web developer for a startup. That just means I am a jack-of-all-trades and am at least competent in every domain:
I also need to be (at least) not terrible at UI design. Other skills involved: interviewing (surprisingly hard to do well), mentorship of junior engineers, managing up for inexperienced CEOs, customer interviews and design feedback sessions, and many more.
Because I'm at a 6-month-old company most of my work is actual programming and application design with our CEO (who is a subject matter expert) or with customers. I usually show up around 11am (in person) and leave at 5 or 6pm. Occasionally I need to put in an hour or two late at night but I'm still well under 40 hours per week and the boss is happy. Best of all there is 0 bullshit and no formal meetings besides 1:1s with the CEO.
My current compensation package - $184,000 salary, 80% of any health insurance plan's premium covered in addition to that (I'm currently using COBRA from my last job in big tech), and 3% of the company's current shares.
I do not think teachers are getting paid appropriately. They should get paid over $100k. The value of a good teacher to society is well above that. The issue is that, in this capitalistic hellscape, if the value you provide isn't direct and obvious - like saving a business money on a current expense - then no one wants to pay you for what you do. We're running the system in an incredibly blind and idiotic way. An amazing teacher could easily produce millions in GDP for each year they work. But that's going to be spread around through thousands of little purchases and paychecks.
This is something I brought up in another post - that the impact of a good educator is incredibly hard to measure. Additionally, sometimes things are just out of your hands (you teach in a rough area, you have students who for one reason or another are hostile to learning that you cannot get through to, you have parents making spurious accusations, etc) and it can torpedo a genuinely good teacher's ability or will to teach in the same way as having simple bad luck in business or decisions can ruin a promising startup or tech worker.
Honestly if someone can do a year of good work in a tough school where kids are told by everyone that they've got no future then they should get 5 extra years of early retirement for that. Someone that can do that is going to earn a "thank you for your service" from me.
I work for a Pharma multinational in a governance role making > $150k.
I do a lot of things, but where I earn my pay is decision quality. Understanding of organisational politics, broader industry trends, short term budget demands, regulatory requirements and how compliant is compliant enough is hard. In addition, I have a PhD in my area and understand the technical details deeply - and can translate this for senior leadership. I have a track record of making good decisions which I have been able to build on to create a brand / trust in my organisation which I leveraged to gain this current high paying role.
I have key seats in the company's governance structure so have a substantial span of control - decisions I make/influence can have impacts in the tens of millions of dollars range. This is a common theme in replies I think - if you act as a force multiplier then in the greater scheme your higher income can be justified. If I just saved the company $2m, I'm basically free for a few years.
Won't say where or what I did but I made 100k to do fuck-all all day until layoffs happened. Now I make half of that doing fuck-all all day but with a pension.
Originally I spent 4 years working helpdesk for a university. Spent 5 years post college doing IT stuff for K12 schools. From there I went to be a sysadmin for a software company, changed my career a few years back and learned to code a little bit and I am now a site reliability engineer (SRE) which is kind of like sysadmin with some programming/"engineering" mindset involved.
Day to day basis is not routine. I am looking at complex systems, making improvements to help ensure that the systems are robust and reliable (from how they are built, to how they are hosted, to how they perform), I am helping when things break (incident command), I am developing new ways for us to catalog our myriad software (microservices & software catalog), I am helping set standards for how new software is made (golden paths), and developing monitoring capabilities to observe all dimensions of systems (observability).
I sort of fell into my current role, if it wasn't for a number of lucky circumstances I have no clue what I'd be doing today, but I've always been curious about technology, so I love learning new things.
I'm in the lead software engineer at my small company and I manage our small team of developers as well as manage our infrastructure, technical planning, high level support, and also software development. I also work as a consultant for our sister company because their needs do not usually require full time developers in house. I probably do more work than a lot of the the stereotypical person that you were describing, but meetings only take up 20% of my time. And I am technically on call 24/7 and end up working after hours for support or significant infrastructure launches. My wife was a teacher, so I know how hard that job is and how unfair the pay is. I think that my time and stress are probably about the same level as a teacher (ignoring summers), and I make over double what the average teacher in my area. My wife left teaching because it was clear that her pay was vastly out of line with the workload, stress, and poor treatment by administration.
I work in Information Security in higher ed. I make over $100k a year, which isn't too bad for mt area. There are a lot of large technical and software oriented businesses in my city, so the salaries for those types of jobs are probably a bit higher than in some other places.
My work "product" is really guiding others to do things in the best way possible.
For example, I got cold called into a meeting a few days ago where the web development team wanted to make a site less secure overall to fix a problem they found. No one knew how long this problem has existed, it came up in testing for an upgrade. So I had to quickly evaluate the state of what was broken, the potential impact of lessening security to achieve a business need, and balance that with the amount of time required to implement the fix. All in about 15 minutes. In the end I pushed back on the change and we had to meet with the business leaders and explain what was wrong, why we couldn't/shouldn't just slam a fix in place, and plan for a more complicated work around (including adding addition burden to other departments) to put in place until the correct fix can be put in place.
All of that takes a particular set of skills that I've developed over the last 20+ years in IT. Technical understanding to know when other technical people are putting their priorities (get shit done) over mine (get shit done securely), people skills/soft skills to work with the developers and management to explain the problem and discuss solutions that are not really palatable to anyone involved, then the ability to track and follow through on the fixes to make sure they're done correctly.
Beyond that one example, I'm also responsible for doing internal risk assessments of 3rd party applications to make sure we're not buying shit that's immediately going to get hacked (hopefully), making sure that we have policies and procedures (documented) to meet our internal and external regulatory requirements, as well as provide other kinds of "IT support" when needed.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that my job is hard to explain to people who don't really know how IT functions in larger organizations, and there are plenty of days where I'm just in meetings and talking to people, but the results of those conversations are part what I "produce" even if there's nothing tangible.
I also have days where I can kind of slack off and play a game for awhile or watch a video, but really I have to manage my own time and schedule and do still have things that need to be done at certain times so that I don't affect the productivity of others. From the outside I can see how that is hard to grasp for people that work in other types of jobs.
I really respect teachers (have a number of them in my family and had things gone differently for me I might be one too) and think they are underpaid and underappreciated in our society today.
I'm an HRIS (HR Information Systems) manager for one of the largest retail companies in the US. This week:
I make ~$150k a year if I receive my bonus. But to be honest, I hate being a manager. I would gladly step down to a Lead-level and make less money if it meant I didn't have to do as much meetings. My meetings take up roughly ~20-25 hours a week. My boss sucks (not as a person, just as a manager for a person like myself).
I actually told my boss at my recent performance review that I make too much money. I know it sounds absurd to say things like that but the point I was trying to make was that my goal isn't to make more and more money, and progress further and further in my career. I want to work on interesting projects that make me think and work towards a certain goal. If I don't have that, you couldn't pay me double what I make and expect me to be happy.
I work as an engineer writing code that supports the production of our products in factories. I also creat designs for industrial machines to support production. My day to involves a variety of meetings adding my input and experience to how to better create and support these machines, as well as the actual hardware and software development work. Which generally consists of drawing schematics and writing code.
As for is my work worth 4x as much as yours? Ethically I don’t think that should be the case, but the high pay is justified by the profound impact my job can have on the factory. If I mess up I could destroy millions of dollars of production, and if I do well I can save huge amounts of money through increasing factory efficiency.
A large portion of higher paying jobs is proper communication, documentation, and planning.
If you can build a widget or perform a service that makes the company money, that's great.
If you have 3000 people involved in that process, one bad decision can cost much more than one widget producer could reasonably generate.
In theory, a lot of these "do nothing" jobs that don't produce visible output are there to make sure the company knows what it's doing, in an attempt to avoid or be aware of these kinds of things.
In practice, this gets nebulous as you have a lot of conflicting incentives (do i admit i screwed up, do i point out someone higher than me is about to make a bad decision and risk my job, etc) and terrible metrics (we're only going to do procedures that make us money, so now all procedures that save money get axed).
Personally as I sorta qualify for what you're talking about, I do a lot of the above (communication, meetings, project planning), but also do coding/automation across a variety of systems. It would be hard for me to judge what's been more valuable for the company between the two, because for every time I've saved hours, days, or weeks of work on a process with code, I've probably done something similar by just being aware of what's going on, talking to the right people, and making sure everyone knows what they should (or should not) be doing.
To touch on some of your complaints directly:
I've absolutely had days that were less productive than others. I've also had months where I was working hyper late every day and weekends because something critical had to be done NOW.
In general I think breaks should be more rewarded/encouraged because a lot of work is bursty/sporadic and "pretending" to work all day is sometimes worse than just screwing around on your phone/playing BG3.
None of this isn't to say there aren't plenty of people who are overpaid and doing nothing useful. There's all sorts of scenarios where these jobs just become box checking and pointless arguments over things that'll never matter or just delegate away every problem/think nothing is actually "their problem". But to be fair, I've seen shit/lazy workers in lots of positions, and it's not just Corporate.
As for pay scales, that's a whole other thing. In general I think a lot of corporate pay has been hyper inflated due to the "requirement" all these people get 4 year degrees in "business or whatever" which now requires them to be paid X or Y with little to no actual benefit. Most of what you need to do these jobs is learned on the job, and degrees wind up as arduous requirements with hard to justify benefits, if not being downright detrimental if your work environment doesn't mesh well with the "theory" they teach.
Knowledge bases are a huge thing, I'll second you on that just having someone who knows the right thing at the right meeting can literally save man-years of wasted effort. Sometimes those are technical, but often it can also be knowledge about the organization or detailed knowledge of its products as well, so you get people who are paid surprisingly well just because they have the tenure to have acquired that level of knowledge about the organization.
Military R&D software developer. There's government BS (lots of training, meetings, etc), but between that, I design software subsystems to work as part of broader communication networks, build prototype test hardware, repair and modify COTS/GOTS equipment (including being allowed to stick my grubby fingers into pieces of hardware that cost several times my yearly paycheck), and taking these things out into the field for tests, at test ranges both on land and at sea.
That said, while I get to do pretty much all of those over the course of any given year, most of the time, it involves sitting at a desk and programming, albeit often with one or two of those silly expensive pieces of hardware sitting on the next desk over while I get the software talking to it; also, it often tends to be programming that requires some fairly specialized skills regarding high performance/security minded code as well as knowledge of how certain military systems and comms protocols work. To be honest, even as someone making over 100k, I could probably double or triple my salary moving in to the private sector given some of my skill areas, but govvie work has some benefits when it comes to things like more regular hours and time off vs private industry and my current paycheck is enough that I don't feel driven to go for more at the expense of quality of life.
If you are making $100k+ a year you are still a salary person. Executives are making their income from investments, which is how they can get way beyond $250k and into 7+ figures. Yes they can have multi-million salaries on top of that, these people are very few and in between.
At the executive level you are making decisions constantly and dictating direction to others. It’s entirely delegated work.
This.
I make over $250k, and all I do is delegate.
Executives are salaried as well. Some executives happen to major shareholders, in the case where the founder of the company is still the executive. But Sundae Pichai, or Andy Jass, are salary workers, working for the board of their companies.
Their comp is often structured with a significant amount of stock grants, but that is still money the company is giving to them - it’s not “investments”.
On the other hand, Bezos use to pay himself 80k, no stock. Because he was the founder, and had a founder’s share of stocks in Amazon, so as long as Amazon went up and to the right, his wealth increased.
Most executives are not Bezos. They are paid by the company in money or money equivalent assets.
I think that’s an important distinction. Companies are different sizes. There’s like the point where annual income balloons rapidly, but the number of people in those categories also drops down radically.
Wouldn’t surprise me if statistically the majority of executives are for companies with less than 10 employees.
I'm a mechanical engineer. Likely soon to leave the corporate environment (I'm in my notice period now, in fact). But this is what I've observed in my 9 years of working in a corporation.
The corporate environment is a bit unique. It's an encapsulated version of a market. My engineering is applied to very specific problems in this environment, from performance of our products all the way to solving an inability to obtain a desired part (need to design in a new part) and the inexpediency of changing a lot of older designs to use a new thing to avoid having to buy an old thing or to gain the ability to buy lots of new things to bring prices down.
Part of what I do is creative. In the same sense of artistic creativity, but rather than the art driven by human emotions, it's driven by human desired function. Rather than using paint on paper to evoke a sense of the variety of emotions which come with the human condition (fine arts), we use, say, machined metal shaped to perform a human defined function in space and time.
The other part is making decisions. I have to sit with other humans to decide how the business operates. Not in the sense of buying and selling, but in the sense of what we decide our product to do and how it might appeal to a customer. At the individual level, I have the leverage to shape, in a small way, the millions of dollars of business our product produces. I have to negotiate the performance and cost of our product with executives who match this to what might appeal to our customers. It's a fractal structure where I'm making decisions at the very small level over my own work, working with small teams of 5-6 people to make decisions at larger levels, who then work in teams of 5-6 groups to make decisions at yet a larger level, all the way up through the VP level who makes decisions at a very high level to the executive corporate suite who makes the top level decisions.
The world of business is a world of people talking to people to achieve a goal. A corporation, specifically, is a fractal machine for doing this kind of business. Working in that machine is to operate the levers that make the machine move. Every lever in that structure has some level of ability to change the company, with peons like me having a small lever that can make very minute changes and VPs having very large levers which make very large changes to the company, but with very little ability to make very detailed changes. At a low level, I have to respond to tiny perturbations in the corporation. At the VP level, they have to respond to very large directional changes to the corporation.
I'm a frontend engineer. I am in charge of our marketing site and flagship product demos, but it's a startup so I also dabble in design for said demos (former life as a graphic designer). I'm a remote worker so I am in my PJs and hanging out with my pets. It's pretty cushy. I do work plenty late when needed, but I feel extremely well compensated for it.
Your location is the most important factor. You say you are a teacher, but there's plenty of places where 25k can be a good salary and others where it's below minimum wage. In some places 100k is entry level salary, in others, what you would make at the top of the chain, like a VP.
I’m disappointed to see this response at the top; OP isn’t complaining that she makes 1/4 of a 100k salary, they are asking what the value-added difference is between the two jobs. I feel like this is dodging the question totally by deflecting to “well you probably only make so little because of where you live”—all salaries scale with COL, so those 100k salary Idaho workers living in major cities where teachers earn $100k are themselves making much more. Additionally, teaching is a touch-another-person job, and the closer you are to actual people the less potential you have to get a cushy high-paying remote job in your field and move somewhere cheaper while you’re earning CA or NY money (US examples, maybe it’s the same elsewhere).
I disagree. Things do not scale the same way in all places. The discrepancy between a teacher and a programmer may be 4x in the US, but be in the same ballparks as others.
The work you do isn't as much a factor as where you are, as the perception of the job, the supply/demand, local industry, cost of living etc play much larger factors.
I know everyone wants to think that some jobs are some kind of magical meritocratic stuff where you get X money because you are Y more productivity or Z more responsibility, but really, it isn't that much of a factor.
As an example, I was working as a developer in my country for 35k, which is average for a programmer, and slighty above average salary (IT industry is not strong here), and then got a job for 50k remote working for an US company with raises that have left me with about 100k, which is very, very good in my country. My work is actually easier than my old company (I also put insane hours, but I also had that before).
Is location really the most important factor? I'd think you'd have to reach for the extrema to find places where you could quadruple your pay by simply moving.
I also kind of doubt that 25k could be considered a "good" salary anywhere in the US. Sufficient? Maybe. But good?
I'm not assuming OP is in the US. That kind of discrepancy happens a lot in the EU, though, which is my point.
I mean, but no one with an income of $25k USD is going to be able to easily move to a more expensive area—and definitely isn't able to move overseas. I read your reply above—it sort of ties in with what someone else was saying about remote work opening up opportunities for people with more "detached" jobs, vs. service/healthcare/education/etc industry positions where you kinda gotta be there. So you've been able to benefit from that, which is great, but it would take a career change for OP, and that job would still be paying the same crummy wage.
I'm fairly certain OP is American, however, so I assume they were referring to discrepancies within the US.