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Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

The difference here is usually leverage. A teacher spending an hour to teach one child teaches one child, but a programmer who spends an hour writing code to generate a dollar’s worth of value can have that run thousands of times a second or 24/7 even when they’re sleeping.

Of course teachers who understand this also make money, see Miss Excel ( https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en ), who was/is making $100k a day with excel instruction videos on tiktok and instagram. It’ll all about leverage.

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I disagree - the difference isn’t leverage it’s monetize-ability.

If teachers were paid a lifetime percentage of their students earnings teachers would make far more than software engineers. Barring some cultural revolution that’s not going to happen.

Software engineers simply make more money because the companies they work for have high margins.

This assumes there’s actually a significant benefit from school on lifetime earnings, which is at best debatable if not actually at odds with all available research.

I’d love to see the research you’re citing. Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings?

Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes.

It's not that trivial, because the types of people that choose to drop out might be the types of people that earn less, even if there are no causal links at all.

For example, they might be risk averse and a risk averse personality might lead to other decisions that make more money. (or the opposite)

It would be easy for a fad to arise calling education unnecessary and a waste of time, and for people to consider the option to drop out less risky just because it gets talked about more. So even if the correlation held statistically now, in any year it could change just because the subgroup of risk-averse people are more likely to consider it. So you still couldn't use it to make permanent decisions(like creating a school system for hundreds of years).

Homeschooling vs. high school graduates would remove "choice to drop out" from the student, but then "choice to homeschool" on the parents might carry down genetically or culturally and maybe "aversion to government authority" improves earnings on average.

I try to reject all statistics on "easily understandable" social topics. Leave that for scientists only. It's too easy to make a mistake and not get any warning that you made a mistake, and believe wrong things your whole life.

Just because one is homeschooled doesn’t mean they don’t have a teacher.

All observable evidence shows those who complete their schooling in any form make more money

It's illegal not to provide schooling of some sort, so that is yet a 3rd variable("willingness to commit crimes") that could be a better predictor.

I don't care whether schooling causes or doesn't cause a benefit: You called it "trivial" by looking at statistics, and that supreme confidence that there can be no other explanation seems unjustified.

I didn’t mention any statistics so I’m not sure what you’re going on about. I’m saying those who don’t go to school make less money. That is empirically true. Selection bias is irrelevant here to the original comment.

> Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings?

> Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes.

There is an implied statistical argument here that by plotting "did X drop out" on one axis and their future income on another, that a correlation would refute a statement that "Schools cause students to earn less".

Specifically, you would be:

    1. Gathering many examples of individuals(a "population") with boolean "did they drop out?" V1, some income metric V2, maybe some others.
    2. Comparing and aggregating V1 and V2 across the population
    3. Using it to refute a statement S

That is a statistical argument for ~S because it involves comparing population aggregates. You may not have explicitly used the word "statistics" or realized you did it, but you made a statistical argument.

The teachers who teach 30 kids / year x 20 year avg career = 600 kids, on average 10% go on to become coders, so now that one teacher is responsible for generating 60 coders each of whose code goes on to "run thousands of times a second or 24/7 even when they're sleeping." They are more levered in impact than most coders will ever be and yet remain under compensated. It is a sad state of affairs.

This is nonsense of course. Teachers affect lives every day and those lives effect others. Your code is ephemeral and only exists in a digital realm. It's only as good as the next pull request.

Time to get over ourselves people.

Imagine we added up all the dollars generated as a result of good instruction.

"A teacher spending an hour to teach one child teaches one child"

Thats a tautology, not analysis.

A teacher spending an hour in front of 300 kids might create 300 buisinessmen, so have you accounted for their contributuon to the conomy?

Classic tech guy response. Teachers teach multiple kids, hundreds a week of not a day, and can inspire many to go on to do great things (money-wise or not).

Why are we tech people so arrogant about our career? We already make good money, no need to think we're better than others.

Nobody suggested greater leverage meant "better than others".

If you write software in any given year that gets used by thousands or millions of others, you may also be enabling great things - either in capabilities or reduced friction shipped.

Also, successful software gets used for a long time, with additional work adding value on top of previous value.

So software work is leveragable without fundamental limits across both space and time.

This space-time leverage is true of all automation design.

In contrast, well done online courses can "automate" learning, but not as completely. The highest quality teaching involves meeting many students individual needs. And there is nothing automated about most teaching.

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