American CEO says the airline has grounded 100 planes | Hacker News Reader

American CEO says the airline has grounded 100 planes

businessinsider.com

My friend just quit his job as a commercial airline captain to go study computer science. He started flying around the age of 16, about the time I started programming.

Airlines treat their employees like objects. The schedule is horrendous and their healthcare benefits are abysmal. The monotony of the job causes a lot of depression compounded with the fact that you’re away from family for often days or weeks at a time living in sub par hotels.

The pay is not very great either, yet execs rake in huge . Some pilots at FedEx and other carriers can make FAANG money, but it’s not the average.

An interesting perspective he also shared was you don’t grow. You kind of learn everything initially but it’s mentally boring. He’s loved CS. Seems like execs need to focus on quality of life and quality of work for these pilots.

Not to mention the need to cultivate more pilots. As smaller airports are destroyed by corrupt local politicians for a one-time payoff at the behest of developers and land speculators, there are fewer and fewer places to train. That's on top of the already high cost.

If there were more pilots coming through, the turnover might be more manageable.

Also, regional pilot pay is dogshit.

It looks like there are just over 100k pilots in the US. That would mean that American is trying to hire roughly 2% of all US pilots.

I dont have a feel for if this is a tall order, or not that hard. In other industries it seems like it would be hard. Hiring 2% of all developers in the US? That would sound hard. Is it easier with pilots?

does pilot earn more than sde?

If these are to be believed, then yes.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/pilot/salary

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...

Thanks for the data on pilot compensation.

So it doesn’t come anywhere close to software compensation: https://www.levels.fyi/2021/

Presumably the methodology used by USN&WR is uniform across careers. You can’t pick another methodology and expect to get meaningful results by comparing across the two.

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