No, value to the business only sets the ceiling. The floor comes from the labor supply side of the market. (i.e. can the company find qualified people willing to do it at X rate)
Value to the business is the floor more often than not. Plenty of business activities simply don't generate much money in the first place, with salaries capped accordingly. Albeit not the typical tech company or F500.
>how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.
Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures.
It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.
Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.
The word "qualified" is pulling a lot of weight in your argument.
You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you're willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".
Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business, but such market forces don't apply to schools. Unless you want to completely privatize education (which has its own set of issues) we have to use the political process to drive schools to raise their both their salaries and hiring standards.
Another thing to consider is that the quality of the teacher might not map to improved results in the same way it does in tech. A programmer tends to have a lot more choice in how they go about solving the problem, whereas teachers tend to have very little leeway. Furthermore, it's very difficult to quantify how well a teacher is doing as well.
>>Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business
Most work in Tech companies even the top FAANG ones these days is crud work.
These people can only afford to pay well, because they make their money through advertising scale. Companies which depend on paying users, can't afford to pay that kind of salaries, nor waste their time interviewing people on rounds and rounds for proxy skills which have nothing to do with the job on hand.
In short only VC companies without profit pressure or web advertising companies pay well. Others don't have this luxury.
> ...you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".
Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.
That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.
I'm not sure how much that holds with the government running public schools and the primary stakeholders being children.
For example if you didn't really care the much about building a software project, but had to do it, you could probably find some 'developers' who would do the work for the same salary that teachers work at.
I'm not sure how the outcome would compare to that of public schools.
The labor market is a tool of society. It's like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn't perform its function effectively.
It's true, and while I also believe teachers should be paid more relative to other occupations, labor market has one thing going for it that makes it hard to replace - it's a very simple process that doesn't require any central coordination.
>>Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes.
I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.
Some public schools can't find a decent calculus teacher at the prices they're paying. On the other hand, if they paid a janitor to sit in the classroom while AP Calc students teach themselves, in many places that would work out great.
Thank you, I was trying to show by pointing out an example of low pay and high outcomes that pay is not corrected. But I don’t want to say that there’s a negative correlation.
I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.
I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).
>>There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.
Add to this, demand for teachers is directly tied to population growth rates. If more teachers are being produced compared to growth of class rooms the pay falls further.
No, long before AWS, Amazon intentionally re-invested all of the excess revenue that would be reported as profit back into the business instead (expanding capex and opex).
I thought aws sprung out of investment in their own infrastructure. A happy accident of sorts, not some preplanned mammoth investment in building AWS from the ground up
AWS, or rather S3 was a pet project of one of the very early Amazon employees who wanted to do something fun. It wasn't really taken seriously or had deep strategy at first. Once it's started to gain traction, Bezos realized the enormous potential and full-steamed-ahead AWS.
Then it took many years for Amazon retail to actually start using AWS products in any meaningful way.
>No, because at this point the barrier to entry is substantial.
Not really. Unless the product has a powerful network effect, people can easily enter. If that weren't the case, starbucks would have run every coffee shop out of business by now.
My mother-in-law did just that and is doing fine, thank you very much. May not be the world-beating "money in it" as you define it, but for the small business she's running it's viable.
Would it shock you to know these topics have already come up in the family, and have since day one? Or that she herself is an Amazon customer?
Somehow, she still finds a way to sell books and make some money, as well as highlight local authors and sell trail guides. The Barnes & Noble down the road, to be frank, seems to be her bigger headache.
Starbucks has caused a lot of coffee shops to close. Boutique coffee shops have a significant advantage however—people like variety in their café's. This exists in some industries more than others.
> Starbucks has caused a lot of coffee shops to close.
Sure, but normal legitimate competition causes worse-performing competitors to close, so some distinction should be made between this supposed "predatory pricing until competitors shut down" strategy and the normal "cause competitors to shut down by simply being better than them" strategy.
...to my knowledge, Starbucks has never engaged in predatory pricing to begin with, so at this point I'm legitimately not sure what we're discussing here.
If the question is, given a willingness to blatantly violate anti-trust law, and lose immense amounts of short-term for long-term gains, could Starbucks drive out all competition? And... I actually don't think they could, because (A) coffee shop patrons like variety and (B) I'm not clear that Starbucks could necessarily outlast e.g. Dunkin' Donuts.
Starbucks is just a poor example. Walmart would be a much better example.
Has Walmart ever been charged for predatory pricing? There have been plenty of accusations and lawsuits, but from what I've seen, they amount to accusations of having a few "loss leader" products. I can't find any evidence that either 1) loss leader pricing strategies are clearly illegal or 2) that Walmart actually prices things at a loss rather than simply cheaper than the cheapest price a competitor can offer.
>After doing this for a while, you can use these relative effort estimates to project completion dates for new projects.
This doesn't work. The problem is that you get periods where the work is relatively easy overall so 5 points ends up being tasks that take 2 days. Then you pick up new difficult features and estimate everything relative to all of the new hard tasks and you end up with 5 points meaning 5 days.
Sure you can gauge relative difficulty of tasks between each other, but in a regular developer's day-to-day life the range should really be 1-100 or so rather than making stuff fit into 12 points or less.
1. Keep your baseline tasks you're comparing against consistent for as long as you can (as long as the team remembers them and agrees on the effort they required). Don't use a task from week 2 to estimate week 3, etc.
2. Don't use a short time interval or moving average to determine your points->time mapping. You're looking for the long-run average mapping, not a specific estimate for this developer today.
> How would you decide on any other number and justify overpayment to the shareholders?
How do they justify a 245 billion dollar cash pile to the shareholders? To decide on a number, pick one that beats all competitors, then advertise on all boxes and websites that you pay more tax than anyone else.
> Sounds like Europe has tax problems then. Pass some laws.
The worlds richest company has the best lawyers, they will always be able to find loopholes or refuse payment (see prior link). The best way to tackle it is via public rebutal of their self-righteous image.
Not related? Tapping an undersea cable doesn't compromise encrypted traffic.
Unless it looks like the NSA gets Apple and Google to put in back-doors, the products are still significantly safer than Huawei which is just an arm of the government.
