Difficult how? A relative of mine is a teacher in a high-poverty area and it seems like a very taxing job. Regularly having to deal with children who are emotionally or physically abused, or who recently immigrated and don't even speak english, and trying to teach them math. I daresay this is not a set of challenges most software engineers I've met would be well equipped to handle.
I'd strongly disagree with your assertion that teaching is not a difficult job. I won't address the exertion that goes into individual parts of it, but all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends in addition to handling the emotional stress of teaching, which itself is a huge burden, especially for those working in less affluent schools.
In any case, the measure for teachers should not be "how hard is the job" but rather "how important is the outcome". It might be easy enough to replace a teacher without raising the salary (another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide), but could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money?
> all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends
There's a difference between difficulty and exertion.
> how important is the outcome
It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county.
> another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide
I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
> could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money
If you want to make the argument we should fire all the current teachers and replace them with people who would otherwise be accountants or actuaries or software engineers, I'd be amenable to the argument.
> I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
If the state is still paying, they're still going to be stingy.
A private school has roughly the same administrative staff as a public school. Their buildings may be a little bit less expensive, as they probably can get away with less ADA accessibility. They probably don't pay into pensions and may not provide as nice of health care, so they may be able to move more of total comp into salaries, but they may also compensate their board members more. Word on the street is private school teachers get paid less and have less due process, but also have less stringent degree requirements and fewer mandates in their classroom. But they also get a lot more parental engagement, and a rather different cohort of students.
Note we tend to pay garbagemen more than teachers! I think that probably seeks to the job desirability. More people are willing to be teachers than haul garbage and that is reflected in the pay, net of other impacts.
According to the BLS garbage collectors have a median annual wage of $ 42,780[1] whereas elementary school teachers have a median annual wage of $61,400[2].
>Teaching is not a particularly high skill or difficult job.
Even though I disagree with you I can see where you're coming from with this sentence, but: the impact is HUGE. The impact of good teachers on society cannot be overstated. It's an amazing ROI and everything we can do to further the education of humankind is worth doing.
Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well, compare software engineering with electronics engineering, for example, but the impact is huge: that's why you're probably well paid to do it and your company makes your life really easy, with all the bells and whistles to make you happy.
More people could be trained to program, especially in a casual way many more (spreadsheet formulas, low-code forms or glue) but working as mentor in high-school CS programs, I've been surprised in both directions. There are a bunch of bright people out there that could move into programming with just a boost to their training to enable them to bootstrap further ... and there are lots of people that just don't have the mindset. Abstract reasoning or modeling the world is just not something they are capable of doing without intense concentration, if that. It just doesn't come naturally to these people.
