> the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system.
Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people.
The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask.
If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.
> But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value
Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd. The world is an unfair place if you can't cope with the fact that a large majority of jobs will pay "peanuts". If tomorrow there is an infinite supply of highly qualified programmers, surely programmers would be paid low wages too but the truth is that there never will be - there is a lot of valuable software left to be created, to be maintained and we won't hit saturation any time soon.
> Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd.
Community/support roles are still widely considered "soft skills", and thanks to a century or two of patriarchy, are indeed considered womens' work. (This is, needless to say, bullshit.)
You seem to be implying that there is an "infinite supply of highly qualified" community/support folks; hence the low wages. There is not.
The difference between an average and a great customer support is not millions of dollars in revenue. You are thinking about the difference between a terrible and a great customer, and with 1 in a million scenario.
There are some situations where great customer support brings the company tremendous value and opportunity. But these situations are so rare and few that investing in great customer support (for high price) is not worthwhile. An average person should do.
If good customer support is really bringing in value, then they should be able to negotiate for more pay. If they leave, the company should see losses.
Reinforcing this, B2B customer support is vastly different than consumer-facing customer support.
Screwing up B2B support genuinely can cost millions in a single incident, which is why service level agreements and reliability standards exist. Compare that to the service level of your average help line (somewhere between "maybe if you're lucky" and "go die"). And of course, entities like ISPs don't count in the first place when they're immune to competition.
There are customer support reps making six figures. They tend to go by names like "service engineer", and actively solve problems the customer can't, rather than just guiding someone through a reboot process. In extreme cases, customer support is the development team - if your business is worth enough you'll end up talking to someone who actually made the broken product.
As you pointed out, it's not an accident that the companies with useless, call-center customer support are the ones not worried about losing a consumer or two.
Of course it is. Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support from company X then a few years later you're the engineer making recommendations or the CTO signing off POs and you think "I will never deal with X again".
I've got my list, I bet everyone reading this can think of their own X's too...
What do you mean by it? That the difference between great and average technical support is worth millions of dollars in revenue?
Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support
This seems hardly generalizable, but beyond that, I agree with you. Shitty tech support is never excusable.
Pay for average or above-average tech support. Those you can train in less than a month.
Don't break your back paying for "great" tech support. This is a silly directive, because it's so obvious once you are in the shoes of an executive, having to recognize tradeoffs in every decision. Unless your company is large enough where the tradeoffs make sense, paying for stellar tech support is an inane investment.
You can say a lot to the leader as a follower, but once you start leading, you must dance around the intricacies of decisionmaking.
EDIT: Not quite sure, but your assertion based on the so-called "list" of shitty tech support seems to be a case of selection bias.
There were probably many cases of reasonable tech support, but you haven't made a list of them :P
"Average" tech support is pretty bad is why. Companies either care a lot about support (i.e. their reputation), or they don't care at all, there is no middle ground in my experience... Companies with good tech support are good all round.
"The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people."
Spent a few years doing community management / customer support. This is _100% correct_. Oh, the stories I could tell. The role is critically important, and terribly, horribly underpaid. I went back to web development because, even with a 3-year gap in my resume and taking a non-senior role, I was still able to make 50% more.
I can train someone in less than a month to be a world class customer support agent. Assuming they have the temperament, the job requires no scarce skills. I can train a person to work on a crew pouring concrete in a day. Comparing road crews to software engineering is a false equivalence. Mining in Africa is certainly hard work, but I could staff a mine with eager workers in an hour.
If one feels that income inequality among the professions is a problem, one should change professions. There's nothing stopping anyone right? However if we do acknowledge that there are barriers to entry, then we have just proven the point as to why a guy pouring asphalt is paid less than a person writing APIs. Marxist theory has every profession being equal. Yet, why, in the Soviet Union were nuclear scientists rewarded differently than the shop clerk at Moscow's GUM department store? Why were Soviet ballerinas treated like relative royalty while the people running electricity to the Bolshoi treated far worse?
Because of scarcity. Gold is worth more than sand. Though without sand, you wouldn't have concrete. I can't believe we're still having economic discussions where scarcity seems to be a novel (and controversial) concept. Marxism fails every time it has been tried because it fails to recognize scarcity.
Supply vs. demand explains so much of this world. Some people either don't grok the concept, or refuse to believe it applies everywhere.
It hurts our emotions when we think about a miner in Africa (working 120 hour workweeks, wiping the sweat off his brow, with five mouths to feed) getting paid hundred times less than a software engineer fresh out of college working four hours a day, sitting in ergonomic chairs and getting in massage pods as a "break."
But pain is not value. Sorry. This is not a utopia. Don't make decisions thinking the world is a utopia. Have a correct mapping of the world, and then do something about it.
The article starts with "In a groundbreaking effort to close the wage gap between men and women..." I do see what you were getting at but my guess (based on karma and skimming previous comments) is that the gender comment was sarcastic. I could be wrong though.
Serious? There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I've worked with some very intelligent customer support people who know the product as well as the engineers.
B2B seems like the obvious standard of comparison here. Customer support really can be worth millions there, and that's reflected by how the system works.
Keeping customers happy as a general principle isn't gendered, or undervalued, or much of anything else. It just varies from "you're an essential customer, you can call our engineers night and day" to "abandon us forever, see if we care". Any kind of generalization like "treated as women's work" or "don't put technical people in front" is going to find counterexamples in big, high-stakes contracts.
I saw one contract with a clause that a Sev1 incident had a 15 minute SLA to the highest tier support engineer and 30 minute SLA for initial contact from an SVP level exec to the customer CIO.
There's more to customer support than picking up a phone.
I agree. There is more to customer support than picking up a phone, and some people make it sound like supporting a customer is just reading from the manual.
There's also more to cleaning than mopping. You can employ your philosophy of cleanliness and make things perfectly ordered and spiffy-shiny.
Maybe one day the CEO might walk in and be impressed by your attention to detail, hire you as an intern, and so goes the rest of your success story.
But how much value is the janitor bringing to the company by doing a stellar job? How about customer support? Either hire a stellar engineer and mediocre customer support, or hire a mediocre engineer and stellar customer support. Which would you choose?
When we start talking about jobs, we tend to imagine, in our minds, the people working. Then when people throw out words like "software engineer brings more value to the world than customer support", we translate those words to "you are saying this customer support Jan I am imagining is more valuable than the software engineer Dan I am imagining?"
(Names Jan and Dan were chosen as such because I have seen more female customer support and male software engineers than their counterparts. If you think that is sexism, then you are inherently valuing the human worth of software engineers over that of customer support personnel.)
People's worth is not determined by how much value they bring to the world.
Digression aside, we tend to construct mental models emotionally and attempt to justify with logic.
That is why people include gender in this argument, even though gender has nothing to do with whether people bring value. Again, the software engineer Dan is not a more valuable person than customer support Jan. If you don't get this difference, read No More Mr. Nice Guy or The Way of the Superior Man. The titles are somewhat of a misnomer; I suppose women will gain just as much value from those books.
This is a total shot in the dark, but female engineers are probably paid less than male engineers because they bring less value to the company (read: people hiring) than their male counterparts. The reason why male trait is valued more in STEM is because there are more men in STEM already.
We tend to want to work with people who are similar to us. Thus to a male CEO, he probably prefers a male over female engineer, if they are equal in aptitude. This, of course, is not a right judgment call, but this is humans' default mode of thinking.
There are also job-specific preferred traits. If I were running a hospital, I would pay a male nurse less than a female nurse; female nurses, by their gender trait and societal preference of female nurses (both men and women prefer female nurses), female nurses inherently have more value.
A complex topic that is easily subject to emotional manipulation. But worth talking about.
I disagree with a lot of what you said (starting with the importance of janitorial services -- have you ever worked in a place with truly bad janitorial services?) but to stick to the factual side right now, male nurses earn more than female nurses. The article I'll link from the Journal of the American Medical Association includes analysis of approximately 290,000 RNs.
That is my mistake, I would have assumed otherwise. Thus it must make my example invalid. I would have to think otherwise, then.
The point about janitorial services — I am sure having horrible janitors (and horrible customer support) is a true disaster. But being an average janitor is not too hard; if a place has bad janitors, then of course that should be a priority investment.
> (Names Jan and Dan were chosen as such because I have seen more female customer support and male software engineers than their counterparts. If you think that is sexism, then you are inherently valuing the human worth of software engineers over that of customer support personnel.)
That's not really needed, my Name is Jan and I'm male. My cousin is called Dan and she is female (people call her Dan but it's Danielle).
Assuming people should pay what things are worth to them is complete and utter bullshit and isn't how economics work.
Do you realize how much water is worth to you? You cannot live without it, but you aren't going to send your water company $100/gallon for it because there is a massive supply of it.
The same applies to paying people to do things. Nobody is going to pay more than what the price is for the skills they are looking for. To expect otherwise or lament the fact that's it's not happening shows a very basic misunderstanding of economics.
Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people.
The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask.
If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.