The Ten Most Overpaid Jobs In The U.S.

misbach writes "Here is what the 'compensation experts' have to say are the ten most overpaid jobs [original article at CBS MarketWatch]. 'Almost no one in America would admit to being overpaid, but many of us take home bloated paychecks far beyond what's deserved. 'Fair compensation' is a relative term, yet human-resource consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive compensation that can't be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.'"

Comments

I don;t know about 9

[grub]

I have to think about 9) Pilots for major airlines. If the plane hits inclement weather or other serious issues arise do you really care if the people behind the cockpit doors are making ~250K a year?

Oh and 2) Washed-up pro athletes in long-term contracts? Crap. All major sports athletes are overpaid primadonnas. Paying them millions because they can throw a ball only fuels consumerism. "Did you watch the game on Sunday? Wow!" mindless sheep..

Re:I don;t know about 9

[geekoid]

Athletes is about supply and demand. There are very few people who can supply an acurate, repeatable 50 yeard pass(or whatever) while 3 or 4 300 pound guys moving as fast as an elk bear down on them.
The company that owns the team makes money from that, and the athlete gets a percentage.

pretty simple actually.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Thud457]

"2) Washed-up pro athletes in long-term contracts? Crap. All major sports athletes are overpaid primadonnas. Paying them millions because they can throw a ball only fuels consumerism. "Did you watch the game on Sunday? Wow!" mindless sheep.."

Actually, this is driven by advertising.
Sports bring in viewers. Star athletes sell stuff people. Advertising corrupts anything it touches. (Just look at professional baseball or pop music for prime examples.)

Re:I don;t know about 9

[antis0c]

I agree. A major airline pilot holds the lives of a lot of people in their hands. I wouldn't mind if they got paid twice that as long as they were well trained and happy.

Last thing I want is a depressed pilot worrying about bills when the left engine fails. Last thing I want to enter his mind is "fuck it" when that happens.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[3waygeek]

The Straight Dope on in-flight irradiation -- I suppose your definition of "a lot more" is somewhat different than mine.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Fallen Kell]

Too bad the computer is what does the major work now on any modern jet-liner. You don't even need the pilot to land it anymore... Basically they are there as a backup to the computer system now.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[transient]

Another thing to consider with airline pilots is the huge investment they have to make for initial training. And if you look at salaries for any pilot who isn't working for a major airline, you will begin to understand the sacrifices that have to be made to make it to the majors.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[NoOneInParticular]

First of all, self-preservation is a fairly strong instinct you can count on in such a situation. As the article rightly points out, you should more fear the mechanic or the overseer to think "fuck it" if he sees that the left wing can fall of in mid-flight any flight now. He will not be on board when that happens. Why not pay him the 250K and the pilot a 100?

Re:I don;t know about 9

[meta-monkey]

Where do you expect the money to go? I really enjoy watching football. The feats of athleticism and dedication required to play at the level of NFL players is just amazing. So, I'm willing to pay money to watch their games. I'm willing to sit through commercials, and the advertising are more than willing to pay to for my attention. So, who should get all that money? I mean, it's pouring in. Lot of people are paying it. Where does it go?

I, for one, would MUCH rather have it go to the players, the guys out there on the field, who've spent their lives training for this, and who risk serious injury every Sunday for my entertainment, than have it line the already cushy pockets of the team owner. Supply and demand at its finest.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[gaijin99]

I'm inclined to agree with you. Airline pilots are highly skilled, and do work where a single screw up can kill people... $250,000/year puts them into the upper 1% of Americans (according to the US census). I'd argue that they're some of the few people in that income bracket who actually do work worthy of that much money.

What staggered me about the list was that CEO's as a body weren't included. Yes, the CEO's of underperforming companies are horribly overpaid, but you can't tell me that Michael Eisner actually did work equal in value to $700 *million*. Honestly, I rather doubt that its possible for anyone to do work worth 700 million... Eisner is on the high side, but all corporate executives tend to earn well beyond what they are worth.

You want to know why were in a recession? Its simple, really. The people earning that money don't spend it. Not because they're malicious, but because you *can't* spend $700M, not unless you're buying solid gold toilets every day, or something equally silly. Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...

Re:I don;t know about 9

[0x20]

As fast as an elk? Is that some kind of Canadian measure of velocity? Can you get a speeding ticket for going 2 elks in a school zone? What is the speed of light in elks?

Re:I don;t know about 9

[geoffspear]

Which is why I say it fuels consumerism, same thing in as many words. ;) (I cancelled my cable as there is so little useful information on TV these days)

Then it's probably time to cancel your net access too.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[devphaeton]

Too bad the computer is what does the major work now on any modern jet-liner. You don't even need the pilot to land it anymore... Basically they are there as a backup to the computer system now.
And pretty soon, with a few more advances in AI, we'll also have computers with the attitude of "oh, fuck it" when the left engine fails.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[0x20]

Oh, I don't know, charge $3 for tickets and $1 for cokes, and let the idiots on the field make as much as schoolteachers or cops? Sounds fair to me.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[cmallinson]

Did you watch the game on Sunday? Wow!" mindless sheep..

I won't argue that some pro athletes in the top sports are overpaid, so lets not get into that discussion, but...

You're calling me a mindless sheep, mearly because I enjoy sports, and dare to discuss a good game with a friend? Who's the primadonna now? Involvement in sport is a fantastic way to improve your overall physical and mental health, and build valuable social skills. Having athletes to mentor, whether it's a pro or the kid up the street, helps to get people involved, and that's a good thing.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[MarchHare]

It's a canadian unit of velocity AND mass. (So now that I think about it it's a unit of momentum). It's defined as the momentum of your average elk running at the average maximum elk speed. A football player with all his gear does about 0.2 elk.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[PPGMD]

9) Pilots for major airlines. If the plane hits inclement weather or other serious issues arise do you really care if the people behind the cockpit doors are making ~250K a year?

Too bad the 250K a year is a myth, only the most senior pilots at the major airlines make that much money. The average co-pilot for the majors makes about $30k, while an average line pilot makes $45-55K.

The commuters such as ASA, and Comair start their co-pilots at $18.5K, and their average pilost make about $30-40K, with the most senior making close the 6 figure.

Note that this is after a pilot invests nearly $50K geting a Bachlors degree, and another $50-60K in flight training. Also the pilots generally spend 2-3 years making just better than McJob wages, doing flight training themselves or other jobs.

Corporate pilots don't get as high pay wise, but they can move up more quickily to their highest pay scale if they are good.

/karma whoring consultant that was once a broke pilot.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[grasshoppa]

Where do you expect the money to go? I really enjoy watching football.

That's fine, but how much is it worth to you? What would you say the average ticket costs?

he feats of athleticism and dedication required to play at the level of NFL players is just amazing.

You'd get more enjoyment out of going outside and doing it yourself, trust me on this one.

So, I'm willing to pay money to watch their games. I'm willing to sit through commercials, and the advertising are more than willing to pay to for my attention. So, who should get all that money? I mean, it's pouring in. Lot of people are paying it. Where does it go?

This is a truely fucked up country where people can honestly and with a straight face ask this question.

Try: Homeless. Education. Security. And these are just off the top of my head.

I, for one, would MUCH rather have it go to the players, the guys out there on the field, who've spent their lives training for this, and who risk serious injury every Sunday for my entertainment, than have it line the already cushy pockets of the team owner.

I would like to see them paided enough to live on and have BITCHING medical. That's fair I think, for playing A CHILDS GAME FOR A LIVING. And they should consider themselves lucky they get that much.

Supply and demand at its finest.

And morality at it's worse.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Kirby]

With respect to pro athletes, keep in mind that it's not a matter of greedy jocks taking the public for money, in reality.

It's massive multi-billionaires (like pre-AOL Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch, and Walmart's Carl Pohlad) setting prices based on what the market can bear. That's 90%+ of what determines ticket price - salary concerns are a red herring.

And most of the owners are making large, large amounts of money - much more than even the highest paid players. The accounting practices are such that it's extremely hard to get actual data, as things like concessions are often booked under a sub-corporation and not reported as income on what little data they do release (which always shows them losing money.)

Player salaries are supply/demand, and their skills are not easily replacable. They're high in sports without a salary cap, because the marginal wins that player is expected to provide is worth a real dollar amount in increased ticket sales and merchandise. Some teams spend their money more wisely than others, but they're hardly offering contracts at gunpoint.

Leagues with a salary cap, like the NFL, the owners are raking in money hand-over-fist.

Sure, washed up athletes in guaranteed contracts are a huge waste of money. Why do owners give out multi-year deals? One, cost-certainty - if I sign a young player for a long contract, and he breaks out into an MVP, I have him for those years at below market value, a competitive advantage. Two, because the players want it, and if I don't offer them, they'll sign with someone else who will. Eventually, every athelete stops being productive, for one reason or another, and if you don't do your analysis correctly or just get plain unlucky, well, that's the chance you take.

Many contracts do include substantial amounts in performance-based incentives (particularly for often injured players.) The entire industry could, I suppose, switch to entirely performance-based after the fact salaries - but both sides would fight tooth and nail to stop it. The players want some protection, so that if they get hurt and miss the year they don't have to forclose on their mortgage. The owners need the cost-certainty - if the Oakland A's had to pay for what the players actually produced, rather than being able to bargain hunt and find value in unexpected places, the franchise would collapse. (Of course, it'd be awfully nice for the Orioles.)

That's probably far more sports economics than Slashdot readers typically want, but I strongly suspect that the same sort of naive, spiteful logic applies to the rest of the list. (Though, I do see the point about CEOs of failing companies taking multi-million dollar severance packages.)

Re:I don;t know about 9

[GeekZilla]

Huge investment? Next time you see a commercial airline pilot, ask him where he/she got their training and you will find that a majority of them will say either the Air Force or the Navy. Cost to former military pilot for training: Almost $0.00.
Yes, there is additional training required to go from flying an F-14 to a 747, but some of these pilots have been flying modified 737's (Air Force) all their careers anyway. And it's not like becoming a doctor-which IS a much bigger investment in time and money than training to become a commercial airline pilot after being trained in the military.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[anubi]

Airline pilots are the sole ones on the given list that I think justifiably earn the compensation given.

There is a helluva lot of training and responsibility to running the aircraft, to be there, and do whatever has to be done in the event of ANY malfunction, no matter what. Sure, I can see its all automated. I'll betcha they could take a whole planeload of passengers from one airport to another by remote control without a pilot at all in the plane.

Now, try it if the plane has major malfunctions midflight.. say part of the fuselage gets caught up in the slipstream, the hydraulics jam, some kook gets onboard and causes sabotage. Now, without a knowledgeable individual onboard who knows how to handle any emergency, what's the chance of getting back to earth alive?

On top of that, I consider these guys face a major health problem, by the nature of their job which requires MUCH sitting. Sitting through training. Sitting in the cockpit. All this sitting... guess what happens to the old cardiovascular system? The blood will start pooling in the legs. The heart is not a suction pump. It won't pull the blood up. You HAVE to walk around in order to get the blood back up, by way of contractions of the calf and thigh muscles, to squeeze the blood back up. The eventual end to this is a condition like phlebitis, where blood pools in the legs, forms clots, which eventually break loose, shooting up the leg venuous system, up to the heart, over to the lung, where they become trapped forming a pulmonary embolism. Not a fun thing.

I am not an airline pilot, nor are any of my family or friends... but I did consider it as a possible career option and when I realized I would have to spend a large portion of my live confined to a cubbyhole that would make a restroom stall large by comparison, I reconsidered. I feel these guys earn their pay, not only for their skills, but as compensation for the wear and tear it puts on them.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[transient]

One more argument in defense of airline pilots. (We should really be able to edit our posts...) The article claims that flight is nearly completely automated, and that's true, just as long as nothing goes wrong. What if an engine comes apart in flight? What if the landing gear doesn't extend? That fancy category II ILS coupled autopilot might get you safely to the runway, but you still won't have any wheels. Flying a plane is relatively easy, until something goes wrong.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Have Blue]

What is the speed of light in elks?

Zero. Elks are opaque.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Asgard]

The money that doesn't get spent gets put into some sort of financial instrument, which then is put back into the economy in the form of money that can be used as capital. It certainly doesn't just 'dissapear' unless the owner keeps it all in larg bills under their mattress.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[cmallinson]

replacing athletes with artists

I'm wondering how artists can manage to make so much money and at the same time taxpayers of major cities are more than eager to fork over their own money as well as their neighbors to have an art gallery built for art that quite blunty sucks, and then still have no problem paying $10 for a post card in the gift shop once it opens.

Some athletes get millions of dollars. Some artists get millions of dollars. Probably similar percentages too. Sports stadiums, however, bring in a heck of a lot more money and can double as convention centers and concert venues.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Eneff]

Wrong. So long as they don't stuff it under their bed, they're doing something with it.

Saving can be as effective multiplier as spending it. If they invest in a company, then that company has the money to acquire capital (new machines, new computers) which creates manufacturing jobs, as well as creating jobs from the increased efficency.

If they put it in the bank, the bank now has the additional money to loan to consumers, reducing interest rates.

Now, it can be argued that trickle down doesn't work, but *not* because it isn't being spent. The better argument is that this country finds luxury in imported goods. If one buys imported goods, the money is going out of the country and thus inhibiting the multiplier effect. Supply-side, therefore, only helps in conjunction with protectionism or some sort of competitive advantage bringing money into an economy.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[_J_]

Now that's funny because a german kid once referred to me as "ein grosse elk." The danger in using elks as a form of measurement is variation between jurisdictions; Elk is another word for moose in Europe while it refers to a large deer, also called a Wapiti, in North America. So this kid was calling me a big moose while I thought he was calling me a large, red deer.

However, since this is a Canadian measure Elk should refer to the deer and not the moose.

On another note, for the purposes of accident insurance, deer are considere flying objects in Canada.

IMHO, as per.

J:)

Re:I don;t know about 9

[nelsonal]

The same reason we spend $399 on the latest video card* when it ships, because it's fun, it gives us status with our peers, and we feel the deal offers us value in excess of cash spent. I recently returned from a Mariners game, and while the tickets, travel costs, and stay in seattle were certainly not cheap, I did have a fun time with several good friends, and made a few memories. If life isn't about some of that stuff, then you need to put some thought what you are working toward.

*I don't know if you actually have ever spent that much on a video card, but surely you've splurged on something.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[0x20]

#1: Aww, poor athletes, getting cut and everything. Hopefully they won't be reduced to sleeping in their gold-plated Escalades before they find something to support them. Where can I donate to their relief fund?

#2: There is a shortage of teachers AND cops. The reason pro athletes can get cut is that they and their jobs are entirely superfluous to begin with. Firing a teacher, even one who appears incompetent, has a real effect (as ooposed to just causing 40-year-old babies watching TV to cry in their pretzels.)

Re:I don;t know about 9

[fermion]

Actually, like most entertainment, there are a relatively large number of people who have adequate talent to play a sport. If we take the national football league as an example, about 40 teams employ around 3000 players. I would find it extremely doubtful that of the 40 million people in the US currently in their 20's, only 3000 have the capability to play some position in football.

Clearly the pay is help create a mystic about the person, help the person delude himself or herself into believing that he or she is extra special, and develop a star that will bring in the fans. If the pay was just about ability, then we would have none of the backlash when a player goes and acts badly. It is an issue because they are purposefully crafted images.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[StenD]

Huge investment? Next time you see a commercial airline pilot, ask him where he/she got their training and you will find that a majority of them will say either the Air Force or the Navy.

Only about half, actually.

Cost to former military pilot for training: Almost $0.00.

Aside from about 10 years of their lives, after training, with the added opportunity of being shot at.

And it's not like becoming a doctor-which IS a much bigger investment in time and money than training to become a commercial airline pilot after being trained in the military.

The military pays for medical school, too.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[dboyles]

"Did you watch the game on Sunday? Wow!" mindless sheep.."

I was under the impression that I enjoyed watching sports purely as a form of entertainment (and that entertainment includes discussing sports with friends). Now, through the insight of your post, I realize that I have simply been following the herd. I shall hereby resign my fan status, and retire to Slashdot, where I will post only things that will be accepted as mainstream geek.

Whew, I almost fell in with those sports fan sheep who always say things because they think that's what others want to hear. Good thing I'm away from that and safe here on Slashdot.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[ComputerSlicer23]

It's my understanding that pilot error is now the single most dangerous thing about flying. You are more likely to die of the pilot doing something stupid, then you are of just about anything else going wrong with the plane. (Maybe not a on commercial air liner, but on planes in general).

A friend of mine's Dad is a flight instructor, and tells about how there are a lot of things a pilot had to do to get a license that they don't now. They figured out, that by forcing unexperienced pilots to go into spins kills more people, then the number of people who are on a plane that go into spins.

A modern airplane can be built so it's nearly impossible to stall. So it doesn't have nearly so many of the problems it used to have, and thus pilots really to know as much or be as technically skilled as they used to due to modern Engineering.

All that said, I'm still aware of several scenerios where a pilot saved people by doing something deemed "impossible", by everyone I know who knows anything about planes. I think the FAA has new training due to a plane crash that happened near Siox City, Iowa. A guy was steering a plane using the flaps in a way that wasn't supposed to work. It was supposed to tear the plane apart. However, that was the only control left on the plane that worked. I think 90 people lived (of the 170). I saw film of it, it was terrifing.

Finally, pilots don't get enough time off. They should get paid that much for how much time they spend away from their families, and the hours they put in.

Kirby

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Kyaphas]

A somewhat insightful post, marred by racism. Sigh...

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Golias]

because like the case of Shawn Kemp, there are plenty of guys who could score 6 points and 3 rebounds a game.

That's the big myth behind the "overpaid washed up athletes" claim. There are not plenty of guys who could score 6 points and three rebounds against NBA players. The European leagues are full of very good former college stars who couldn't do it.

Out of almost 300 Million Americans, only a couple hundred are good enough to be benchwarmers in the NBA. Fewer than ever these days, because there are so many good players from the rest of the world now entering the league. You could easilly take the worst team in the NBA (the Clippers at the moment, I suspect) and mop up the floor with any college team in the US, or have a winning record against the pros in the Italian League. They may seem to suck in contrast to the Tim Duncans and Kevin Garnetts, but don't let that fool you into thinking they are anything less than elite athletes.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[precogpunk]

From what I've heard pilots make very little when starting out as a pilot -- $20K in some cases. Fool.com has data on the salary range of pilots and $250K is on the high end. Some of them qualify for welfare! Michael Moore writes:

"That's right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his hands. Until recently, Continental Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an American Eagle pilot , who had four kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food stamps -- and he was eligible! " Google Cache

If they hang in there and are lucky they might get a shot at the $250K. Besides, as you pointed out, people's lives are in their hands. It's worth paying them for quality work.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[SmallFurryCreature]

Cause it is the pilot who has the training and experience to land that aircraft on only 1 gear down. With half the engines off. With part of the control surfaces stuck. It isn't always bad maintenance that causes failures. Sometimes things just break. Then the pilot go to land it. No matter how much you pay the mechanics they can not fix the aircraft inflight.

Plus of course there are a hell of a lot more mechanics for each plane then pilots. So it would be like pay several million more on maintenance or just a million more on pilots. Simple choice really.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[E_elven]

I freely admit I can't toss a ball as well as some NBA player -that's not the point. The point is, sports is not *productive* and therefore should not be unduly rewarded.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[j33px0r]

I think people have this common misconception that doctors, lawyers and jumbo-jet pilots spend their lives in sainthood and keep us safe from all harm.

I have a friend who is working up the ranks of American Airlines towards flying the big jumbo jets. That "great" investement is a 4 year bachelor degree in aviation. This is nothing in comparison to many professions requiring masters and beyond. His long hours are approx 20 hours a week. Yes, he is away from home and his wife for 3 - 4 days at a time but thats the adventuresome lifestyle he always wanted. Besides, how many hours a week are truck drivers away from home? As for stress, imagine being control of a big vehicle where 99.999999% of the time the only reason another vehile is within a half-mile of you is when its shut off. It is going to take him another 5-10 years to have the seniority to fly the big boys. But then again, at every job you have to put in your dues for the most part.

Do pilots make alot. Oh yeah. Do airlines over-charge you to take a flight? Just a wee bit. I think the pilots deserve the amount they receive considering how much the airlines make on those flights. Young pilots however don't make $#i7.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Obfiscator]

Any reason why you left other professional entertainers (actors, actresses, writers, etc.) off your list?

People seem to forget that professional athletes are entertainers, and they'll be paid as long as people pay to see them.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[kcbrown]

Huge investment? Next time you see a commercial airline pilot, ask him where he/she got their training and you will find that a majority of them will say either the Air Force or the Navy. Cost to former military pilot for training: Almost $0.00.

That may be the case, but from what I understand it's rather difficult to become a pilot in the military. For one thing, your uncorrected vision has to be 20/20 or better, which eliminates a whole bunch of people. By the way, as I understand it, "uncorrected" means just that: no corrective surgery, no glasses, no contacts.

If you want to become a pilot through civilian channels, you do indeed have to make large sacrifices. The training is quite expensive and quite extensive. You have to train for your private pilot's license, your commercial license, your twin engine rating, your flight instructor's license, and then you have to work as an instructor to build enough flight time (at least a thousand hours or so) before anyone (even cargo haulers) will consider you. And when you are finally hired, you won't be hired by the majors -- you'll be hired by the regionals at best. And those guys start off at about $30K per year. Captains in the regionals make around $70K per year. That's for putting in 12-16 hour days, with a "home base" that may change on a yearly basis and which may be quite far from home.

It's ironic, really, because the kind of flying the regional guys do is harder than the flying done by the majors. The regionals typically operate turboprop equipment that flies in the 15,000 to 25,000 foot altitude range, where weather is much more of a factor than the 30,000 to 40,000 foot range the majors fly in. The regionals tend to fly into smaller airports that have fewer or older navigational aids and which also tend to be in areas of more dangerous terrain. And their equipment isn't as good as the equipment the majors fly, so icing (for example) is more of a problem.

If it were up to me, the guys in the regional airlines would be making more than the guys in the majors, simply because their job is harder.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Lucidwray]

Everytime I hear the argument that Pro_Athletes are over paid it drives me crazy. What no one seems to realise is that pro athletes are nothing but advertsing draws for their owners. They are paid 10Million a year because the owner is hoping that that one player will contribute more than 10 million in advertising dollars. The better/bigger the players the more people go to the games. The more people at the games the more ad signs cost in the stadium, the more ticket sales, more tv viewers, more tv money, more radio money, more merchandising.

It has NOTHING to do with an athletes ability to throw a ball, it has EVERYTHING to do with how good the fans think he is, therefore how much money they will spend on the team.

Its nothing but business. You can complain all day long how fat and old XXX basketplayer is, But if he fills seats and turns on TV's, then thats all that matters.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[twiddlingbits]

Airline Pilots are limited by the FAA to like 100 hours a month and 8 hours flying time per day w/o a 12 hour off time. Senior Captains often can ick long trips where they get the 8 hours in on 1 flight. Jr Pilots have to make multiple takeoffs and landings which at busy airports and with weather can be very stressful. Delays due to weather don't count towards the 12hr max duty day, so there can be some LONG days. Right now, airlines are really getting some concessions (S$$$) out of pilots, who not only have to worry about terrorists but thier own CEOS stabbing them! Senior Captains with 15-20 yrs experience who fly the "heavies" like 747s get a nice 6 figure income, the guys and gals flying for Southwest make about 60K. Seniority is the key, as well as getting trained on lots of different aircraft in order to move up. Often a captain of a small plane will get trained on something else and move up, but he is back to being co-pilot or flight engineer and maybe even a pay cut until s/he is certified on the new equipment. It's not an easy job, you have life and death over a lot of people and have to deal with a lot of Gov't red tape as well as other things. These guys earn the checks!

Re:I don;t know about 9

[KILNA]

I'm upset that us yanks are still using Imperial Elk instead of Metric.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[lysander]

What is the speed of light in elks?

Zero. Elks are opaque.

Oh this is easy. You've got the entire EM band. Pick something besides visible light.

I'm sure you won't have a problem if you use gamma rays. Although, it would be a problem for the elk.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[bnenning]

Care to tell us just what someone who can reliably throw an object 50 some odd yards is actually contributing to society at large?

Because many members of society place a positive value watching him throw objects, as indicated by their willingness to pay to do so. Perhaps you don't agree with their preferences, but that doesn't mean they're not valid.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[j7953]

The money that doesn't get spent gets put into some sort of financial instrument, which then is put back into the economy in the form of money that can be used as capital.

Sure, but having a supply of capital for investments makes sense only if the investments that it can be used for make sense, and the investments make sense only if at the end of the chain, there are enough people who will actually consume the produced goods.

A healthy economy needs consumers just as much as it needs investors.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[mph]

The point is, sports is not *productive* and therefore should not be unduly rewarded.

Of course sports is productive. It's big business, earning lots of money (in most cases) for the team's owners, the stations that broadcast it, and so forth. The athletes are essential to this profit, and are compensated accordingly.

Now, maybe you don't like that it's a successful industry, but luckily you don't get to tell me how to spend my money. Too bad.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[igny]

Pilot's traning may be crucial in situations like this .

Re:I don;t know about 9

[AbbyNormal]

You are absoultely wrong. Advertising does not corrupt everything it touches. Take me for example.
Excuse me a second.

Sluuurrrrp. Mmmm...Nothing like a nice chilled Coca Cola Classic (TM) to calm the nerves.

Where was I? Oh right, advertising. So what if advertising is everywhere.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[QuantumRiff]

One minor correction, Pilot error is not the most dangerous thing about flying, Gravity is!..

Re:I don;t know about 9

[onthefenceman]

If you look at the mean salary of all the people that TRY to be professional atheletes, I think you would be more satisfied with your CS/IT/Engineering/CowboyNeal salary.

For every athlete that makes it big, there are probably a thousand hustling Big Macs and shoveling roadkill for $25000/year or less because they spent evenings playing ball instead of doing homework.

Do the math:

1,000 x 25,000 = $25 Million.

If the one guy that makes a professional team pulls down $5 Million a year for his trouble, he's still only bringing the group average up to just under $30k a year. Makes your $60-100k/year sound pretty nice, doesn't it?

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Laser Lou]

One thing that I haven't seen pointed out yet here is that, per FAA regulations, airline pilots MUST retire at age 60. By the time a pilot starts earning that ~250K/year, he/she has only a few years left to work.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[delcielo]

I'm a flight instructor, and I'd like to respond to some of your post.

First, the fact that most accidents can be attributed, at least in part, to pilot error is no surprise. The word "most" implies a ratio. As the systems on airplanes become more reliable, and procedures more conservative, that leaves pilots who are getting both better and worse to make up the rest of the percentages.

Pilots are much more educated these days in subjects as diverse as aerodynamics, systems, physiology and crew resource management, etc.

At the same time, some of the skills previously taught are not now mandatory. The spins you mentioned, for instance. It used to be mandatory that you gave students spin training, and that CFIs (Certificated Flight Instructors) had to demonstrate spins to get their licenses. As your buddy's dad noted, however, there were more people being killed by the training than by accidents. I had a student inadvertantly enter a spin during slow flight who froze on the controls for roughly two turns until I was able to get him to let go. So I easily understand the now lesser requirements. Having said that, I and many others still give spin training. Most students stare agog at the rotating earth on their first spin rather than do anything constructive, so I think it's unfair not to get them through that initial "shock and awe" before sending them out into the world where, as shown above, they might enter that situation inadvertantly.

So we're growing them smarter; but at the same time, we may not be arming them with everything we used to. Having said that, spin training isn't necessarily useful to a DC-10 driver.

As for aircraft design... you can build airplanes that are very stable, very smart, very fault tolerant and forgiving, etc.; but every piece of that perfect airplane adds complexity and problems of its own. For instance, the Airbus that crashed at the Paris airshow because the computer entered "land" mode and wouldn't allow the pilot to exceed certain parameters in his go-around attempt. In 1994(?) there was a Fed-Ex DC-10 crew that was attacked by a disgruntled employee who struck all 3 crewmembers with a framing hammer. They disabled him by initially performing a split-S maneuver that no computer would have allowed. The attacker wanted to fly the airplane into the Fed-Ex hub in Memphis and would likely have succeeded if the pilot had been unable to fly the airplane beyond its operational parameters. History has many more such stories of times when doing something the airplane wasn't supposed to do saved the day. You don't want a computer to control everything. There needs to be context for actions; and currently, only humans can really analyze that.

Also plan on getting rid of anything smaller than a passenger jet, if you're going to require the same systems that those high-end airplanes carry. They're simply not feasible in terms of weight and price for smaller airplanes, though that is slowly changing.

In the Sioux City crash, the pilot was using differential thrust from the engines to control the airplane. If you increase thrust on the right wing, it travels a bit faster and produces more lift, which causes it to raise a bit and the airplane to turn. The sweepback angle on the wing enhances this also, as the forward wing (the one on the outside of the turn) is effectively longer than the other wing. (That's a lot easier to illustrate visually.) Anyhow, the Sioux City incident is a perfect example of how necessary the pilots are.

Finally, I know of jobs that pay a lot less and are more demanding on average. For instance, the dishwasher at your local restaurant works a lot harder day in and day out than the airline pilot who flew you to Cleveland last week. The reason we don't pay the dishwasher 100K per year (aside from the now exorbitant $1000 price for chicken-fried steak) is that there won't ever be a dishwashing emergency that will cost the lives of hundreds of people if not dealt with in the next 20 seconds.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[corbettw]

"On another note, for the purposes of accident insurance, deer are considere flying objects in Canada."

Not surprising, given your proximity to the North Pole.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[mgooderum]

I'm a private pilot and have several friends and relatives who work as pilots from the lowly cargo dogs flying single engine FedEx to a DC-10 captain at American Airlines.

One - the $250k number probably represents the top 5% of pilots for compensation. Even the pilots earning those numbers took 10-15 years and spent a whole lot of $$ to get there - makes Med School look fast and cheap.

Two - many (not all) pilots are paid all or mostly by the hour flown - they aren't paid for the hours of flight planning and prep or the days away from home. An international flight crew might easily be away from home 20 out of 30 days and that is gone for 24 hours, no family, maybe one phone call a day if the time you are on the ground lines up with the time your family is awake. Out of that remaining 10 days they may still have to get in their periodic training, reviews, etc.

Three - yes computers can land the airplane all the way to the pavement. But they can only do it (today) at a handful of runways at a handful of airports with the right precision (Cat III ILS) approach. As a point of reference in all of California - the home of the most airports overall and the most airports which scheduled air service of any of the US states there are less than a dozen Cat III ILS approaches. Even that number is unusually large because of the relatively small (towns like Fresno) cities with Cat III because of the unique weather of the Central Valley (Tule Fog).

Over the other 98% of the world you need a pilot to keep flying and land. Technology is rapidly improving and things like GPS will make more and more precision approaches possible but it will still take a pilot to land at the majority of runway ends in the world. And when shit goes wrong you want to land at the closest runway that you can get safely stopped in - not the one that the computer can use 30 minutes or an hour or more farther away.

Computers are great at doing things requiring fast calculations and precise responses but the /. crowd should know more than most how hard it is to program reponses for when the situation departs "normal" parameters.

Granted - people don't always do better - they typically still need some training and guidance for how to respond and tend to do poorly when flight departs completely from the norm. Look at the end result of events like the accidental thrust reverser deployments in 767s or the rudder failures in 737s. But in many of these events even the post-mortem reviews shows that the "window" to recover from these events is often 10 seconds or less. But other situations like the Souix City crash or the volcanic ash incident of Speedbird 1 (British Airways) show that the adaptability of a human crew is irreplacable.

It is probably inevitable that computers will do more and more of the flying - they already do 80%-90% of the enroute flying and they typically fly most of the hard appraochees (at least on the "big" guys) with the pilot acting more as a director and flight computer programmer than a pilot. But think - as the pilots really fly less and less then how do they maintain their skills for the 5% of the time that they are really needed?

So I think the pilots of the world earn every nickel the hard way.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[vsprintf]

If you look at the mean salary of all the people that TRY to be professional atheletes, I think you would be more satisfied with your CS/IT/Engineering/CowboyNeal salary.
. . .
If the one guy that makes a professional team pulls down $5 Million a year for his trouble, he's still only bringing the group average up to just under $30k a year. Makes your $60-100k/year sound pretty nice, doesn't it?

What does "TRY to be professional atheletes" have to do with it? The kids in the local Special Olympics (bless their hearts) want to be professional athletes. In order to be a "professional", you actually have to be paid for doing work in your "profession" at some point. But, following your logic, you have to consider the millions of truly professional IT workers who are now unemployed or underemployed as burger-flippers or security guards who bring that average to far less than your supposed 60K. And those people put in just as much or more time in college as professional athletes - but studying, instead of playing, and usually at their own expense. And you won't find any coders making $5 million a year.
Please, cry me no crocodile tears for professional athletes. I like to watch the local team play, but it doesn't mean the star running back is worth more than the local elementary school teacher.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a couterexample to all this BS.

Bus-drivers don't get 6-figure incomes. Yet every time you set foot on a bus you are putting your life in the hands of the bus-driver. Also the bus-driver is endangering the lives of everyone (cars, bikes, pedestrians) on the street.

Bus-driving is a special skill that requires specific training. If you've only driven an automatic-transmission Camry and you hop behind the wheel on a Greyhound, you'd probably kill someone.

Many, MANY more people get killed on or by buses every year than on or by planes. And plane flight is much more automated that bus-driving, which is still completely manually controlled at every instance.

SO, by the above reasoning bus drivers are either vastly undercompensated in our society or major-airline pilots vastly overcompensated.

It all comes down to the irrational risk-perception. We "perceive" death on a plane to be horrific, fiery and awful compared to the "mundane" bus-crashes. This is of course completely untrue, but for some reason dropping from the sky seems much more dramatic than a mass of squashed bodies resulting from a bus crash.

@subscribers

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for slashdotting the site already, you ugly hairy subscribers

Re:@subscribers

[TheOtherAgentM]

Does anyone else find it amusing that the site that got /.ed is alwayson-network.com and it is down?

slashdotted

[dtfinch]

So much for alwayson-network

Re:slashdotted

[Heywood Yabuzof]

#11: Webmaster at alwayson-network.com

Where is Gates on this list?

[ChaoticChaos]

The first clue you're being paid too much is when you start building castles instead of homes. ;-)

It's disingenous to include "CEO's of underperforming companies" when you can't include the man who's in charge of software technology for Microsoft and the whole thing is riddled with security issues. I'd say he's being paid a bit too much with that track record.

Re:Where is Gates on this list?

[DAldredge]

He makes less than 500,000 per year. I think it is around 250,000 or so. The rest of his wealth comes from investments.

Re:Where is Gates on this list?

[geekoid]

But Microsoft is not an underperforming company. Security issues do not matter, the bottom lines does.
A CEO that manages to put 50 billion dollars away for emergences is a damn good CEO.

Now their product may suck, but the product is not the issue here.

Re:Where is Gates on this list?

[filth grinder]

Of course everyone should sacrifice... yeah right.

The Red Cross needs good management and a good CEO. Take a look at the amount of money the company handles, and the stuff they do around the world. They are equal to a multinational corporation. Now, they need people with the ability to lead a company that size. In order to attract these people, they have to offer a salary. Now in order to get the people needed into these positions, they need to pay a competitive salary. Some guy off the street being the CEO of the Red Cross for 50K a year might look good, but unless he's independently wealthy and doing it as a humanitarian effort, he's not going to do the job well.

CEOs actually do alot for companies, it may look like a cushy job, but there is alot of work going on there.

I mean, compare it with software development. If you have a project going on, you want a good software dev team to work on it. Sure, you are going to "piss away cash" to pay their salaries, but you could always just farm out the job overseas. Anyone here will tell you, the farmed out code is going to be subpar. If you farm out the CEO of the Red Cross, the result is going to be subpar.

It is the samething with teachers. Everyone will complain that teachers are underpaid. Yet, I don't see anyone ponying up more tax dollars to pay for them.

Re:Where is Gates on this list?

[Zathrus]

I'd say he's being paid a bit too much with that track record.

So taking a company from two employees with their only product being a BASIC interpreter for a home-built computer (the Altair) to an industry dominating software company that provides software for 95% of all PCs in the world is "underperforming" by your standard?

I guess to get "average" he would have to enslave all of humanity and force them to build his pyramid for him. (And, of course, some of the more rabidly vapid /.ers will say he's already done this).

Re:Where is Gates on this list?

[sgasch]

In fact in a recent USNews article (about the country's most overpaid CEOs) Gates was listed as the #1 most underpaid CEO. I think me makes something like $350k / year.

They missed one.

[Joseph Vigneau]

AlwaysOn Network Web Site Architect/Administrator

Slashdotted already?

[edwardd]

I mean, come on! are we all that afraid that WE'RE overpaid?

Re:Slashdotted already?

[erice]

I mean, come on! are we all that afraid that WE'RE overpaid?

Not me. I'm unemployed.

I think at least part of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

is that the pilots for the non-major airlines are making so, so much less.

Is this because the pilots for the major airlines are better? Is it because the lives they protect are worth more? No. It's because they have a better union.

Re:#1 Most Overpaid Jobs

[bluethundr]

DOH! must...hit...preview!!!

Meant to say, I think I know the #1 most overpaid Jobs...

Re:And rounding out the bottom 10:

[Stephen]

The Indian programmer doing the job you were laid off from

I thought they were underpaid. Isn't that the point?

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[anaphora]

Once again, with formatting this time :P

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Almost no one in America would admit to being overpaid, but many of us take home bloated paychecks far beyond what's deserved.

Fair compensation is a relative term, yet human-resource consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive compensation that can't be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.

And while it's easy to argue that chief executives, lawyers and movie stars are overpaid, reality is not that cut and dry.

Corporate attorneys earning $500 an hour and plaintiffs lawyers pocketing a third of a class-action or personal-injury settlement certainly don't go hungry. Yet many local prosecutors and public defenders are hard-pressed to pay off law-school loans.

Hollywood stars, making $20 million a movie or $10 million per TV-season, qualify for many people's overpaid list. But for every one of those actors and actresses, there are a thousand waiting tables and taking bit movie parts or regional theater roles awaiting a big break that never comes.

A lot of people are overpaid because there are certain things consumers just don't want screwed up, said Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation for Salary.com. You wouldn't want to board a plane flown by a second-rate pilot or hire a cheap wedding photographer to record an event you hope happens once in your lifetime.

With pro athletes, one owner is willing to pay big money for a star player and then all the other players want to keep up with the Joneses, Coleman said. The art with CEO pay is making sure your CEO is above the median -- and you see where that goes.

What follows is a list of the 10 most overpaid jobs in the U.S., in reverse order, drafted with input from compensation experts:

10) Wedding photographers

Photographers typically charge $2,000 to $5,000 to shoot a wedding, for what amounts to a one-day assignment plus processing time. Some get $15,000 or more. Yet many mope through the job, bumping guests in their way without apology, with the attitude: I'm just doing this for the money until Time or National Geographic calls.

They must cover equipment and film-development costs. Still, many in major metropolitan areas who shoot two weddings each weekend in the May-to-October marrying season pull in $100,000 for six months' work.

Yet let's face it; much of their work is mediocre. Have you ever really been wowed flipping the pages of a wedding album handed you by recent newlyweds? Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon they're not, but some charge fees as if they're in the same league.

9) Pilots for major airlines

Captains with 12 years of experience earn up to $265 an hour at Delta, United, American and Northwest, which translates to $250,000 a year and more for a job that technology is making almost fully automated.

By comparison, senior pilots at low-fare carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue make about 40 percent less. That helps explain why their employers are profitable while several of the majors are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

The pilot's union is the most powerful in the industry. It commands premium wages as if still in the glory days of long-gone Pan Am and TWA, rather than the cutthroat, deregulated market of under-$200 coast-to-coast roundtrips. Because we entrust our lives to them, consumers accept the excessive sums paid them, when it's airplane mechanics who really hold our fate in their hands.

8) West Coast longshoremen

In early 2002, West Coast ports shut down as the longshoremen's union fought to preserve generous health-care benefits that would make most Americans drool. The union didn't demand much in wage hikes for good reason: Its members already were making a boatload of money.

Next year, West Coast dockworkers will earn an average of $112,000 for handling cargo, according to the Pacific Maritime Association, their employer. Office clerks who log shipping records into comput

Kind of an ironic name for a website...

[ahem]

...given the current slashdotting.

http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id= 14 77_0_7_0_C

What about HR people?

[tangledweb]

Is it too late to nominate human resource consultant to the list?

Re:Most overpaid job?

[Aardpig]

First poster!

Huh? First Poster is the most overpaid job? That's news to me, I thought the pay was pretty lousy. Which is a pity, since /. would clearly disintegrate without the terrific work of those unsung heroes, the First Post ACs.

Re:Most overpaid job?

[Dutchmaan]

I can see the first poster as being most over moderated job.

Another Article @ CBS

[jaaron]

This article seems slashdotted, but there's a similar (same?) article on the CBS site: Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S. .

Also, check a search on Google News

Public Program Managment.

[Brigadier]

I work for an architecture firm that handles airport noise mitigation projects. and I'ved worked with several municipalities with regards to differnt programs accross the country. The majority of these programs are federally funded. I recently saw a job opening for a program director assistant type position paying over 80k a year. For someone not knowing the real requirments of the Job it may sound intence but the job is so easy and so useless. It blows my mind to see how over paid public servants are in the US it is crazy. Not only that but how many uneccessary jobs are created in adminitrative positions. Another area is State education systems and the amount of money paid to administrative professionals when teachers are in short supply and classrooms are under equipped.

Re:Public Program Managment.

[Keely]

>Such as what positions?

Such as district superintendants, principals, asst. principals, dean of students, athletic director, etc, etc - check out these people's salary's in your local district, and compare it with the salary of a classroom teacher with 5-10 yrs experience and a masters degree.

Hopefully the discrepency isn't as bad as it was when I was in high school... The joke then was that in order to get one of the "cushy" admin jobs, you had to be related (or married) to someone already in one of these positions.

Re:Public Program Managment.

[jonbrewer]

It blows my mind to see how over paid public servants are in the US it is crazy.

Have a look at the public servant pay scales. I think they're very fair. They are adjusted based on where the job is located. I picked this particular scale b/c I was offered a GS-N level job earlier this year and turned it down to go back to school. The salary I was to have drawn was $10k less than I had been making at my previous job, but was still $20k more than that of my Uncle, who has worked in the Social Security Administration for 33 years.

Maybe you saw a job working for a contractor? That's where the real money goes.

Re:#1 Most Overpaid Jobs

[aggieben]

Just in case anyone cares, an FYI:

"It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt."-Abraham Lincoln

The attribution is incorrect. This saying came from Proverbs 17:28.

Article Mirrored

[TrekCycling]

Here's the list.

#1 - Professional Athletes
#2 - CEO
#3 - CTO
#4 - CIO
#5 - Chairman of the board
#6 - Generic Executives
#7 - CEO
#8 - CEO
#9 - Guys at think tanks that produce articles like this
#10 - CEO

Talk about the pot and the freakin' kettle

[Glamdrlng]

...yet human-resource consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive compensation that can't be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.

You gotta be fscking kidding. Did the HR consultants and executive headhunters point out that their own astronomical salaries can't be explained by anyone? Anyone that is, except for other HR consultants and executive headhunters...

Ironic

[thomas.galvin]

alwayson-network.com is a wonderfully ironic name for a webserver that just got slashdotted...

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[Gherald]

> Once again, with formatting this time :P

Karma whoring at its best ;-)

Suggestion...

[GreggBert]

I would have thought that "Microsoft O/S Security Assurance Specialist" would have made the list. No ?

Google Cache of the Story

[sparkhead]

Google cache

PO'ed photographers speak out.

[TheMysteriousFuture]

Got this from a photography forum

Quote

There was some recent NEGATIVE PRESS about us as Professional Photographers being over paid.

IF you would like to FLOOD this guys email box expressing your feelings, please go here:

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/mai...3BF2A%7D

Here is an a small amount of what he said about us professional photographers:
--------------
What follows is a list of the 10 most overpaid jobs in the U.S., in reverse order, drafted with input from compensation experts:

10) Wedding photographers

Photographers typically charge $2,000 to $5,000 to shoot a wedding, for what amounts to a one-day assignment plus processing time. Some get $15,000 or more. Yet many mope through the job, bumping guests in their way without apology, with the attitude: "I'm just doing this for the money until Time or National Geographic calls."

They must cover equipment and film-development costs. Still, many in major metropolitan areas who shoot two weddings each weekend in the May-to-October marrying season pull in $100,000 for six months' work.

Yet let's face it; much of their work is mediocre. Have you ever really been wowed flipping the pages of a wedding album handed you by recent newlyweds? Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon they're not, but some charge fees as if they're in the same league.

--------------
Come on gang...this guy can't get by saying this about us....let's send him a message!!!!!!

End quote

Interesting that he doesn't even consider that SOME (not all) photographers just MIGHT actually be over paid.

pay reflects risk analysis

[Speare]

The bit about the wedding photographer sounds like he had some grudge against his (or his daughter's) photographer. Whine whine whine.

If you hire a bargain-basement photographer's assistant, you might get stunning Annie-Liebowicz-level artwork. But the chances are that you'll get fifty images that are ill-timed, ill-posed, ill-conceived, ill-focused or ill-processed. You pay the money to someone who will get the best possible angle on the critical moments that the wedding couple will want to remember for the rest of their lives. Sometimes that requires a nudge to move Aunt Marge out of the way. It's not an occasion you're going to want to repeat if the photographer got it all wrong.

The same goes for an airline pilot... think about all the training you're depending on. Sure, it's "routine" to fly from coast to coast, but emergencies happen and it's the pilot's experience and training that you're paying for. It's a little late to complain that you didn't get your money's worth, once you've landed safe and sound after a boring flight.

Jeez...

[American AC in Paris]

Skycaps?

OK, I get harshing on most of the others, but c'mon, skycaps? Let's smack down a bunch of guys who make $30k a year standing in the exhaust-drenched air at airport dropoff points, dealing with irate travellers, lugging overpacked suitcases around to the cries of 'Be careful with that!'...so they make tips, too--you think the surly, don't-give-a-damn ones are the ones raking in $300/day in tips? Right.

Saying it takes less brains than stuffing fast food in a bag is rather insulting to skycaps, too--does this guy honestly think that a skycap can just kinda traipse around with a cart full of luggage, darned if he cares what happens to it? (This even without taking the crazy new security measures into account--I'm sure that makes their jobs oh-so-easy these days...)

Pro atheletes? Sure. High-end real estate agents? Yep. Skycaps? That's...kinda reaching for a top ten list...

Re:Jeez...

[Bitsy Boffin]

Yea. I don't get this whole tipping thing either. I live in New Zealand, we don't tip here (not if your a New Zealander anyway), and I don't understand why other nations do, I mean, the person is paid to do thier job, you should not have to, in effect, bribe them to provide good service. Being helpful and doing your job well should be, natural, it is here anyway.

If I ever has to go to a nation where tipping is required, I would be forever worrying - am I supposed to tip this person, how much is appropriate, am I giving too much, too little, what if I don't have change or cash, or...

Tips are wierd, m'kay. You get paid to do your job, no further reward should be necessary.

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[protohiro1]

Wedding photographers! My god what a racket. I worked for a online wedding photography company and the top photographers contracted with us made $40-60k PER EVENT. One photographer I won't name routinely charged $40k for events that he didn't even bother to show up at. He sent an assistant. I am not making that up.

And what do you get for that price? That's right. NOTHING. They show up and shoot. But they make you pay for the prints. >$10 a pop. And if you want an album? Well...thats gonna cost extra.

#10

[sckeener]

10) Wedding photographers

Photographers typically charge $2,000 to $5,000 to shoot a wedding

I went to a wedding over the weekend. The cheapest price they could find for a wedding photographer was $1200 in the Houston area. They didn't want to pay that so they got the UH school paper photographer to come and do it for $200!

Re:#10

[TheGratefulNet]

there is a LOT of pressure to get it 'perfect' in this field. and the clients are usually picky as hell and annoying as hell, due to the tension.

and having to shoot ugly people too and try to make them look good ;)

Re:#10

[Dalroth]

No kidding. My friend got married last spring and in his wedding the Photographer was a really horrid woman (late 30's early 40's). She did EVERYTHING that was mentioned in this article. She shoved people out of the way, she was rude, she hogged all the good pictures to herself. All while spending the entire evening bitching to anybody she possibly could about how digital cameras were ruining her business.

You know what though, SHE was the one ruining her business, not the digital camers. You have to adapt with the times, and you have to adapt to the situation, and being a horrid cold bitch is not the way to sell yourself to potential future customers. You can't be complacent, no matter who you are or what job you do, times change.

You want to take good wedding pictures? Hire a local college student who is going to school for Photography. You'll get a great price, great pictures, and the student will get some extra money for beer and some pictures for their art classes. I can tell you my college friends who were photography majors sure would've appreciated the work!!

Bryan

Re:#10

[TopShelf]

Not to mention the fact that photographers are usually on their own in terms of providing benefits like health insurance, etc. A friend of mine is a wedding photographer, and 1) he doesn't rake in obscene $$$, and 2) the guy has a genuine talent for taking great pictures...

Re:#10

[khendron]

I've never really understood the whole "wedding photographer" thing. At my wedding, every single guest had a camera. My wife and I asked if people could send us copies of their best photos from our wedding, which is no big thing because most people would do that anyway. It cost next to nothing, and the photos are much more personal than you would get from a professional photographer.

Re:#10

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, photography is just the beginning... there's no end to the BS when it comes to wedding expenses. Vendors of all stripes know that they can lay a major guilt trip on their customers and get a good response.

They're just like funeral parlor owners.

Re:#10

[mlilback]

The cheapest price they could find for a wedding photographer was $1200 in the Houston area.

My dad was named the 2003 Houston-area professional photographer of the year, so I know a little bit about this subject.

For a good photographer, 1200 is way too low. When my dad shot a wedding, he'd bring an assistant. Some wedding photographers I know bring 2-3 assistants.

They are at the wedding beforehand to shoot pictures because there will be no time during the wedding for posed family shots. They stay throughout most of the reception. That is easily 6 hours of work. Normally on a weekend. I don't think $100/hour for a freelancing professional on the weekend is that outrageous.

Now add in the massive costs for a professional. For my dad, that meant bringing a professional lighting setup and multiple hasselblad cameras and lenses (easily over $10,000) so there is no chance at missing a shot. Then throw in processing costs, proofs (4x5 proofs of all shots are made), basic administrative/advertising overhead, travel, planning sessions, profit, etc.

And don't understimate the fact that it normally is weekend work. My parents would work all week long and then not be around on the weekend because they were shooting weddings. That's one of the main reasons they closed their studio -- it was too taxing on their personal lives.

You are paying for an expert to capture one of the most important days of your life, and you get what you pay for.
Sure you can trust your wedding to a college student with a single 35mm camera. But is a few thousand more really not worth it to get a trained professional who uses redundent, top-of-the-line equipment?

But then again, look at how much of the world uses Windoze because it is "good enough".

Glaring Omission

[gmhowell]

One glaring omission: operators/'editors' of popular internet sites. A certain one has maintainers/editors who:

ignore user requests
play games all day
don't 'edit' anything
don't read submissions
don't read their own site
don't properly test proposed site changes
offend and namecall users

No specific sites in mind

(goodbye karma...)

Airline pilots

[grotgrot]

They ignored how pilots actually get paid. It is based ENTIRELY on length of service with their current airline. When they start. it is around $13,000 a year (yes, really). And don't forget they often have to pay back for flight school. The longer they serve, they more they get paid as they move up ("seniority"). Their career can be instantly over failing the six month physical/medical. And that isn't failing like ordinary folk would. The health standards are significantly higher. Oh, and if they have to leave an airline while earning $250,000 a year and start at another, they really do start at $13,000.

The pay is definitely broken, but it isn't really apparent how to fix it. If they were paid on timely arrivals or lack of crashes, then there would be an incentive to buck the system to improve those in dangerous ways. They can hardly be blamed for maintenance, weather, in flight emergencies with passengers or any other "performance related" means. So seniority/length of service it remains.

So why do pilots fight so hard for their pay. Simple. When you have been making $13,000 a year and growing slowly until you eventually hit bigger numbers many decades later, you feel like you have earned it. And all the pilots who have put in a decade at low pay don't want the future rewards they have sacrificed for taken away. You should also be aware that very few pilots earn those big bucks.

Check out the series of articles "Ask the Pilot" on Salon which goes into way more detail. Quite frankly you would be insane to become a pilot for the money.

And lay off the damn longshoremen

[Elwood P Dowd]

8) West Coast longshoremen

In early 2002, West Coast ports shut down as the longshoremen's union fought to preserve generous health-care benefits that would make most Americans drool. The union didn't demand much in wage hikes for good reason: Its members already were making a boatload of money.

Maybe they make too much money. But ports shut down because of a lock-out, not a strike. Everyone that writes about this and wants to paint them in a bad light casually fails to mention that. If the Pacific Maritime Association feels that the Longshoremen's Union has too much of a stranglehold on the ports, perhaps they should consider that the PMA has too much of a stranglehold on the ports. Monopolies suck. Amen. One monopoly has managed to take money from the other monopoly. You think consumer prices would fall if the PMA managed to break the union?

Re:And lay off the damn longshoremen

[Elwood P Dowd]

That's the other thing that everyone says when they want to paint the longshoremen in a bad light. And there's an easy answer to that one too: The longshoremen were happy to use new and better technologies in their ports, so long as they got a peice of the action. The PMA wanted to increase productivity and decrease headcount at the same time, and the longshoremen wanted raises.

It's two monopolies vying for cash. Anyone who picks a side is selling something.

Re:And lay off the damn longshoremen

[mveloso]

Yeah, get off it. Longshoremen are basically cargo monkeys, no different than the UPS delivery guys, except for one thing - longshoremen have more equipment, so they don't actually have to lift anything.

It's great that their union is so powerful that it can disrupt commerce worldwide. That just means that, like the Mob, they've become experts in extortion.

Don't try and point the finger somewhere else - those guys are way overpaid, and it's no good to say "hey, they're overpaid because the other guys is a monopoly too."

Re:And lay off the damn longshoremen

[multiplexo]

Fuck that noise. There are Navy CPOs who do the same thing, who don't get overtime, who are accountable, who have to do this in areas where people are shooting at them (or driving up to the ship with a Zodiac loaded with Semtex) and who get paid about 25k a year. Longshoremen are overpaid cargo monkeys. End of fucking story.

They should rename this piece

[bigjnsa500]

They should rename that article to "Must Have Jobs of 2003." And who cares if they're overpaid, its not like they themselves are the ones paying those huge salaries. If somebody is willing to pay me that much, do you really think I'd say no? Heck no!

Malarkey

[jdavidb]

"Overpaid" is an opinion. This article acts as if "overpaid" can be objectively defined. You may not think sports stars are worth it (hey, I sure don't), but apparently everyone else does and is voting with their dollars. If you want these people's salaries to be "corrected," you're going to have to sway public opinion.

Honestly, I'm so tired of reading articles by people who never understood the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve.

Great reading on the subject from Walter Williams.

I don't think the sports stars should make that much money. Sometimes I even resent them. But for me to decree that they're "overpaid" means I think I have the right to prohibit thousands of people from purchasing sports tickets. I don't have the right to that kind of control over people's lives any more than I have the right to choose their religion.

Re:Malarkey

[Noren]

Not quite, if you read the article it argues in come cases that the market isn't reaching equilibrium because of collusion or fraud.

"9) Pilots for major airlines" and "8) West Coast longshoremen" are both claimed to be overpaid because of powerful unions controlling all the labor supply and acting as a monopolist.

"4) Orthodontists" argues that the supply of orthodontists is kept artificially low by "U.S. Dental Schools". I don't necessarily agree with the whole of the argument here, but it's not based on misunderstanding of the funamentals of supply and demand.

"1) Mutual Fund managers" is claiming the whole profession is guilty of fraud, may be an overreaction because of current events, but fraud is certainly a way to be paid more than your fair market value.

Some of the examples cited are bad, but in situations of monopoly, artificial scarcity of supply, or fraud it does happen that people are paid more than their fair market value. (I do agree that most professional athletes are not overpaid... but the article doesn't cite the general case, rather "2) Washed-up pro athletes in long-term contracts", which is more arguable.)

Athletes' Pay

[PimpDaddie]

I think it is important to point out that the article does not criticize athletes high pay in general, but more specifically players with long-term contracts that under perform. Their examples are an NBA player and a MLB player. I want to point out that contracts in the NBA and MLB are guaranteed. That means if the player gets hurt, or just doesn't perform the team still has to pay them the entire contract. So even if you fire Shawn Kemp you have to pay him the $100 million. Now contrast that with the NFL, the league with the highest chance of career ending injuries. NFL contracts are not guaranteed. If you are cut by a team you are only guaranteed that years money, if after the roster deadline, and your signing bonus.

they are wrong about wedding photographers

[Savatte]

Have you ever really been wowed flipping the pages of a wedding album handed you by recent newlyweds?

It takes more than just snapping photos to be a wedding photographer. It's like being a drummer: Do your job well and no one will notice, but mess up and you'll catch hell. I guarantee you can tell the difference between a professional wedding photographer's photographs and some doofus with a disposable. Wedding Photographers are also not only working against the clock, but they only get one day.

Articles like these with the lack of repsect for profession's intricacies as are borderline offensive. Just because the author doesn't see what the big deal is is no reason to bash it.

Re:they are wrong about wedding photographers

[meta-monkey]

Geez, I'm a wedding photographer and I WISH I were making $400-$1000/hour. Let me see, I usually spend about 3 hours with the bride before the wedding going over the shot list, eight hours at the wedding, and then another 40 hours or so after the wedding processing, retouching, editing, and color correcting the photos and then designing the album. Man, if I could pull in $1,000 an hour, I'd make $51,000 per wedding! Damn, that would pay off my $40,000 in photo equipment in one week, plus pay for my health insurance, studio rent, and advertising, and help me save for retirement! Oh, well, I guess I'll have to slog along here at $2k ~ $3k a wedding...

Re:they are wrong about wedding photographers

[menscher]

It takes more than just snapping photos to be a wedding photographer.

Just to elaborate a little on why the photographer is paid so much:

• Equipment: cameras are not cheap. You could easily bring $20,000 in equipment to a wedding. You can't just go in with a single camera, you know... you need AT LEAST three. Two always on you, with different lenses, etc, so there's never a risk of needing to change film at a critical moment. You also take pictures of important events using two cameras, in case one malfunctions, the lab screws up the processing, etc. A third camera is in the car in case on of the two primaries fails. Of course, that's the simple scenario, assuming you're just shooting one type of film. Add to that digital, or slides/prints, and you need more equipment. Want decent lighting? Have an assistant (who has to be paid) follow you around with a second flash (wireless). Oh, and you probably have to buy (no, not rent) your own tux. Furthermore, you're providing the film.
• Experience: knowing how to pose the bride isn't easy. I'm always amused when watching them get arranged. There are things that the average person just doesn't see, like position of hands, what's in the background, lighting (and proper placement of shadows!), etc.

Yes, you can do it yourself with your little disposable. But I can guarantee they'll look crappy. You won't know why the pro's pictures look better, because you're not trained to see it. All you'll know is that gut feeling that he did something you didn't.

Of course, I'm slightly biased, having a father who is a pro photographer. I'll acknowledge that there are many crappy photographers out there. But it's an art, so don't attack the entire field.

Finally here's my proof that I am qualified to make the above statements. ;)

Re:they are wrong about wedding photographers

[Goldsmith]

I disagree.

There are pressures to perform in any job, and simply saying that screwing up will cost you money is no reason to charge as much as is charged. If I screw up in my job, the building I work in may end up with a large smoking hole in the side, yet I don't get paid a third of the money they claim a wedding photographer gets.

I actually have been wowed flipping through the pages of a wedding album from some newlywed friends of mine, and the pictures were taken by what I would call a "cheap" wedding photographer. This was someone who does it as a hobby, and charges commensurately.

You're right when you say it's like being a drummer. You should and can only do it if you would do it for free. If you feel the need to make boatloads of money off of it, I don't want you taking pictures at my wedding.

Re:they are wrong about wedding photographers

[meta-monkey]

I'm not saying you have to feel sorry for me. I think it's a pretty fair wage. If anything, though, it's too low, for the amount of stress you take on. Running a business is very stressful, in general, and wedding photography is doubly hard...there are no do-overs. You either get the shots or you ruin the most important day of some poor girl's life. I was merely responding sarcasticly to the guy who thinks I make $1,000/hour.

Oh, and by the way, that's $40 to $60 per hour of real work. Not like people who say they work a 40 hour a week job, but then they come in half an hour late every day, and leave half an hour early, take an hour and a half for lunch, and are sure to spend 45 minutes a day chatting with their co-workers by the water cooler. When you're self employed, when you're not working, you're not making jack.

Missing from the list?

[bl968]

Slashdot Editor?

Re:law of supply and demand.

[FuzzyDaddy]

If someone is willing to pay it and some body's willing to supply it. It's a fair price.

Unless the guy making the decision and the guy parting with the money are not the same guy. If the board of directors of a company is deciding how to pay the CEO more (because the CEO is on THEIR board of directors) this isn't supply and demand - it's called "milking the system".

Many are overpaid, even more then become underpaid

[2TecTom]

The gap between top and bottom salaries is at a historic all time high. The powerful simply bent the rules so they gain more than their fair share at the expense of all of the rest of us. This cripples our economy as it's a clear disincentive to labor. At the current rate of mismanagement, it surely won't be too long before the whole rotten house of cards collapses again. Excessive affluence is a sure sign of a corrupt society and I, for one, wish there was even some justice in America. Really, the real enemy isn't overseas, they inhabit the top floors of our institutions.

Re:Pet peeve about posts on /.

[R2.0]

You're new here, aren't you?

Airline pilots?

[pcraven]

I don't think top airline pilots are overpaid.

Consider the fact that their 'off' hours are usually away from home. There is a LOT of work that they do outside of flying. This doesn't count in their per-hour charge.

They spend a lot of time gaining hours in small aircraft and as co-pilots of large aircraft. And they get dirt-pay for that.

They can't drink 12 hours before going on the job.

They work odd hours.

They are controlling a big gas tank with an aluminum shell and 300 people inside, all while moving 600+ mph in weather conditions that prevent you from seeing out side.

Yea, I want a good incentive for the pilot up front in my aircraft. I want to get to my destination!

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[grn_lantern]

10) Wedding photographers

I *totally* agree with this. My brother just got married over the weekend and while I have *no* idea what the photographer was paid, but the guy pulled up in a Nissan 350z.

Someone else at the wedding overheard the photographer talking to someone about wanting to purchase a Bently.

hmmm....maybe I SHOULD use my darkroom more. ;-)

Ha! My job made the list

[meta-monkey]

I'm a wedding photographer (#10 on the list).

They're right and they're wrong. First, you can spend as little or as much on a wedding photographer as you want. I know people who will show up for $300, shoot a few dozen rolls of film and hand them to the bride and groom on the way out the door. Will there be some good photos? Maybe, but you can expect an awful lot of crap.

On the other hand, when my wife and I shoot a wedding, we make every photo a work of art: color correct, crop, edit, retouch, black and white, sepia, hand tinting, etc etc etc. Then we design a one of a kind album. This is not a "weekend" job. We spend probably about 3 hours before the wedding going over details and meeting with the couple, an entire day at the wedding (getting ready through the reception), and then about 40 to 50 hours the next week processing all the photos. Oh, and we also have to pay for our $40,000 of photo equipment, lights, computers, etc etc, not to mention all the rest of the stuff that goes along with running a business. Advertising, office space and supplies, promotional materials, phone line, fax line, internet, website, etc. Then, since we're working for ourselves, we have to provide our own benefits, so we're paying our own health insurance, and providing for our own retirement. Oh, and there ain't no two week's paid vacation, either.

With the advent of digital imaging, the technical aspects of photography have increased many times over. I've actually got a Master's degree in electrical and computer engineering. These days, you have to be an artist, an engineer, and oh, yeah a businessman, too. Good luck finding somebody to do all that for $300.

By the way, if you'd like to see our work (or need a photographer!) you can check out our website.

Number 10 is

[Alomex]

Wedding photographer.

Surely the most overpaid job in the world is supermodel photographer.

I would gladly do the job for ten grand, so long as I can pay in instalments...

Photography costs high

[akuzi]

Wedding photographers may be overpaid, but equipment and printing costs are also rather high. Consider that the Zeiss lenses for Hassleblads can cost up to $3000, and 8x10 prints at a professional photo lab will be around $30 each, more for custom prints. It must all add up pretty quickly.

Also consider the stress involved on the day and the required mix of technical and people skills involved. Certainly not an easy job to do well.

pilots for major airlines

[cheezus]

disclaimer: I only know this because at my uni the dept of computer science is for some stupid reason in the school of aerospace sciences.

Lots of kids come in going for a commerical aviation degree dreaming of making a quarter mil a year. The reality? For the ones lucky enough to get a job out of college it's flying some puddle jumping prop for less than $20,000 a year. The guys making the huge money are flying the big jets, and they only get to do that because they have an insane amount of flight hours. Know who is able to rack up insane amount of flight hours (it's expensive)? That's right, retired air force pilots.

Experience can demand that kind of money because that experience is expensive/difficult to get in the first place.

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[Animaether]

40-60k ? That's somewhere down from celebrity weddings, I'm sure.

You could get a very nice downpayment on a house for that money :)
( or one really, really giant diamond on that ring, if the spouse-to-be is so inclined %) )

That said, even the $2k photographers often have an insiduous clause in their contract - I swear it was up on /. , but I can't spot it in the search results now.

The clause is that the photos they made belong to them.
- You want re-prints ? you have to pay, because You're not getting the negatives.
- You photocopy the prints you got ? be careful the photographer doesn't find out, or they may sue you.
- Want digital versions ? Expect crappy web-sized 640x480's or so, because a good resolution means you could print them out. That is -if- the photographer even offers digital versions.

And if he wants to use your pictures in his portfolio, he's free to do so.

You generally have to pay a good amount of money to nullify these clauses.

Very nasty stuff, very much something to look out for when picking a photographer.

trickle-down vs. flow-out

[lysium]

Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...

This is why estate taxes originally came about. The government was extremely worried that a de-facto aristocracy would form out of the money that Industrialists were accumulating. So in order to prevent assets from endlessly collecting interest, they decreed that a large percentage of an individual's wealth would return to society upon death. This would also ensure that, at some point, SOMEone would have to work to bring more money in. Not exactly what one would call a fair system, but since Rockefellers and Kennedys do not own GE and Microsoft today, I would have to call it a partial success.

Now just recently estate taxes were repealed by the fiscal conservatives. Will this finally tip the scale to the point where wealth can endlessly create more wealth, so meritous, hard-working individuals like Ally Hilfiger can entertain us with their priviledge? Our children will find out!

===========

Re:trickle-down vs. flow-out

[e4liberty]

This is a better argument for a wealth tax than an estate tax.

Since we want assets to be used productively, and since the function of the government is to protect us and our property, then taxes should apply to assets (wealth) rather than income. This would encourage wealthy individuals to invest their assets in productive enterprises (making jobs) rather than, say, gold or art (no jobs).

Politicians?

[Archalien]

Where the hell are the politicians on this list?

Scew the ex's on lecture circuits. Where are the idiots getting paid to ruin America?

Don't know what I'm talking about? Check out Al Gore's recent speech on Freedom and Secutity (http://www.moveon.org/gore/speech.html).

What do you mean?

[raehl]

It's the "Always-on Network", not the "Always-able-to-serve-pages Network".

Wow

[NDPTAL85]

Do you ever get dizzy from up there on your high horse?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I know you "mean well" and all with your utopian plans of providing for the homeless and eduction but unfortunately due to the fact that we're HUMANS that means we need to arrainge our economies in a capitalist fashion.

We could try socialism but obvious examples have already demonstrated the sheer humanitarian horror that that produced.

And where do you get off telling someone that going outside and pretending to be as good at sports as a pro is would be enjoyable? Why put your body at risk of injury when you can watch others play a game better than you'd ever be able to? Don't you think thats a bit condescending?

Re:Wow

[HalfFlat]

We could try socialism but obvious examples have already demonstrated the sheer humanitarian horror that that produced.

So glad not to be living under the terror of the Swedish regime!

Socialism != Stalinism. Socialism in some form of capitalist democracy in fact seems to produce the best quality of life for the citizens of a country. Yes, that means quality of life may be better in some countries outside the US!

Re:Wow

[Shenkerian]

We could try socialism but obvious examples have already demonstrated the sheer humanitarian horror that that produced.

Yes, the Swedes and French and Germans and Canadians are railing against their inhumane condition.

I don't disagree with anything else you said, but a blanket statement against Socialism is unfair.

If by Socialism you meant Stalin's vision, then you're correct, but that's no longer the common definition of Socialism.

Re:First-worlders

[kalidasa]

Naw, we're not overpaid. They're horribly underpaid.

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[swv3752]

In the post 9/11 era, most Skycaps make jack now. In most airports they are no longer allowed to checkin bags, so there is not much left for them to do. Not that I feel particularly sorry for them, but their wage was earned. No one had to deal with a sky cap.

The only other job that not deserving to be on the list is Pilots. The only way most anyone has to log enough flight hours is to be a Military Pilot, often for 15 years.

The real problem is not that a few jobs manage to command "over" high salaries, but that so many are in truth underpaid.

6a.

[happyfrogcow]

from the article:
6) Real estate agents selling high-end homes

6a would be "Real estate agents renting apartments in New York". (replace New York with your very own favorite high cost of living city)

The "Broker Fees" are absolutely rediculous for the amount of work they might put in. Mine was $750 on a $900 apartment, only because I talked her down from $900 in fees. Then, the one thing they have to do, they make you pay for again, the $25 for a credit report. Why isn't that included? So for the 2 hours max that I spent with her, signing paperwork and showing the apartment she brings in $750. Typical Broker Fees are like 12% of your anual rent I think. They don't do shit to deserve it.

Get Real!

[INetUser]

Are you guys kiddig me? Look, the truth of the matter is that nearly all CEO's who are getting more than $1/2 Mil each year are grossly overpaid! And that's just about all of them! Next are all the wonderful Demicrooks and RepubliCONS in CONgress. They are all basically in the deep pockets of the cheating and lying CEO's! and don't give a rip who they cheat or steal from nor who they are lying to as long as they have their campagin warchests filled up to stay in office. If the middle class collapses in this country, and there are signs that they are based on economic control and whose got it and wealth distribution, something gonna blow up really big! (IMHO).

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[Anonymous Coward]

The woman who photographed my brother's wedding went on to have a 'life change' (ie, went nutters), and pretty much gave up the business, making additional copies unobtainable.

I can think of one

[moltar77]

American congressman!
$154,700 per year
$166,700 for leaders
$192,600 for speaker

Oh, wait, they just voted to increase their salary to $158,000 next year. Wish I could do that.

Also of note, the president makes $400,000 a year.

6) Real estate agents selling high-end homes

[wytcld]

6) Real estate agents selling high-end homes

... While most agents hustle tail to earn $60,000 a year, those in affluent areas can pull down $200,000-plus for half the effort....

Luxury home agents live off the economy's fat, yet many put on airs as if they're members of the class whose homes they're selling, and eye underdressed open-house visitors as if they're casing the joint.

Hello? Luxury home agents are members of the class whose homes they're selling, or within a step or two of it. And that class as a whole lives off the economy's fat. For the most part, people want to hire professionals who are of their class or better. That especially applies where fashion and taste are concerned. Decorators, landscape designers, architects ... if you wouldn't trust a decorator who didn't have the taste of your class, why would you trust a real estate agent? A realtor who acts like a used-car salesperson is not going to make it at the high end; having the same taste as the people you're helping find a home is essential to guiding them well.

I don't much like realtors, and don't much hold by class, but I'm sure willing to see the realtor get a fee in proportion to the home I'm buying to avoid be steered towards the sort of place that would most appeal to trailor trash with the sales tactics appropriate thereto.

Ultimate in being overpaid

[DownTheLongRoad]

I'm collecting unemployment. Typical day includes sleeping till 3pm them playing Allied Assault for a few hours.

High end estate agents?

[Realistic_Dragon]

These people get paid well, but they do have to work their butt off for it.

There is little to no job security, and benefits have to be paid for out of your cut.

A good agent gets about 5% of a sale (10% if they represent buyer and seller - hard to pull off). Sure, that's $300k on an average house in Concord, Mass - but of that money 40-60% (depending on volume) goes to the office. That leaves ~$150k which represents anything up to a year of uncertainty and hard work dealing with really hard to please clients. (Naturally people in the $3m price range are bitchy perfectionists.)

You face the prospect of your listings getting yanked or poached at any time up to the last second, and investements in things like brocures and out of state listings (many thousands of dollars for really big properties) getting smoked. You need excellent people skills to deal with customers (and other brokers), and you need to be available 24 hours a day, even on weekends and holidays.

An aquaintance of mine managed to close a $9m house last year acting for the buyer and seller - and yeah, everyone was jelous of her. It certainly was a big pay day, but it reperesented a lot of work that could easily have ended up getting her nothing at all. Highly paid? When you get lucky... but it's compensation for the risk and talent involved.

Why Football is an important job

[tjstork]

1) Football is cheap.

Engineering advances pay way more than sports teams. The top most salary of an NFL player is probably 20 million dollars a year. Conversely, an engineer that strikes it stinking rich can dozens if not hundreds of times that. Marc Andreseen was worth, at one time, more than all of the NFL, as is Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and so on. Doctors that start their own research companies these days can make billions of dollars, and they do.

2) If you want your local emergency services to make more money, vote for a property tax increase in your community. Organize a drive to give your police and firefighters and EMTs a real wage. If you want your stay at home wife to live like a queen, go out and get some dough for her. Start your own company, devote your life to a goal, and make something with your life, like an NFL Player did.

3) We spend way more money on medicine and medical research than we do on the NFL. The Health care industry is hundreds of billions of dollars, the NFL is only ten.

The moral of the story is that, dollar for dollar, we do care more about advancing science and curing diseases. However, some of us think that there is more to life than just chasing disease.

For us, the NFL is an on field play of life, each game a miniature drama of competitive instinct and human ingenuity. There are so many small battles, tactics, and individual tests in each NFL game, that there is something for everyone to latch onto of interest and most people do. Watch a game once, before you laugh at it, and, appreciate just how good these people really are at what they do. I'll bet you the EMTs will.

PS. Donovan McNabb is no thug, and, he's going to throw for 300 yards tonight and kick the tar out of Green Bay!

LETS GO EAGLES LETS GO!

Pilot belongs with other *under*paid positions

[ianscot]

Salon.com's "Ask the Pilot" columnist has pointed this out a few times, and I think Michael Moore has a chapter about it in his "Stupid White Men" book. Pilots just don't make good money, not until they're high up on the list. Don't forget the money they pay for their own training while they're pulling in a grand $14k a year during those first few years.

Somewhere there ought to be a comparable list: jobs you assume are worked by well-heeled professionals, but that are actually basically full of blue collar people who're doing it for other reasons. Pilots are there because they like the work. It sure as heck isn't the money. Paramedics -- you think they're in it for the money? They get hardly anything for the job they do, those people are in it for something else.

(I'd rather read my imaginary article, frankly. This one's just a bitchy, demeaning piece of pop tabloid crap.)

longshoremen

[mr_burns]

The longshoremen thing gets to me. I think these are some of the people I least want to be easily bribed. I'd rather they take home $120,000/year than be hurting for cash to the extent that somebody could slip them $20,000 to let a nuke slip through their port.

Plus making that much cash keeps them from stealing half the stuff coming off the boat. If I were running a business that depends on import/export I would be glad that the salary prevents mass shrink before the product hits shelves.

I think the salary is entirely appropriate. I think this article is a bunch of wankery.

Opinionated Bucket O' Crap

[gbulmash]

It wasn't so much amazing to see real estate agents listed in there as it was to see their logic.

The way they talk, anyone with a RE license could set up shop in a high-rent area and the money would start rolling in.

If it was that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it?

You can throw out a shingle anywhere, but to make money as a RE agent, you have to do one of two things... convince homeowners to let you sell your house or convince homebuyers to let you help them find and purchase a house. And the richer those people are, the richer the deals they're making, the more competition there is to get them to sign with you.

Knowing your way around the technical labyrinth of buying and selling houses is the easy part. That merely requires study, which anyone with a brain can do. But doing the networking, selling yourself as an expert, making the good impressions, having or developing the skills to read people, get them to like you, AND get them to trust you with handling megabuck deals for them... that takes serious skill and talent.

I'm not an RE agent. But I've sold high-ticket consumer goods on commission. It was one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. Dancing around with someone is easy, but closing them is a true skill, and to work the high-rent customers you have to be a great closer. If you're not, the other agents will eat you alive, because the more lucrative the market, the more cutthroat it is.

Go to an auto dealership, the ad sales department at a radio or TV station, a real estate agency... Ask any of those sales managers what a great closer is worth.

Go actually work as a commissioned salesperson, selling a high-ticket item for a month.

Then tell me if real estate agents are overpaid.

Sheesh.

- Greg

Low-cost (& better) alternative to wedding pho

[gregwbrooks]

Do what I did: Pick the local daily newspaper with the best photos, and hire one of their photojournalists to shoot the event. Spend as little time as possible on formal photos, and instead instruct the shooter to cover the wedding as if it were a photo essay.

Negotiate to get the negatives and contact sheets at the end of the gig, and go make your own prints.

We ended up with a wedding album that's the envy of every couple that sees it, and we spent around $500 total. Oh, and having the negs makes it easier to archive the negs and slides on a CD-ROM.

Sports are entertaining

[spruce]

It has nothing to do with productivity. Maybe you don't enjoy watching sports, but it's quite obvious that a lot of people do. The market has spoken.

Re:Sports are entertaining

[tbannist]

Don't look now, but the market isn't done yet.

Most pro sports are declining in popularity. Mostly because of poor league structure, overpriced tickets and overpayed players. Especialy when they have the gall to strike on paychecks that among the top 10% and often the top 1% of the country.

All the points remain true. They are over paid for what they do which is usually throwing a ball in some direction. Hwoever, I don't think the world has finished adjusting to the economies of scale that are present in the televised world and the changes of the internet world.

It's all about packing the most viewers into each time slice. And since the same show can be shown to 6 billion people, you pay your performers very well indeed if they catch a significant amount of that attention.

However, the internet's still adapating and growing and changing and so is Television. When more people migrate their attention to specialty channels to streaming content online we should see a reduction in the exhorbitant salaries because they are no longer able to command the attention they once could, under the limited distribution channels of the past.

How wrong can you be?

[HardCase]

You want to know why were in a recession? Its simple, really. The people earning that money don't spend it. Not because they're malicious, but because you *can't* spend $700M, not unless you're buying solid gold toilets every day, or something equally silly. Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...

There is no simple reason for why this recession started, but yours is incorrect. Perhaps the most significant reason was what Alan Greenspan called the "irrational exuberance" of investors in horrendously overvalued stocks and of the hordes of investors who chased businesses with pointless plans that just didn't stand a chance of success. The collapse of the "dot com bubble" was one domino of many that led to the last recession. Companies that appeared to be successful, but really weren't caused investors to lose faith in the market...suddenly many people didn't know whom to trust. I suppose the WTC attack also played a role as well. Those are a few.

Consumer spending, which is what you're talking about, is only one part of what drives the economy. In fact, it's what's brought the economy out of the recession. Another part is corporate spending. And that's where the bulk of the nation's gazillionaire's money goes. You're right, it's pretty damn hard to run through a few hundred million dollars quickly, but that's not how things work. Michael Eisner doesn't have hundreds of millions sitting in a room in his house. His money is in the bank, in stocks, in bonds...in investments. It's kind of like the movie "It's a Wonderful Life". The money isn't sitting in a pile somewhere...it's part of the loan that built some houses, part of the bonds that built the school down the road, part of the venture capital that created jobs in a startup, part of the stock issue that enabled a company to expand into a new market.

The money doesn't get spent on consumer goods, but it certainly gets spent...several times over. Because part of the money that Eisner put in the bank went into that home loan that employed a contractor who bought a pickup from a car dealer that bought new computers from the local computer store that paid its utility bill to the electric company that paid a lineman to install a new transformer... If that's not trickle down, then what is? Economics is a system with a ton of parts. It ain't simple. Shucks, it isn't so hard to figure this out...just note that the amount of money in circulation is a small fraction of the total US GDP.

-h-

Re:The article (Thanks /.!)

[LWATCDR]

It is an odd system.
You are the subject of the photo's
You are paying him to take the pictures.
They should be your pictures.

Wow. Wrong seeming all around...

[neonfrog]

I am not a wedding photographer, but I work in the photo industry and make a product that wedding photographers use.

They are NOT, as a general measure, in the $40-60K per event range. They CAN'T be. Do the math. How many average wedding couples can hire that single aspect of their wedding at that price? As you said, only the TOP photographers. As the article says, the ABOVE AVERAGE photographer would have to do 20 double wedding weekends in the $5000 range per to pull down $100K. I don't know any that actually do that.

Most of the ones I know personally make anywhere from $10k A YEAR (they sideline with photo store or other jobs) up to maybe $40-$60k A YEAR.

I hired someone for my wedding last year. I'm lower middle-class and we felt supremely pinched to consider the $2500 we paid and we got to keep all the files (totally digital) to print as we wanted. He was the most expensive of the several we looked at, but he was considered the best by many. The photographer did 2 weddings that weekend -- and nothing else all week, but that was a PRIME weekend. Assuming he got another 12 PRIME weekends a year (and I think that would be stretching it) he'd be pulling down $60k. Then he'd have to pay assistants so just whack a nice percentage out for that.

And he'd have to deal with:

* Mother of the bride
* Cheap brides who won't pay for prints because they read "how to scan" in Wedding Dress magazine
* Rude wedding guests trying to steal her shots or triggering her flashes
* Missing ANY shot that that anyone thought he should have gotten
* Disposable cameras on the table
* A VERY FULL WEEK editing
* Employing assitants
* Moving 10's of thousands of dollars of heavy photo equipment around in ANY weather, usually in a tuxedo
* And much much more

For most of these guys, this is their whole business. They have to pay rent, taxes, utilities and all of that for their studio OUT OF their service price in addition to their normal salary for keeping the lights on at home. Most of the other jobs listed had no such restrictions.

The product I make comes in two flavors. The cheap one and the expensive one ($350 and $600). The cheap one is extremely popular in the wedding industry. The expensive one is not a great seller in that market. Why? Research shows that it is too rich for the average wedding photographer's blood, even though it is a god send for him as far as function. The guy I hired had the cheap one.

My practical day to day dealings with this industry do not back up the conclusions reached in that article. Sure, some make the big bucks, but EVERY WEEKEND? All the time? ALL OF THEM?!? I'd be curious what the average PER YEAR PER PHOTOG was for the wedding service you worked for, not just the cream of the crop.

Great Idea! Only, we're not communist

[spruce]

Professional athletes aren't government employees, so the government doesn't have any say in how much we the people are willing to pay them. If we follow your logic, why don't we take some of the cash from the bonehead CEO's who don't deserve what they get, or rich kids who don't ever work a day in their life. They obviously don't deserve the money they have.

Just because you don't see the value of entertainment sports provide doesn't mean the rest of us should be punished by having less motivated less qualified athletes.

Sports Stars

[ziggles]

I know people (especially slashdot nerds) love to trash on anything related to professional sports, but let's actually think about this for a second. Becoming a professional athlete is not an easy thing to do. It's not just "throwing a ball," it's hours of training every day. And even with all the training in the world, there's still no guaruntee that you'll even get in the gate, even less that you'll become a highly paid star. Injuries come pretty often as well, which will put a stop to any career you had going.

They're taking a bigger risk than most people ever take by deciding to devote their life to something that can so easily go wrong. In my opinion they do deserve to be rewarded for taking that risk. I don't enjoy sports, I don't watch them, but logically it makes sense to me for professional athletes to get paid a lot. Same with movie stars. The reward is proportional to the risk.

Supply and demand!

[Merk]

Don't these idiots know anything about where the salaries come from?

Wedding photographers make big bucks because people want to make sure they don't get awful, amateur pictures. Everything associated with a wedding is expensive because (at least in theory) it's a one-time event that means a lot to a lot of people, so they don't want to risk being disappointed. Being a wedding photographer requires not only photography skills, but also the ability to deal with angry people (if your pictures don't turn out) and stressed out people (even if they do), as well as taking the same picture over and over again. Because of that, there are few people who want the job and can do it, so the pay is high. Duh!

Luxury home real estate agents act snobbish towards people who visit luxury open houses because *that's their job*. They want to drive up the price of the home, and make it seem exclusive, and part of that is making sure that if you're allowed to look at a luxury home, you feel privileged! Sure, they make high commissions, but dealing with the type of people who could buy or sell a home like that takes more skills than just the ability to pass a real-estate test.

Motivational speakers make money because people want to hear what they want to say. Pro athletes make money because people want to watch them play, or buy things they endorse, etc. Often the incremental cost for each of these things isn't huge. Say on average everybody who watched Micheal Jordan play baskeball over his career bought three pairs of "Air Jordan" sneakers and 100 happy meals. That's relatively cheap for them, but since he gets a cut of millions of people doing that, he gets money. Now sure, you can argue with whether people should be buying things an athlete endorses, but that's their value system. Sure, a pair of "Air Jordan" shoes is expensive, but it's a status symbol, and maybe it helps in their social circle. Paying a thousand dollars to listen to a former president speak is similar. I'm sure nobody thinks they're honestly learning amazing new things they could never learn otherwise, however they get to rub elbows with other people. It's networking, it's status, so hwo do you put a price on it?

Most of the other jobs are either about unions and the undue power they have, or about jobs that take a lot of time and effort to get. (Orthodontist takes years of schooling, mutual fund manager takes years of getting certified as a financial analyst, etc). As for the unions, I think it's accepted that they're pretty corrupt and wield undue power, but eventually that power will fail. As for the jobs that take years to get, most people aren't willing or able to spend almost 10 years after high school to get a very boring, but very high paying job. Those that do can command high salaries.

It's all about supply and demand. I hope this was meant as a fluff piece, because if this is the kind of serious market analysis these people do, I'm not impressed.

Your logic eludes me...

[UncleGizmo]

"I would find it extremely doubtful...", but have you really checked?

There are hundreds of thousands of male students who play football in high school each year. Only a select few are chosen to play at major college schools [less than 1%, IIRC], and some others decide to play at smaller schools [say tens of thousands]. Pro scouts look high and low for potential athletes to join their ranks. Many are invited to summer tryouts. With few exceptions, there are no people who are big, strong, fast, agile and smart enough to play a position in the majors who haven't been found. Read up on what it takes - physical capability-wise - to even make it into the tryouts. Not something that just anyone can do.

"Clearly the pay is help create a mystic about the person..."

Umm, yeah...there are lots of industries who pay employees big wages in order to create a mystic about them. No, actually, it's probably because the 'mystic', as you put it, is that this league has the highest level of skilled performers in that particular profession - bigger, stronger, faster, etc. than the 'average' person [in this realm, physical excellence is more treasured than mental].

I don't doubt that there are some who could play in the NFL [or one of the feeder leagues like NFL Europe or arena football] who aren't, but just because you have a large pool of people, that doesn't mean you should be able to assume a large subset who can perform a specific task.

Don't forget - capability doesn't equal ability. Just because someone is intelligent, has a strong sense of logic, and good typing skills, won't necessarily make them good at programming, will it? Or are you saying that any of 40 million 20-somethings could be one of the few top programmers?

Absolutely wrong

[Kohath]

Can any of those other people get 60,000 people to pay $50 each to watch them work for 3 hours? No?

Does that explain part of the differece in pay?

You don't get paid what you "deserve". You get paid what you're worth to other people who can (and want to) pay you.

Most Overpaid Jobs

[Man of E]

Steve Jobs?

One of the biggest myths in sport.

[dameron]

Is that player salary has a direct impact on ticket prices, concessions, parking, or merchandise.

Prices for those things are driven my supply and demand. The reason a Coke costs $5 at a ball game is because people will pay that price. Tickets likewise are driven by what people are willing to pay.

Teams may justify raising ticket prices because of player salaries, but if it became unprofitable the pricing model would change.

I'm sick of hearing about greedy pro sports players, they, with very rare exceptions, get paid what the market will bear for their skills. Owners know this, players know this, arbitrators know this, GMs too. Fans don't, they're blinded by the size of the contracts floating between the teams and the players, and instinctively react as 0x20 did, that greedy players are driving up the cost of the game.

If you want to blame anyone for the high price of concessions and tickets to pro sports events, blame the owners for taking their product and marketing it to a much more affluent audience, and blame the bastard who can't be bothered to tailgate or bring his own food to the game, but instead drops the cash on the most expensive seats, the season tickets, or the overpriced ($7 12 oz. cups of Bud at Dodger games this year) concessions.

-dameron

sure, but from the OP:

[BrokenHalo]

but many of us take home bloated paychecks

To me, anyone who takes home a bloated paycheck belongs to the category of them not us. :-)

Don't be silly

[FallLine]

Firstly, investments of all sorts are generally considered to be assets, not just cash and gold.

Secondly, do you really honestly believe that the "rich" get richer by squirelling it all away under their beds or something? No, you lose money that way every year with inflation. Gold is generally a pretty poor performer and it has no concrete value (e.g., it is subject to the same laws of supply and demand that your house is) Likewise, if you put it into a standard savings account, you might as well be standing still.

The rich get richer by buying into higher risk investments, e.g., privately-held companies, publically held stocks, and loans. As a general rule, the higher the return available, the higher the risk. If you look carefully at the numbers, you will see that, with the exception of certain institutional investors, it is the rich that comprise MOST equity in privately held companies. Now you might argue that the rich can do this because they can better afford to take risks or that they can aggregate their risks so as to diminish the overall risk, but the fact remains that they perform a very useful function in society.

Do you really believe that when a person buys art (a very small percentage of any wealthy individuals income anyways) that it just sits in some hole in the ground? No, it gets transfered to another wealthy person who WILL almost certainly eventually spend it or hopefully to an artist or some agent thereof that directly promotes the arts--in either event, the money keeps on moving. What do you care if it passes through an art house first?

The stock market on the aggregate over the past century or two has averaged better than 12 percent return per year. While that may not sound like much to you, when you compound the returns over a period of time, it quickly adds up to a lot of money. In other words, the wealthy already have significant encouragement to invest. Putting a gun to their heads and saying that they MUST invest constantly or face losing it all would be silly and counter-productive. Don't forget that the rich must get rich somehow first. If the government starts drastically dictating how the money is to be allocated that it just one more reason NOT to make the effort in the first place.

I also find it highly ironic that you're arguing for taxes so as to spur the rich to invest. Many of these taxes on dividends and capital gains are what dissuades the rich from investing in some of highest risk investments. [Put in the simplest of terms: If you have a 1 in 3 shot of winning a pool and a 2 and 3 shot of losing every dollar you invest, say, 1m dollars, then that pool must be at least 3M dollars before any rational individual would even THINK about investmenting, else it'd be a net average loss. Let's imagine for most people that that one in 3 shot must offer at least 4M dollars. Now what happens when the government decides to take 75% of that money from you in the event that you do win? Woops, game over. This point is this: If you tax windfalls heavily and don't reimburse losses at the other end, then your tax will have distortionary and undesirable effects on the markets]

Btw, the rich also lost disproportionately more money when the stock market fell over the past couple of years. It's no coincidence.

Thanks, here's the stupid list.

[twitter]

After a silly attempt to justify not including salaries of CEO's like Jack Welch, mega lawyers and other thieves, they go for worker bees and people with real and scare talent:

1. Mutual-fund managers
2. Washed-up pro athletes in long-term contracts
3. CEOs of poorly performing companies
4. Orthodontists
5. Motivational speakers and ex-politicians on the lecture circuit
6. Real estate agents selling high-end homes
7. Airport skycaps
8. West Coast longshoremen
9. Pilots for major airlines
10. Wedding photographers

The only time someone is really overpaid is when they are in a position where competition is artificially restricted. One or two of the above fall into that catagory, but the people picked on are at the bottom of the food chain and have little responsibility for their position.

It's amazing to me that someone would publish such an article while we are flooded with corporate scandals like Enron or Tyson. The other day I was reading a story about how a former Tyson excutive directly stuck the company with more than a million dollars for his wife's wedding party and another million or so from his outrageous salary. His single birthday party is equivalent to eight to ten of the so called overpaid yearly salaries above.

I envy people who are actually making enough money to have a stay at home wife, educate their children and retire at a reasonable age. These things should not be confined to worthless upper management. Everyone who actually works for a living deserves as much. If there were more competition in the world, things would be better for everyone.

10 Most Overpaid? That's easy...

[Shads]

C*O

Corporate (Anything) Officer

Re:What about HR people? - What about them?

[meta-monkey]

You make some good points about HR people that most laymen would never realize.

I think that's the problem with just about all the jobs listed in this article, and all the bitching in these comments on /. : ignorance. People just don't know what these jobs entail. They see one part of it, think it must be easy, and therefore not worth any money.

I'm a wedding photographer (#10 on the list), and a lot of people on /. seem to think I only work the 8 hours at the wedding on Saturday, charge $4,000, and leave. They don't seem to consider the several hours of prep work before the wedding, or the 40 or 50 hours of work retouching and editing the photos afterward, or the cost of all my business overhead, including equipment, insurance, rent, phone, internet, etc etc etc. Oh, and I gotta eat and provide my own benefits, too.

Seems to me people should walk a mile in your shoes before they judge. Might as well ask some programmer, "Well, what does it really cost you to work for your company? I mean, gas mileage to and fro, right? So how can you possibly defend the fact that you charge your employer $50,000 a year for your services?!? It's not like it costs you anything! You're just stealing from your poor employer!"

Oh yeah, there's that whole "sucking away my life" thing.

I have to defend CEO's here a second

[ducomputergeek]

Prepares for karma hit

I started a business with a college friend of mine. He is talented in advertising and marketing and has no clue how to run a business. That's why he asked me to become his partner and run the damn company. Yes he does a lot of the apperance and grunt work of coming up with slogans and such, but he can work 6 hour days and get away with it because he is that good.

I on the other hand spend an average of 14 hours a day in the office during the first year doing everything from strategy to accounting.

We are now in our third year and doing about $850k a year in business and now have 4 full time and 2 part-time employes along with four interns every semester. Think my job's gotten easier? No I work an average 60 hour work week. As the "General Manager" (aka CEO without the letters) of the company, I am required to attend an average of 3 business functions a week from weekly "Local business executive's breakfasts" to "Big client's wife's sucky art gallery opening".

Granted, I don't do much of the mundane billing, collecting and now have a secatary that does a lot of my dictation work, but now I have to deal with motivating employees, looking out on the horizon.

What was my salary last year? $175k plus $55k from profits. As an original founder, I get 30% of the profits, co-found/partner gets 50% and the other 20% is divided amoung the employees. Average employee salary is about $38k with all bonuses and benefits.

Yeah, so we get paid more than the average empolyee, but I built this company with hardwork, took a risk leaving a comfortable 9 - 5 job, and by the grace of god got lucky.

Re:Sure, buses are *really* tough to drive...

[kylef]

I think you're basically making my argument for me here.

I work on Learjets so perhaps the planes I play with have better equipment, however I doubt there is a single commercial jet out there without a full navigation suit onboard.

Yes, I understand that! Do you think bus drivers know how to navigate a great circle path? Do you think they understand magnetic deviation? If you fly Lears, you know as well as I do that the question isn't what happens when all the equipment is working: it's what happens when the equipment doesn't work. You have to be able to fly the airplane without navigational aids, or with "archaic" backup systems like VORTACs. You think your average bus driver can plot his location given a sectional chart and a VOR radio while he's flying the plane? Maybe the bus drivers in your area have more technical competence than they do in my area.

Planes have pressurized cabins and O2 systems.

Yes, of course they do. But my point is that you have yet another system that bus operators don't worry about, and would have no clue how to operate. Sure, new two-seater jets have computers that control their operation, but older jets force you to manually set the cabin pressure altitude. Does a bus driver know about hypoxia? What would happen above 10000 feet without a pressurized cabin? These are the questions that NO ONE with the level of training and responsibility a typical bus driver has would be able to answer if he/she were tasked with flying an airplane.

#1 Eng to start ... Throttle lever to idle. Lights look normal.. #2 to start etc... I could teach a bus driver to start one of these things in half an hour.

Sure, you could teach a bus driver to start them. Heck, you could probably even teach a bus driver the concept of independent engine throttle. But how do gas turbines operate? What happens if the compressor stall light comes on? How do the fire extinguishers work? When is it OK to deploy them? Heck, what about planes that require an APU just to start one of the mains? Or when the first officer does a walk-around preflight, would a bus driver know what to look for around the engine compartment to make sure nothing is amiss?

Basically, my argument is that it isn't good enough to expect that the systems are automated, because automated systems will fail. Yes, it's rare. But it happens, and I guarantee you that pilots will always be expected to know how to operate a plane manually in the case of an emergency. Some failures are so catastrophic that no backup systems exist, and I'm aware of that fact. In those rarest of rare circumstances, even trained pilots would fail. But don't try to tell me that someone with the same level of training a bus driver receives would be even REMOTELY capable of landing an MD-11 in, say, Salt Lake City. Or recovering from an engine failure on takeoff in a max-loaded 777. The whole notion is ridiculous!