Jobs and wages

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) gathers wage data from across the nation and categorizes them by occupation. The average annual earnings of each job category is calculated and itemized. There are some really interesting findings.

For instance, the much vilified  Chief Executive Officer (CEO) comes in at number ten in the list of most highly paid occupations. How could that be? We know, for instance, that Larry Ellison, the eccentric head of Oracle, made $41.5 million in 2016. So how could CEOs rank only tenth? It’s because the vast majority of CEOs head up small businesses and make less than impressive incomes. The small jewelry company whose owner makes $55 thousand. Or the landscaping chief who pulls down a cool $40K. They drag the average way, way down.

So while being a CEO might sound like a magnificent occupation the BLS measures the average income at $194K per year. Good but not glorious.

Who  makes up the first nine slots? These are the occupations whose annual income ranges from $200K to $270K. Very well paid indeed.

At the top of the list is anesthesiologists at $270K. Next, surgeons, $253K. (Interesting that, on average, surgeons make less than anesthesiologists. Perhaps some of them are regretting their specialty).

Then there is OB/GYN at $234K, and oral surgeons at $233K.

Orthodontist, $229K.

Physicians, $206K.

Internists, $202K.

Family practitioners, $201K.

Psychiatrists, $200K.

After this is the hated CEO, then six more medical professions before we finally get to number sixteen, the airline pilot, at $152K.

Let’s take a pause here and consider. Of the top fifteen paid professions, all are medical except for one. No wonder health insurance is so pricey!

Now that we are getting out of the stratosphere, we start to see some more expected well-paid jobs. Petroleum engineer, $147K, and computer system manager, $146K. Lawyers are a bit lower on the list at $140K.

The next broad swath, from here down to $100K (an arbitrary boundary), is heavily populated with technical occupations. Marine engineers and technical architects. Software developers. Geoscientists.

To try to put this all in perspective, let’s take a look at the bottom of the BLS statistics and work our way up. Here, the lowest paid occupation is food preparation at $20K. (That’s roughly 10 times less than all the folks we have been talking about up to now).

Cooks, shampooers, dishwashers, cashiers, lifeguards, manicurists, bartenders, meat packers, floral designers, and we’re still not up to $30K. These are the vast foundation of America, laborers extolled by Studs Terkel in his classic book “Working” (1974). The important point that Terkel raised is that these folks are proud of their work and find meaning in what they do. They would rather work than not.

What are we to make of all this?

First of all, there is no shame in honest labor, no matter how little you earn. There is dignity in work, in creating value. Let no one denigrate what you do.

What would we encourage our children to do? While becoming an artistic barista might be rewarding, we might want more for our child. In that case, looking at the top of the BLS occupation list, the only thing which seems most common, most qualifying, is STEM. Science, technology, engineering, math. This will prepare them for the top tier of careers in medicine, engineering, and management.

If you must nudge your kids, encourage them to embrace math. It is the root of human reasoning and will prepare them to excel in science, technology, and engineering.

Anyone can be good at math. It is an innately human ability, to reason. There are only social, cultural and self-confidence barriers, which we must demolish. Race is immaterial, gender irrelevant, and class can be overcome.

The key is love and encouragement. Each child has the raw ability and must only be helped to see what she can achieve.

Belief. What a gift you can bestow.

Yes, girls can do math. And much, much more...

Computing in the twentieth century was dominated by men. Engineers, programmers, and managers were almost entirely male. In the 1970s and 80s, it was not at all unusual to attend a technical training class on operating systems or networking and find oneself in the company of only male students. One could attend a professional conference with thousands of other attendees and see only a paltry handful of women.

These were tough times for women in the computing field.

But one woman stood out.

Jean Sammet, born in 1928 in New York City, had strong math skills. But according to Wikipedia, she was “unable to attend the Bronx High School of Science because it did not accept girls.”

Instead, attending a private high school, she excelled in her math ability and moved on to earn  bachelor’s and master’s degrees by 1949. The first computer she encountered did not impress her. According to reports, she found it to be an obscene beast.

But by the mid-1950s, working for Sperry Gyroscope, she was engaged to use her math and logic skills to program a computer and found that she loved the process.

In those early days, computers demanded that we communicate with them in their own language. Machine language was expressed in binary commands, ones and zeros, sometime grouped into base 16, hexadecimal, where the digits 0-9 and letters A-F expressed binary groupings from 0000 to 1111 (figure 1a). The details are unimportant. What matters is that programs consisting of binary commands and operators and operands were obtuse and difficult to be understood by humans.

Ms. Sammet had an affinity for computer languages and a desire to make them more easy to use. This predilection of hers corresponded with an expanded use of computers from largely engineering and mathematical computation to general business applications – payroll, accounts receivable, tax collection, and the like. She became influential in a group which proposed and designed a new language, COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language. This language was intended to express computer directions in terms of simple English statements (figure 1b).

The US government, at the time the largest user of computers, supported the project and COBOL was born. Others, such as Admiral Grace Hopper, are often given credit for the birth of the COBOL language. And while never diminishing Admiral Hopper’s support, Ms. Sammet rightfully claimed the central role of designing and actually writing the compiler programs which converted English-like COBOL programs into machine language. (After all, the actual computers, at root, still understood only machine language, a fact which remains true to this day).

Now, nearly sixty years later, billions of lines of COBOL programs still enervate the computers of government and big business. Considered a legacy language, meaning new development is utilizing more modern languages (figure 1c), COBOL is still an active agent in processing your credit card charges, insurance claims, and ATM withdrawals.

In the years that followed, Ms. Sammet roared along in her gender-busting career. In the 1960s, she joined IBM and became a programming language technology manager in the IBM Systems Development Division. She authored a seminal book, “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals,” which was published by Prentice-Hall and has been described by others as "the standard work on programming languages" and an "instant computer classic." (IEEE Computer Society history).

Her career continued to ascend and by the late 1970s she was elected president of the prestigious Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Recall that this was a time when women were exceedingly rare in computing. Her successes were astounding and due only to her deep skills and resilient character.

Jean Sammet passed away a few weeks ago on May 20, 2017, at the age of 89. Unremarked and unmourned except by a small society of geeks, she had made her resounding point.

Girls hold no second candle to anyone when it comes to STEM, math, logic, and programming. She was a giant and, unbeknownst to you, bettered your life. God bless you, Jean, and thank you for your work.