I’m an educator, and my Windows PC crashed during my first period class.
I had a cinnamon mint USB drive in my bag. I booted to it, and it saved the day!
I don’t have anybody to tell just how much of a godsend that was, but I figured you guys might appreciate it!
I’d say such a statement can’t be made in general. There are a couple hundred countries on Earth and dozens of types of teaching jobs.
The highest-paid teachers in the world are in Luxembourg. They only make about 160% what teachers in the US do, who are the teachers I’m most familiar with. (Side note, I’m gobsmacked that the US is in the top 10 for teacher salaries. That’s bonkers to me.)
Is teacher pay a perfect analogue for ability to make technology demands at time of hire? No. But both are affected primarily by societal valuation of the profession, and it looks like that is sadly pretty consistent worldwide.
Teachers are educators, but not all educators are teachers. Also, the person I was originally responding to may have options in other fields.
If they have options in other fields, they likely know it and are remaining in the education profession because of their love for it; that’s certainly true for every educator I know currently. Many municipal school systems exploit this love ruthlessly to pay their teachers less.
In any case, I am a software engineer and have never had the ability to negotiate my contract to that extent. Teachers typically have significantly less leverage even than I do.
Have you ever tried? This kind of negotiation unfortunately typically requires a job change, employers are really really bad at understanding how valuable it is to motivate employees at little to no cost to them.
Not in this economy. I’ve never had enough good offers to be able to risk it.
Well - we have a saying in German: “Fragen kostet nichts” - asking doesn’t cost anything. At least you tried then, worst they can say is “no”. Expect that, and who knows, maybe you get a surprise.
Maybe they’ll let you work with a “technical device” that you administrate yourself, while for access to company resources you still have to use the corporate vanilla computer.
I know the guy who administers the company-owned devices at my current company. He’s stretched thin enough that I’m quite sure the answer would be no; he just doesn’t have the bandwidth to consider the possible implications of such a thing.
Not that I don’t, uh… basically do that anyway in a lot of cases. I have a lot of latitude. But I don’t think it’s as common to be able to make those requests as you might think.
I don’t think it is common at all - I think we need to make it common, by asking all the time - especially those of us that are less easily replaced.