When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts:
- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers
- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]
For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.
This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.
I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.
[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106
Law is a well paying profession in general, insofar as many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. You’re correct that only a relatively few people make the kind of money people think lawyers make, and the profession is highly segregated by education. Most people at my law school (northwestern) went on to a big firm job with a salary of $200k rising to $500k after 8 years. A few places lower on the ranking scales, at good public schools, it was more like 1 in 4.
I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.
For the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, however, it can be very rewarding. I’m a decade out of law school, and still enjoying the grind. So is my wife, snd most of the people I graduated with. I’ve got a STEM degree and was a programmer in a previous life, and enjoy the analytical aspect of law. It also combines an element of verbal advocacy and adversarial competition I found lacking in engineering.
I would certainly recommend my kids to go into the profession, at least my oldest who has the temperament for it. What personalities the younger two will have remains to be seen, but I would certainly counsel against them becoming lawyers out of inertia or because they got a useless undergraduate degree. (As an Asian parent, I have no compunction about insisting on STEM degrees for all of them!)
With respect, this comment is wrong in so many places. “High five figures” is not a lot of money considering the opportunity cost (and actual cost of a law degree) (7 years and likely $200,000 all in). The 1 in 4 figure is not close to right either—it’s typically fewer than 1 in 10 get the actually high paying jobs outside of t-14 schools. And I’m glad commenter likes the grind, but most lawyers that I’ve worked with over the years are miserable and drink too much, regardless of school and rank. Sounds like a serious case of survivor bias. This article is closer to reality: https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...
I don't see how high 5 figures is not high salary. 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. And a lot of people earning the median are also deep in student debt. If earning 3 times the median is not good money, maybe your view of what "good money" means something else.
The lawyer median wage is 125k, and the 75 percentile is 186k. I consider 186k to be a high wage, it's 6 times the national mean wage. And according to the sources below, 1 in 4 lawyers are above that.
I am sorry, but I just don't see how the commenter above is wrong, the numbers say he is spot on. But anyway, I am not a lawyer, and I am not trying to be disrespectful, but I see a lot of high earners in many fields that complain having small wages and tough life, but when you compare it from the outside, it doesn't look so bad.
For example, the guy in your article:
said Dylan Boigris, a 2016 Miami Law graduate, who began his career making about $45,000 as a public defender
Making 50% more than the median right out of college, I would say that is pretty good, don't you think? And he is a low percentile, because in your article:
Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year,
Then your article goes to show earning vs debt on a graph. I think it's quite an expectation to have your annual earning cover the cost of the entire law degree...and then bemoan when it doesn't. How many other professions have this luxury?
Lumping your comparison to include people without high school degrees with lawyers is making a huge mistake. At a minimum the comparison should be between collage graduates and lawyers minus the opportunity cost of law school.
Consider, when comparing starting salary your accountant or whatever not only makes money in both years a lawyer is in law school they also likely have two raises before the lawyer gets his first paycheck and start paying back undergrad loans while a lawyer is still adding interest and new debt.
If your opportunity cost from loans, tuition, lost wages and delayed carrier advancement adds up to a conservative 10k/year after taxes for the rest of your life, then your 72k pre tax lawyer is actually making the equivalent of ~58k pre tax and 1/2 of starting Layers are doing worse than that.
Also factor in cost of living and rent. That ~$72k is not going to fly in SF or NY after rent if you are trying to start a family and not have 3 roommates.
I don't see how this is relevant. Of course lawyers must make more in a HCOL to make ends meet, but how is this different than any other profession? Are there significantly more lawyers in HCOL areas?
The demographic you refer to are renters because their debt to income ratio is not sufficient for a mortgage. After going to law school, having to scrape by and pay back student loan debt + HCOL rent is how you are entering your adult life with a law degree. Your entry level salary is still depressed relatively speaking to an entry level software dev in HCOL area. If your spouse is not the breadwinner you are in trouble.
I still fail to see the reasoning here. Most other young professionals are in the same boat: debt out of college, smallish starting salaries, renting, HCOL areas.
Lawyers have higher salaries than most other professions, though. They are 10% better paid than software developers. We have a huge amount of really well paid developers in SF, Seattle and NYC, and lawyers still have a higher median salary.
Thanks I see where you are coming from. All things considered you can make a great life out of a law career if you are driven and motivated, like you said the ceiling is much higher for law than general population jobs
Sure, but the job was irrelevant substitute librarian or anything other than unemployed and the opportunity cost still exists. IMO, the comparison is still quite generous as it ignores risks associated with trying to become a lawyer.
It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school.
Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sources, so I guess it depends on where you look. Regardless, you're correct in your overall point, I just wanted to point out that a $100k salary does not necessarily make it worth going to law school.
With that said, you're right: if your goal is to go into law to make money, it shouldn't be very difficult earn well into the six figures a few years in. I imagine most competent lawyers earning less than that are working in public defense or a similarly underpaid aspect of law, knowing the tradeoff. For reference, the median salary for software engineers is only $110k, but that is clearly on the low end of what a competent engineer can make after even just 5 years in the industry.
Oops, you're right, I completely misread. Thanks! In any case, I'm finding a lot of conflicting data, so at best I think the actual number depends on where you look.
>> Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year
The number I want to see his how much their salaries increased after law school, what they made over and above their pre-lawyer income. At law school I ran into many students who "earned" lots of family money prior to school. Some were on trust funds but other had token jobs in family firms. One of the top earners in our class was a guy hired immediately by his father's firm, but I think he was already some form of on-paper employee with them prior to law school too. Other people came from relatively stable jobs prior, only to struggle to find work afterwards.
There's a problem with your post: you linked to "median lawyer pay" but many graduates will not get lawyer jobs. Median lawyer pay doesn't include folks with a law degree who went back to whatever they were doing before law school.
The vast majority of folks earning “high five figures” don’t have to waste three years on dubious education at a cost of $50k per year (not including debt for living expenses because you can’t work your first year at all). So you’re right, high five figures could be a great salary if you’re a manager of a target and didn’t go to law school, but it’s a bad salary if you had to go to law school to get it.
Army Captain. Someone with a degree and a few years in the job. Someone in command of perhaps 50 people. A federal employee. The sort of person who most Americans would consider solidly middle class.
There is a contingent in tech (and probably other areas like Wall Street) that is absolutely delusional about what most people consider comfortable middle class--or even upper middle class--salaries.
Those same people probably disagree about an army captain being middle class. Some would say that any public employee short of a presidential appointment is per se something below middle class. The average congressman or senator, the people on TV making all the decisions, are paid 175k/year. The president is paid 400k. Such people normally have other private income streams but that is the base pay. So anyone talking about "low six figures" as "middle class" really needs to take their head out of the sand.
It's either regional differences where people pretend that the exception is the rule [0] or rich people pretend to be "middle class" because that way the middle class will vote for the benefits of rich people.
[0] I can't afford a $2 million house, therefore I am not middle class if don't earn at least $200k.
GP's point and your own are not necessarily at odds. A lot has to do with which real lawyer is used as representative. Are we looking at average experience, median, 76th percentile... Taking into account those who never started practicing, etc.
The same can be said of other professions, but the details vary a lot. Relative merits depend on where we put the probe.
A well to do lawyer, 40+ lawyer can be in a more comfortable career place than a comparison programmer going forward. Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority. Competitive, yet prestige based career starts. A nice seniority ratchet as a winners reward.
OTOH, scrapy starts seem like a tough place for lawyers. In tech, skills, hustle and attitude can get you a start... when times are good. Tech is a good business to be in, but volatile... even when times are good. I wouldn't say only chops matter, but you can get by on mostly chops.
Play the game you stand to win, I suppose. If you are en route to line up prestigious degrees, internships and such... 1 in 4 doesn't necessarily mean 1 in 4 for you. There's a harsh distribution.
I suspect this explains attrition. More prestige oriented success factors and a harsher distribution. Beyond a certain threshold winners win a more prestige oriented prize. The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward. Seniority isn't even a value, it's only valued for implied experience.
If you have good odds at a prestigious internship or starting job, it makes a lot of sense to pursue law. If you aren't, it often won't. I reckon that reality sinks in during law school. Programming doesn't really have that. False starts, scrappy starts, and such are fine. Average results for working programmers are fine. An uncle who can advise and groom you before eventually recommending you for a great internship is great, but it's not the stuff most tech careers are made of.
The sort of well-to-do 40+ lawyer you describe is really only something found at "biglaw" firms, and not only that, but people at biglaw firms who have managed to make partner. Getting hired into biglaw is like getting hired into big tech from CS school, but less predictable because it's almost universally based on law school rank after your first year. And law school rank is almost universally dependent upon exam grades. In law school, your grade for a class for the entire semester is dependent on one exam; mine often had somewhere around 4 questions. You can know the material back and front objectively, but if you have not managed to divine how the prof wants their questions answered, you will score poorly.
Everyone goes into law school thinking they will be the one to get high grades, but in my experience, working hard was not well correlated with good grades. Even if you work harder than anyone else, it still somewhat comes down to a coin flip. This can be so frustrating, I cannot even begin to describe it.
Even if you then make it into biglaw (a low percentage), you then need to make partner (an extremely low percentage). This is far more about a) office politics, b) connections, and c) your ability to "rain make" by bringing in big new clients; than about your skill as a practitioner of law.
I would also caution against looking at numbers like salary in isolation. Law is full of unhappy rich people. 36% of the profession suffer from alcohol use disorders, compared to ~12% of the general population. Nearly half experience depression at some point (compared to 15% in the general population, in the stat I was able to locate). It's not a happy field.
So... that path exists in tech too. As you say, a "big tech from CS school" trailhead. Politics, and tech versions of rainmaking play a role sorting into senior positions from there too.
Up to this point, a tech career has a lot more options and opportunities. Didn't get google? Work at a bank, a startup, a salesforce solutions techshop.... Didn't get MIT? There are other paths forward, including quirky ones that will work too.
Past this point, well-to-do lawyer at Biglaw has the cushier path. Law firms respect seniority. They give them nice offices, autonomy. Senior partners don't worry about wippersnappers running circles around them in some new law paradigm. They don't need to relearn contract law periodically.
The point about happiness is valid, but complex. That competitive prestige game is, empirically, often misery making. Programming has more realness, but there can be a lot of performance stress, especially if you're thinking in decades.
> Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority
The equivalent of tech progressing into management is lawyers progressing into sales. The people who make the most aren’t the ones who know the law the best, they’re the “rainmakers,” the ones bringing in all the business. At a certain point your career and monetary progression will be limited if you’re not moving to a relationship-building/sales-style role. It’s like investment banking in that regard.
Probably most professions with firms that have a senior partner/partner/associate sort of structure. The more senior you are, the less your job is about doing "work" and the more it is about bringing new business and retaining existing clients. Of course, it's true in IT consulting as well. You can be sure that most of the senior people at Accenture aren't doing much coding.
According to [1] full-time employed people with professional degrees earn a median of $117,679 while full time employed high school graduates earn a median of $38,102.
If it were easy to earn high five figures with a GED, wouldn't the earnings of GED holders be much higher?
I didn't say full time high school graduates. I said factory jobs. The average starting pay here is roughly 25/hr which is >50k/yr. It's pretty easy to work up to 35+/hr in just a few years. If you get into a foreman position, you can be making upwards of 90 per year and supervisor roles are typically 6 figures.
I'd consider 75k/yr "high 5 figures" and this is extremely doable where I'm from. It's not a major metro, just an average industrial city near a port. Everyone in my family does factory work and has done so for 3 generations, I'm the only one in tech.
There are indeed plenty of folks out there making less than 40/yr. They are almost exclusively temp/contract labors with poor work ethic. The people who are dependable typically get hired on full time which comes with a significant pay increase and full benefits.
The factory job will destroy your body before your 50s. What good is high five figures if you can't do anything with it other that pay for insurance that barely covers the physical therapy you'll need?
And a sedentary life at a keyboard could leave one in poor health. Every job has its tradeoffs. I would argue that a job with physical activity is better overall - I'd take joint replacement over heart surgery or diabetes.
Because the vast majority of factory work is not backbreaking labor. It typically involves running machines, taking QC measurements, performing maintenance, manning estops, 5s etc. Yes, there are days that suck and they can be exhausting, but most factories don't have days like that very often. Everyone knows the ones that do and it's best to avoid those plants.
So why wouldn't people downvote the person who said the work will destroy your body, or the one who said you can't sit down?
I never said factory work is backbreaking. It can vary greatly by industry, but is generally more active than an software dev job but harder on knees and such. Yes, there are some manufacturing jobs that you just sit at a machine, but many of the machines still need someone to load them, reset them, etc.
>> It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.
Maybe for you. For me, when I was practicing, law was a very human-oriented thing. My job was about convincing people and companies to do things that they didn't want to do (mostly security). I felt like Charlie Sheen's therapist: If they don't make any changes the client will wind up in jail. But push too hard and they will walk away.
I will echo what sandworm says here. I went from a philosophy undergrad to law school to a law career to a coding bootcamp to a programming career.
The job is certainly demanding and detail oriented. Analytical, I guess it depends on what you mean by analytical. What I became disillusioned with was how brutally incoherent legal arguments can be. And to be honest, the Python code I encounter is often in better English than the legal code that I encountered. You can try reading the Illinois Compiled Statutes if you would like a taste.
I am of the school that all laws are perfectly coherent. I read any vagueness as tacit permission for the court to figure it out for itself. So I don't see "loophole". Rather, I see the legislature granting permission to do something. That mindset means I never feel frustrated by poorly-written code. But when judges don't make sense, that is another story.
>I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.
Underrated comment -- literally half of all lawyers I've worked with (financial regulation) admit they chose law because they didn't like math.
Doesn’t the LSAT have a significant logic portion which IIRC was fairly challenging? I guess you could figure out a way to do well on the LSAT with a distaste for math.
Never taken the LSAT, but have taken GMAT and (semi-obviously) SAT. Yes, there's a certain subset of "math" on these tests. But there are a lot of people who grind test prep and do well enough to get by. (And logic is something a bit different--which lawyers absolutely do need to some degree.)
I have no personal familiarity with law school but I know in (a good) business school, I had plenty of classmates who struggled with anything beyond very basic math--and sometimes even that. Read any of the "my first year in business school" literature and an essentially universal theme is that the math part was really hard.
Which it's not. And I say this as someone who even back then didn't consider themselves especially strong with mathematics in spite of having an engineering degree.
"It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it."
I would love the detailed and analytical aspect of it. Sadly, I hate the contradictions, mistakes, etc that I have experienced with the system. With the vast number of laws and opinions, it seems it's just as much about making the judge like you because they can pick and choose what laws apply (just look at stuff like split opinions). Even if you're not a litigation lawyer, any documents being worked on could lead to litigation. So it seems to me that luck and manipulation play a big part.
> With the vast number of laws and opinions, it seems it's just as much about making the judge like you because they can pick and choose what laws apply (just look at stuff like split opinions).
I tend to view this as analyzing the same problem under different rule sets. Like, making an argument to a “living constitution” judge can be different than making none to an origins list judge, but there’s an internal logic to each argument. It’s just different axioms and rules.
I kind of see that at the higher levels, but there can even be split opinions and contradictions in very simple cases.
For example a judge said that he wouldn't dismiss a case during a trial de novo because there was no record of the original trial (magisterial courts are considered courts not of record, but you are allowed to make a recording) showing that the objections were raised there. Then he later said he won't allow the use of prior statements at that magisterial trial to be used to discredit a witness. He also explained that the trial de novo is "a complete do-over". If it is in fact a complete do-over then why won't the petition to dismiss be considered? I understand that you can't introduce facts from the prior trial at a de novo trial, but any documented statement by a witness can be used to discredit them (ie you don't present it like facts in an appeal, but rather question the witness on why their answer is different from their prior statement). Too many details to list here to show the full legal argument.
Then take conflicts of interest and rules of statutory construction. If I have a precedential ruling saying that the letter of the law cannot be ignored to pursue its spirit, but the judge does just that... or how the judiciary has granted themselves special protections not found in the laws passed by congress, specifically that complaints against them are so secret that even if they contain exculpatory evidence it cannot be revealed. But this explanation would turn into a dissertation.
Perhaps the best example is that magistrates aren't even required to be lawyers. I had one think that I was calling him prejudiced for requesting that the case be dismissed with prejudice. How does one tailor their argument to a functional idiot while still adhering to legal procedures/ideas?
Does your inclination to recommend the legal field and law school stand if the person would have to finance the entire law degree, and couldn't get in to a T14 school? I assume $120k all-in, having been a party to shopping for law schools—albeit several years ago, so I hope it hasn't gone up much.
As someone that works as a software engineer with a liberal arts degree I've found a lot of my STEM degree holding peers to be lacking considering my expectations and all the high and mighty talk about STEM degrees.
The proof is in the pudding, very rarely do people with STEM degrees have to vouch for the usefulness of their degree. We already know why mechanics, engineers and statisticians are useful as career fields, it's the Create Haiku majors that always seem to have to explain the "value unseen" in their degree.
Note, though, that in most threads on HN about qualifications for programming or software engineering there are usually quite a few comments from people saying that they never actually use anything from the classes they had to take to earn their STEM degree.
As far as actually teaching them things they would use on the job the STEM degree was no better than any random humanities degree. The only value they say they get out of the STEM degree as opposed to any other degree or no degree is that many employers use a STEM degree as a filter when hiring.
You can also see this whenever any thread about software interviewing comes up. People complain about having to cram memorizing a bunch of algorithms and data structures that companies like to ask about.
Those questions would be right at home on a CS class homework assignment. If the class material was something that working programmers actually had to use they would not need to cram for it when it comes up on interviews.
So yeah, a STEM degree is more valuable for a typical programming job than a humanities degree--but not for any good reason.
My uni had an entire course devoted to data structures (from b-trees, to relational db) so I beg to differ. Anecdotal (much as your comments are as well) but I've often employed the knowledge i gained in my classes as a CS major in subsequent engineering jobs. In the course of my jobs I've used everything from genetic algorithms to least squares regression, and everything in between.
And yes, there is a good reason that it's more valuable, particularly for a recent grad. It shows that a prospective job candidate has already put forth some effort in the field (from working on class projects, to exams, to working with other students on larger programs)
Yes. Because STEM degrees have perceived economic value and liberal arts degrees don't. That does not mean liberal arts degrees are useless. It is, at the very least, short-sighted to think so.
I majored in comp sci but I'm not gonna sit around and pretend every aspect of culture and humanity can be solved by my engineering work...
The problem is that people take on debt. With debt you also get the financial shackles to get something out of your degree. You can argue that the liberal art degrees provide useful education but I don't think they are worth the price they charge.
The idea that you intentionally pay huge sums for something whose value shouldn't depend on how much it costs is ridiculous and only acceptable if paying those huge sums will also help you pay them back.
Corporate graphic design pays exactly that amount in several Southeastern cities, and that's considered better than average. source: seen the paystubs.
Not for corporate design specifically - some graphic designers specialize in that. However, there are certainly professional bodies for graphic designers.[1]
From the Wikipedia link you provided, graphic design has achieved the first 4 milestones of being a profession:
"an occupation becomes a full-time occupation, the establishment of a training school, the establishment of a university school, the establishment of a local association".
For some reason you went off about 'what are others earning' and '50k for a professional'. You hallucinated an entirely different conversation. The person above actually
talking about lawyers just said:
> many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life.
For someone making an engineering salary, “high five figures” is around a 50% pay cut.
I have friends with no degree at all pulling down $250k in software. I have a lawyer friend with a law degree and 10 years experience in corporate litigation who makes $125k (but has student loans on top of it, so take-home is way less). Given the amount of stress and long hours, I would view it as a poor move for burned out engineers.
I don’t know if the value proposition is there anymore, but when I burned out from engineering I went the MBA / tech executive route and that absolutely has been worth it from a comp standpoint. I work a lot less, I can delegate the tasks I’m not good at, and feel like I have control over my career in a way I never did as an engineer.
Although average wages are around 75k, wages of lawyers are two tiered, the majority settle around ~55k and then prominent lawyers who went to good schools and were groomed to become partners make over triple that [1]. So it is a lot like other professional white collar professions like accounting where there are huge amounts of extremely overworked people in entry level jobs who were suckered into the perceived security of the profession and few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries, the only difference is that they have to go through a professional degree and often incur huge amounts of debt just to get there.
I should clarify, there is a pretty large split between big law and an typical career in law. Those that go into top (200) firms are starting as associates at ~190k [1] with partners making ~1mm [2] with a long tail end. However most others will follow a career trajectory starting around 60k [3], maybe less if they are public attorneys, moving towards ~150k [4] if they make partner in a smaller firm. Prospective lawyers are sold the big law dream but outside of that the career trajectory is a lot less enticing considering the upfront costs.
Starting salary for partners is around 300k at a big four. That's true for FAANG starting salaries, too.
The only difference is it takes 15 years to make partner at a big four, whereas (especially with college-age side hustle experience) you can start with a few years of experience.
Oh, the other difference is you can spend a few hundred thousand to buy-in as a partner, as opposed to a 100k signing bonus at a faang.
The fact senior partners make millions doesn't change the fact about starting salaries. At that point you're comparing a 25yo to a 45yo.
Starting for partners is $300k at a big four but that does not include equity grants or profit sharing. It also rapidly climbs from $300k, especially if you can make it past the first 3 years. A senior partner with 10+ years as a partner can pull down $20M+ a year easily and would be a candidate for C-suite jobs basically anywhere if they decided to leave.
But making it into the partnership is more about playing politics than being good, so it’s definitely not for everyone.
How do these firms make so much money to pay these eye popping amounts?!
Are these the firms that do lawsuits against companies on behalf of a wronged client, client gets peanuts and “lawyer” fees eat up the sizable chunk of amount awarded in $xx,000,000+ cases?
- People make the most in Big 4 law/tech firms, as well as a handful of boutique firms.
- Most people work elsewhere, making a respectable living but nothing extraordinary like the baove.
- Last but not least, there are folks working as IT/paralegal, who did not manage to break into developer/lawyer.
This last one is very brutal for law careers, if you did not manage to qualify or pass the bar the year you were supposed to, you've lost your chance for life, whereas in technology a formal engineering degree is not a hard requirement.
Tri modal in US (public sector and nontech companies, tech startups and midsize tech companies, big tech), except that any of the US citizen programmers can switch between any of the tiers
People are pushing harder to make programming more inclusive simply because it is lucrative (aside from more accurately addressing societal needs if it was more inclusive), but it already has some realities that are way more open than other lucrative professions
Yeah, you have this stereotype that you have partners at white shoe law firms who all went to Harvard or Yale and all the other lawyers doing real estate closings from an office in a strip mall.
In practice, there are plenty of lawyers who are in-house counsels for large companies, own successful law practices in smaller cities and large towns, etc. who make decent money often in moderate cost of living areas.
This is old data, and not really conclusive, but it indicated that things were heading that way in 2016. I don't know of anything that would have changed that trend, FAANGs are even more of an outlier now I'd guess.
My father was a lawyer and genuinely enjoyed his career. He did fit into that “elite lawyer” category. In retirement now, he has been approached several times to return (for obscene money) and its always a firm no from him. He doesn’t want the headache. He loved the networking and people-relationships of lawyering but the actual work was tedious and exhausting even with an army of supporting staff and associates around him.
I have a sibling that is a lawyer and they want nothing to do with being a firm slave on the partner-track grind. They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization. I know many of there friends from law school tho are not in great positions several years after graduation…
I have a bunch of other friends that went to law school with various levels of success. It does seem to mint a respectable amount of middle-class jobs but none of them are getting rich doing it.
> They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization.
This has been my personal experience with most lawyers, and they all seem pretty regular, not working crazy 16 hour days for weeks leading up to a trial, etc.
We say software is eating the world, but the law only ever gets more complex, not simpler, with more regulations being introduced on a seemingly monthly basis. The law and GRC is eating the world, so I only see the demand for these roles increasing.
I own a corner lot around the corner from the studio, and we were going through a really rough winter in Canada. So much so that I was worried about somebody slipping on my sidewalk, even though I was doing my best to keep it safely walkable.
(It was so cold out, and we were getting pelted with so much snow for days that the salt was literally not melting anything.)
After talking calmly about the yoga class we just took, and learning that he was a lawyer, I decided to ask him what might happen if somebody slipped and hurt themselves on my sidewalk.
Seemed somewhat trivial to non-lawyer me, as the city I live in tries to do their best to clean the sidewalk of snow, and so do I.
The city actually owns the sidewalk. And I was curious who would be at fault.
His demeanor totally flipped. He started ranting about how he would sue the city, and sue the homeowner, just to cover all of his bases for the plaintiff.
His blood pressure skyrocketed, and I was only able to escape after listening to 15 minutes of his insanely over the top ranting.
Thank goodness we never crossed paths again!
What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time.
(Usually when you slip and fall on ice in Canada, you just shrug it off and keep walking. There's ice everywhere in the winter. It's Canada.)
> What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time.
You asked him to think about it. Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, so I’m glad he knew how to advocate for his clients.
And this is why I hate law and politics. Rather than about learning and prevention of accidents it's about how much revenge you can get out of the intentionally vague text called law.
Just think about it. According to your logic the world would be better if 5 people slip on the sidewalk and the owner of the sidewalk burns in hell.
I asked him a simple question, not to rant for 15 minutes straight.
He got extremely worked up over a simple question is the point I was trying to make.
>Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo,
Which is easily prevented in a number of ways in the middle of a Canadian winter.
Like preparing for a coming storm by buying what you need to survive it beforehand, or wearing ice grips on your shoes if you insist on venturing out into what is sure to be a slippy-step every 10 feet or so.
Further reading about slips and falling on ice in Canada if you're interested [0]
My girlfriend was a lawyer for a few years. Shortly after we met she went to a bootcamp for coding, immediately got a new job, and now (a couple years later) makes something like 4x what she did as a lawyer. Of course she was doing contract work for a small local firm, but that was the best job she could find in the job market as it was.
I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding.
Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me.
So transitioning from law to coding is maybe "just" learning some programming language and technical details, but the mind is already somewhat prepared to the thinking?
I was a lawyer for 15 years or so. Before law, I was a PHP programmer and a C/lisp dabbler. After law, I have been a university researcher doing tons of JS and Python for building experiments and running complex computational modeling analyses. However, I was a philosophy major who focused on logic, which is also a precursor to both law and coding, so it's hard to know what influenced what. Anyway, I would say that they can certainly be quite compatible, if ...
If you are a certain type of lawyer, then law and coding are a natural fit. There are several different types of lawyers. Some like the code aspect of law (literally, the legal code), some like the more social aspects of lawyering -- like negotiating deals and trying to bullshit the answer when you are about to lose your case and networking and just all around helping people out.
My wife is a lawyer. My brother was a lawyer. My wife's brother is a lawyer. Of those three, my brother would not have been a very good programmer, and my wife's brother would rather launch himself into the sun. My wife would be good at it (and she is; I have taught her a little to work on our own family web project), but she is also a good mathematician and good scientist, so it's hard to say how much of it might be from legal training.
The impression I've gotten from talking with her is that law is like the worst codebase you could possibly imagine, running on a machine that doesn't even execute it consistently, where every ambiguity (which abound) is resolved via interpersonal conflict. It sounds like my worst nightmare, personally. She didn't like it either which is part of why she got out.
It's also a ton of rote memorization, which luckily isn't very important for programming because I'm terrible at it.
Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant rate those who couldn't ended up failing at a significant rate.
The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc.
The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.
>Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me.
I think there is another benefit - in that if you have some legal background (not much needed, some business law courses and basic familiarity) then when you are looking at code that you can't figure out why did they do this and think I will improve it! Sometimes the reason they did things in a weird way is because of regulatory requirements and you might be better able to notice those situations.
Also when you are planning features you might be able to determine this needs to be ran past legal more than other developers (at least I've had this experience a few times)
>I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding
Could work in reverse too. I met the author Ken Liu at a convention, and he mentioned he started out as a software engineer, and then went to law school. And then began writing on the side as well.
Being mathematically inclined and having worked in software for a decade+ I'm also very good at understanding the complex laws and nuances for international travel in the age of COVID. I'm about to visit 3 countries and from my own research I feel like I'm the world's expert on the congressional bills and executive orders of these countries now (I'm only somewhat kidding)
By the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math, comp sci and minoring in music)
Modern software stacks are tall enough that the ability to find answers is a key skill.
My favorite interview question is to take something the interviewee doesn't know, toss a laptop in front of them, and ask them to see if they can find an answer. You learn a lot about a person from the way they search.
"I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math and comp sci and minoring in music)" ... if you're majoring in math... you're not a liberal arts grad.
I personally minored in music composition (with a masters in CS) but I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal arts grad.
I went to a liberal arts college - I don't think most people on HN are familiar with US liberal arts colleges. I have a B.A. degree because no B.Sc. was offered. Lots of requirements for courses outside one discipline or major field of studies - much more so than at non-liberal arts college. Generally liberal arts colleges only offer undergraduate degrees. They also generally do not have research faculty - teaching is the core emphasis.
And the entire ethos of my school was about internationalism and utopian thinking, certainly not about doing real world practical things or even making money.
So liberal arts graduate is still accurate for me.
Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.
It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.
I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.
Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.
> and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts
it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.
I used to work as an attorney, quit to join a coding boot camp, transitioned to web development, and now I'm employed as a software engineer.
When I was a lawyer, I bounced around a few different jobs--mostly in litigation. I started off as a public defender before moving on to private criminal defense, then doing some work as a legislative researcher, and finally ending my career in plaintiffs' civil rights litigation. That might all sound fun and exciting, but, frankly, the work is just plain boring. You interview your client, listen to their story, read some reports, filter out relevant evidence, do some legal research to support your arguments, read and write some briefs, cut a deal with opposing counsel, sit around waiting in court, suck up to some power-tripping judge, get a thankless goodbye from your client, rinse, wipe, repeat. Throw in a jury trial here and there and now you're having some fun, but get ready to basically be a used car salesman, because you've got to sell your client's story whether you believe it or not. Depending on the facts of your case (as known to you) and the strength of your conscience, that can be a tough and soul-sucking task. And if you stick with government work, you probably won't be making six figures until you're very high up the totem pole (10+ years into your career).
After about 6-7 years of it, I realized that I could separate most of the older lawyers into two groups: true believers and functional burnouts. The true believers are really gung-ho about what they do because they really do think their job is the most important job in the world, and they really shine. Those are the lawyers you want to hire. But the majority of them are just going through the motions and are too afraid to try something else because they've invested so much time and effort into their careers, they've got kids and a mortgage, they've got golden handcuffs, and "being a lawyer" is simply what defines their identity. I might have started off as a true believer, but over time, I started seeing a lot more gray in the work I did--to the point where it was a daily struggle to deal with the cognitive dissonance. You're on the fast-track to burnout at that point, so I figured it was a good time to bounce. I had always been a lot more technically adept than most lawyers (some can be borderline luddites, probably because technology represents a threat to their billable hours), so the transition to tech was a smooth and enjoyable one. I don't regret the decision.
Could I get burned out in tech, too? Sure, but it suits my overall disposition better, so I think there's a little more room to push myself before that happens. I'd rather fight with computers than people, so I feel pretty safe (until I wind up in management). Really just depends on what your personal values are. I wouldn't necessarily discourage someone from becoming a lawyer, but you might want to make sure you have a damn good reason for wanting it. If you're a committed ideologue, there's opportunity there in litigation. If you just want to be a glorified service industry professional having people fill out the right forms, there's opportunity in transactional work. But... eh, you're going to be doing a lot of babysitting either way, and it's not a particularly "creative" line of work. Whatever you do, don't take on an insane amount of debt. I went to a state school and got a lot of grant money, so I basically went to law school for the same cost as a brand new Camaro. If I took on a 6-figure debt load, I'd be up shit creek today.
This resonates with me. I also changed careers from law to tech. I went to law school because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and got a full scholarship at a state school, so it was really the easy path. Looking back, I'd say at least 50% of my law school class went to law school because of similar career uncertainty. I imagine many of them are in the stereotypical: trapped in a middling legal career with a pile of debt following them around. There were a tiny minority who were truly passionate about law.
Fortunately, I found time during law school to get into software and robotics and transitioned into a tech career within about 18 months after graduation. My short legal career as a corporate M&A attorney was more than enough to convince me to take a risk and try something new. I never did any litigation work, but corporate legal work involves plenty of going through the motions - often late at night or on weekends to meeting some arbitrary timing imposed by a client. I was extremely fortunate to have a supportive partner, no kids, etc., so making a somewhat radical career move didn't involve all that much risk.
I have a few other friends who also moved from law to software and have done quite well. It could be selection bias, but I do think some of the discipline and diligence required to do well in law school translated nicely into coding and related technical disciplines.
This is probably the best summary I've come across, particularly the true believers vs functional burnouts bit.
The only thing I'd add is that many (most?) lawyers are not only fundamentally uncreative and arrogant, but also weirdly insecure. They pick fights with each other over meaningless minutiae, simply in the pursuit of "winning". This not only means they're a massive pain in the ass to deal with, and it's also where a lot of the unnecessary expense comes from.
Thank you so much for sharing. I quit after 1L because Covid hit and I really didn't think zoom law school was worth the $$. That and I fantasized about murdering my legal writing professor before and after every assignment...
But you hit the nail on the head with attorneys either being true believers or functional burnouts. I look back on all the attorneys that I've met before and during law school and I can only think of about two who were true believers. The dozen or so others just seemed miserable at the end of the day. Considering I was much too cynical to be a truly passionate attorney I knew immediately which one I'd end up.
Now I work in IT and I like it a lot. Similar values to law oddly enough - constant education, strategic problem solving, helping your client achieve certain goals, etc.
I come from a very similar background (practiced law for four years, now in my 10th year in software) and this is a very well expressed framing that tracks my own observations. Personally, when I realized that was not a "true believer" and would be competing with those happy few who were, it strengthened my resolve to move on.
- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
Yes, but it must be like what IT has become to some extent. Many people go into it because it's a (seemingly) high paying job with lots of jobs available, but they aren't passionate about it. Then get disillusioned about it. So you have a high rate of dissatisfaction amongst professionals in the field. Personal experience you can go from 50k/yr to 250k/yr and still be depressed if you're not excited about what you are doing.
Wife's divorce lawyer.. Guy has a small office in small town. Has one paralegal working w him. Charges his $250/hr. Not much stress. If he works around full-time per week, pays his paralegal and small office - he's doing pretty good by most salary standards.
I used to be a Lawyer and transitioned to IT, though my Law experience is not in the US.
I agree that there is a big misconception about lawyers and wages in most places. In Brazil, where I started, some lawyers really do make a lot of money but the vast majority of them earn barely above the minimum wage (doesn't help that Brazil has more Law Schools than most places due to bad higher education policies).
One of the reasons I left Law was because I burnt out. In my case, the main reason was mostly a mismatch of personalities. In Law, specially Corporate Law that I practiced, you just need to be ready and on point for a fight at any given time. Be it in a contract negotiation, a government inspection that is not totally according to terms or sometimes even fighting your own client that really wants you to say it is ok to do something that clearly is not and he is going to regret it. I just didn't have the personality to do that day in, day out.
I haven't experienced burning out in Tech yet, but I imagine it would be completely different. In my case, even in stressful times I enjoy that most of the day to day is just me, trying to solve problems by myself.
So, to address your question of "do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law?", I'd say:
If you have the type of personality that gets energized by being and interacting with people, even in a combative manner, "burning out in Law" is probably more adequate since you can can still take a break and come back.
If, on the other hand, too many people interaction and specially contentious interactions drains your energy, "burning out in Tech" with computers is probably better.
When I try to summarize my case, I usually say:
If as a kid you would enjoy more being in a debates club, you will like being a Laywer. If, on the other hand, a robotics club seems more enticing, then tech is more likely.
In the end, burning out is burning out, in any profession. The question is more: can you go back to being energized after taking a break? And that has more to do if you what you do aligns with who you are.
If you can get into a top school (all of the top-3 for sure, and probably some other top-10 as well), they have loan forgiveness programs for graduates who work in public interest law. Caveat: if you're married to a spouse who earns decent money, you might find yourself disqualified on the basis of his/her income.
This doesn't solve the problem about being overworked, but at least it makes being a PD more financially viable.
A few caveats to this, in addition to the spouse problem:
1) You are shackled to this for ten years. Dropping out early isn't just bad - it's a financial catastrophe.
2) It's based on qualified payments, not "time served" or the like, and there's lots of things that can disrupt those. Plan to fight with your loan servicer.
3) Republican administrations tend to do a will they/won't they thing with approving the actual loan forgiveness.
I wasn't referring to the governmental assistance programs (which have these risks/limitations), but rather the programs run by the elite law schools themselves. They will actually pay a portion of your loan payments if you work in a qualified job.
I don't know which schools currently offer this, but 15 years ago (when I was dating a HLS grad), they operated this way. I would guess that HYS and probably a handful of other top-10 schools would be able to afford a direct-payment program like this.
Most of the law students that go to HYS law schools are already wealthy, so the benefits are going to the wrong people. Furthermore, these graduates are mostly hired at elite law firms making huge salaries and are unlikely to take advantage of these programs. Easy to offer a generous program to people that don’t need it.
> something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
I can't find the citation now, but I remember reading recently that children of programmers are 6x more likely to become programmers than other children, but children of lawyers are 13x more likely to become lawyers (and children of doctors 25x more likely to become doctors).
>For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.
Since you knew what you didn't want to do, I feel you've made a right decision for yourself.
Not being aligned with the values of the work can indeed result in burnouts, Many can compartmentalize, Many can stay absolutely agnostic to the impact of their work on the society at large and yes they can make lot of money but then again you can't put a price upon doing what you really want to do.
The trouble in law is to get qualified (in the UK). If you can't finish the 5 years of study or you can't find an internship at the end (extremely competitive), you've wasted your entire time and money and you will never be able to give legal advice and charge £500 an hour.
But after that it's a walk in the park.
The competitiveness of lawyer and developer jobs is really not comparable. All companies have a legal department and hire lawyers, internal lawyer is a good office job with a decent pay but nothing extraordinary.
There's no comparable career path for developers because only tech companies hire developers, the comparison is unemployment if you couldn't make it to a tech company.
That is completely wrong? The FAR majority of developers do not work in tech companies. Most big corporations have internal developer teams, or they employ some contractors that do development for them. But MOST big companies employ developers in basicly all industries.
Seconding this—every company has to have accountants, lawyers, and software developers. Sometimes they contract it out to external firms, sometimes they hire directly, and once they get to a certain size they almost always do both.
Not sure that's really 100% true, although it may have more to do with a company considering themselves a tech company or not. Companies do hire programmers/devs/tech folks, but may look on them more as a cost-center than a revenue generation opportunity.
"I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York law firm, but it turned out to be a very strange place. From the outside, everybody wanted to get in, and from the inside, everybody wanted to get out."
— Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, on his “seven months, and three days” as a Sullivan & Cromwell associate, during his commencement address at Hamilton College on May 22, 2016.
My mother's a secretary at a law firm. Growing up it sounded like lawyers spent a lot of time on planes away from family. My parents had plenty (father works in furniture repair), so it was pretty clear to me that with a bit of budgeting you don't need a lot of money for a good life
>For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer
When it comes down to it, doesn't that describe the majority of well paying jobs?
(I say that as someone who bailed on my well paying tech career to work in the non-profit space for that very reason)
- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers
- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]
For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.
This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.
I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.
[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106