Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting thread.

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.

You can probably reduce it multiple ways. But ultimately, it's a different culture with different norms;)

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.

> Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority. Competitive, yet prestige based career starts.

> The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward

If he's still a "senior programmer" at 44 and not Staff level engineer, it's indeed a rough path ahead.

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