Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks.

While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week.

There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.

It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.

As pre-med isn't an undergrad degree in the states, we'd probably find pre-meds with engineering undergrad degrees outscore other majors on the MCAT. The engineering grad is also a bonus for admission (given way too many chem/biology applicants). Not that this happens very often, however.

The GRE verbal is a great predictor of success in CS grad school and any kind of science grad school because it's so heavily g-loaded. Verbal scores are very hard to game and correlate well with raw IQ even when people try to study for the test and artificially improve scores. Antonyms, vocabulary, and reading comprehension are very good measures of the same mental ability that deep cutting edge research requires.

Of course, that doesn't work for non-fluent English speakers.

There are samples from both sections here for comparison: http://www.lsac.org/jd/lsat/about-the-lsat/

I too found analytic reasoning delightful, both during practice tests and during the actual test. One thing about the actual test that kicked it up a notch over practice tests (aside from the pressure of it being for real) was that you could not bring scratch paper to the real test. There was a fair bit of empty space in the test booklet so you had room for truth tables, graphs, and such, but if you botched one and had to start over you might find scratch space tight.

I aced analytic reasoning. Shortly after the test, I saw a magazine at the supermarket full of those kinds of problems. The shelf position and the ads in the magazine indicated it was aimed at older women. I bought it, because I enjoyed that part of the test so much, but didn't have much hope because I aced that part of the LSAT! How are puzzles for Grannies going to be a challenge? So I tried a level 3 difficulty puzzle (range was 1 to 5 with 5 the hardest).

It DESTROYED me. I could do level 1 reasonably, and level 2 with a lot of effort.

I vowed that if I did become a lawyer, I would not take cases that would pit me against old ladies. (I did not become a lawyer. I decided near the end of law school that I would rather be a programmer who knew a lot about law than a lawyer who knew a lot about programming. My policy of not going against old ladies in battles of wits remains in force).

And you have potential interactions with anyone within a given jurisdiction, the same one over which the infrastructure exists. Sure, you don't interact with them all, but you interact with a fraction of them, so the scaling properties are the same.

Moreover, I disagree with the common analogy made in circles like HN that laws resemble code. Perhaps in some esoteric probabilistic language they might, though I don't believe thinking such as "ML will fix this" will yield a proper correspondence.

I still would not believe China pays software engineers more than the US, even at a leadership position, without some stats. China as much as India has vast lower "engineering" cast based on price.

I have not yet heard of people from Argentina returning to glory after working outside, it is expected to take a dent in income, even though argentina is much richer than China/India for these purposes.

And Switzerland and Israel are very small countries, where the engineering sample is probably very low and so are th work opportunities.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.as...

The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.

There is a substantial danger in being pigeonholed and eliminated because of some weekend hobby project three years ago "Oh we can't hire that guy, he does low level hardware driver work on microcontroller RFID devices and we need a DBA" Outside SV and NYC there is no shortage of coders and you'll get rejected for nothing.

I'm not really concerned about whatever supposed "hidden biases" there are in open source, the simple fact is that the best way to judge someone's work is to see it.

If you're concerned about hidden biases I would direct you to the status quo brainteasers used today, where the interviewer simply has a blank slate to project whatever personal biases they have onto the candidate in a highly subjective, highly unrealistic situation that has nothing to do with actual programming.