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!)
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
- 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.
> 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.
"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)
Summary: entry-level jobs dried up, so people are going to law school instead. Also political motivations.
Editorial: More lawyers make the country more complicated and less competitive. We need more and better people going into industrial and medical skilled trades. Think CAD/CAM, not plumber. On the other hand, I think basic legal education would probably have been more relevant than almost anything I’ve ever learned in a classroom, and law school might have been worth it just for my own purposes. Minus the political activism of course, which I guess is center stage now.
Where I live plumbers make more than an average software engineer.
Owner operator plumbers make close to half a million a year. And don’t get me started on Plumbers operating a min of 5 trucks they make atleast a million and half. I know this because my brother law is a plumber.
Man, so many people are going to be in for a world of hurt:
1. The increased applications and class sizes means there will be more competition for a smaller number of jobs when these folks graduate (tech is automating away a lot of legal work, too).
2. As others have commented, a huge percentage of lawyers regret going to law school. This is actually in direct contrast to many other professional degrees, e.g. MBAs score very high on the "I'd still do it again" question.
3. The regret sentiment is especially high among anything outside of a top 50 program.
When I was growing up there was this idea that the best of the best became doctors (physicians) and lawyers; and that these were well paid careers. Today that’s broadly no longer the case.
Both professions certainly have a top tier that earns a lot (top firm partner, top specialist surgeon) that does very well but the vast majority in both professions aren’t particularly well paid and also are no longer attracting the “best and brightest” out of graduating classes. Your typical established doctor these days makes what would be considered an early career salary at FAANG—and that’s before considering the crazy amounts of debt that many law and medical students take on. Many lawyers (outside top firms) make very little considering the amount of training required.
A savvy tradesman these days (e.g. Plumber) can easily make more than most lawyers and even many physicians. I’ve cited that a lot when giving career advice to those being pressured into a college degree when it’s probably not the right fit for them.
“Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt.
Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found.”
It’s basically “elite overproduction”. As someone with no dog in this fight I think it’s good in some ways that the amount of law school admissions aren’t being artificially restricted like they are for MD, bad that a lot of these loans are through the government and non-dischargeable, tying down people for a long time with debt and may still end up being forgiven, and interesting that oversupply of lawyers creates a bifurcated market rather than lowering prices across the board.
A lot of these problems probably stem from the government loans - if you’re not a school with a reputation to uphold, there’s pretty much no reason not to admit as many people as you reasonably can and charge them as much as possible. Of course with no loans, a lot of people from poorer backgrounds wouldn’t be able to go to school without some form of charity from universities or private donors which is also pretty bad.
Is U of Miami a target school? Meaning do law firms come to campus in order to recruit? Because that is what matters for law school. If you're paying that kind of tuition, you owe it to yourself to do due diligence on how its graduates perform.
Back in the day you only had the school's published stats to go on. Those are gently manipulated to show the best possible outcome, e.g. "95% of students found employment within 6 months of graduation".
Today you have LinkedIn. Type in a search for U Miami and do a quick count of how many recent grads come up, and where they're working.
It's not surprising that LSAT scores are higher due to the additional time to prep and the ability to control the testing environment. And in reality, it doesn't matter that much. Schools will sort students just like they always have, and students will end up roughly where they otherwise would have. The whole application process is on a curve.
It's also worth noting that over the last decade, it's been increasingly easy to get into prestigious law schools. Students got wise to the fact that law school costs a ton and many students don't get high-paying jobs. As a result, applications went down and lower-scoring students got into better schools. In some ways, this most recent stat may be mostly a reversion to the prior mean.
How much does the LSAT saturate though? The SAT, particularly the math section, is already very saturated at the top percentiles, which make up almost the entire application pool to the elite schools. That's why those schools basically just use the SAT as a quick screener now, if they use it at all. Raising scores even more would further diminish its utility and could increase the impact of a silly mistake.
Many comments here assume that going to law school == becoming a lawyer. This is not always true. Many go to law school since it a degree that you can use in many other business fields even without practicing law.
> Experts attribute the crush of applications to a number of factors, particularly the slowdown in the entry-level job market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Law school and other graduate programs historically become more popular when jobs are tougher to come by in slow economies. Law school applicants shot up nearly 18% in 2002, amid the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble. The number of people applying also climbed nearly 4% in 2009, amid the Great Recession.
> But current events separate from the economy also prompted more people to consider a law degree this cycle, said Susan Krinsky, the council’s executive vice president for operations. The death of George Floyd, the national reckoning over systemic racism and inequality, and the death of iconic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all focused attention on the rule of law and the role lawyers play in pushing for a more equitable society. Election years also tend to yield more law school applicants, she noted.
I see the increase in people wanting to become lawyers as a negative signal about society. It suggests to me that the law is becoming too complex, that people litigate too much, and this complexity and propensity to litigate becomes a cost.
It’s not an entirely thought out hunch on my end but I think it ties in with how complex the tax code is. To me the tax code is needlessly complex. Sure it’ll likely never fit on a single page but does it need to require tombs and be so complex that smart individuals spend time and brain cells finding ways around it to save corporations and the wealthy money instead of working on science or something else that would benefit society?
Honestly if you look at the direction the US is going, federal politicians are getting wealthier and wealthier while the middle class erodes into a larger and larger dependent lower class.
Most of our congressman are lawyers.
You have about two paths to wealth in America. Start a tech company hope to get bought big tech, become a lawyer hope to become a high up well connected politician. Because those connections are proving to pay off.
Are CS applications surging too? What about other fields? It seems like more people are applying to college in general.
Both my current and previous university, year after year keep having record numbers of applicants. And IIRC the CS program is getting more and more competitive.
At this point I assume every young, college aged male I speak with is majoring in software. I'm right more often than wrong. That doesn't account for changing majors, etc, and I'm certainly biased.
I was in law school for 2 semesters. I got a job at a top m&a and societary office, in one of the highest profile avenues in the tropical capital I lived in, as an intern. It was summer, lunchtime, and I was walking on said avenue when my boss crossed me. He stopped and all of a sudden reached for my tie knot, to check if the button behind it was correctly buttoned (is this the right word?). He proceeded to tell me I was an employee of his high-tier office even during lunchtime and I should always keep appearances. Luckily I'm deeply anti-violence, because my first instinct when he touched my tie was to smash his face. I didn't return to the office, and soon after that I quit law school. By that time my tactics to circumvent the office proxy and access forbidden websites had gone viral :P.
My brother just did a joint JD/MBA, he said it was one of the hardest things he's ever done. I think it was a pretty smart move to hedge the JD though, due to many of the anecdotes in this thread.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|4 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
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!)
[+] [-] ayngg|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...
[+] [-] voidfunc|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] johnnyApplePRNG|4 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] brundolf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dolebirchwood|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dpweb|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hugocbp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gnicholas|4 years ago|reply
This doesn't solve the problem about being overworked, but at least it makes being a PD more financially viable.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] user5994461|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] benatkin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hncurious|4 years ago|reply
— 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.
[+] [-] __s|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wintermutestwin|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl2718|4 years ago|reply
Editorial: More lawyers make the country more complicated and less competitive. We need more and better people going into industrial and medical skilled trades. Think CAD/CAM, not plumber. On the other hand, I think basic legal education would probably have been more relevant than almost anything I’ve ever learned in a classroom, and law school might have been worth it just for my own purposes. Minus the political activism of course, which I guess is center stage now.
[+] [-] otterley|4 years ago|reply
Have you tried to hire a skilled plumber, landscaper, carpenter, or mason in a major city lately? There's a massive tradesperson shortage.
[+] [-] BeFlatXIII|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bississippi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
1. The increased applications and class sizes means there will be more competition for a smaller number of jobs when these folks graduate (tech is automating away a lot of legal work, too).
2. As others have commented, a huge percentage of lawyers regret going to law school. This is actually in direct contrast to many other professional degrees, e.g. MBAs score very high on the "I'd still do it again" question.
3. The regret sentiment is especially high among anything outside of a top 50 program.
[+] [-] JCM9|4 years ago|reply
Both professions certainly have a top tier that earns a lot (top firm partner, top specialist surgeon) that does very well but the vast majority in both professions aren’t particularly well paid and also are no longer attracting the “best and brightest” out of graduating classes. Your typical established doctor these days makes what would be considered an early career salary at FAANG—and that’s before considering the crazy amounts of debt that many law and medical students take on. Many lawyers (outside top firms) make very little considering the amount of training required.
A savvy tradesman these days (e.g. Plumber) can easily make more than most lawyers and even many physicians. I’ve cited that a lot when giving career advice to those being pressured into a college degree when it’s probably not the right fit for them.
[+] [-] readonthegoapp|4 years ago|reply
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Law School Loses Luster as Debts Mount and Salaries Stagnate"
The Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...
https://archive.is/3hGsA
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
“Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt.
Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...
[+] [-] opportune|4 years ago|reply
A lot of these problems probably stem from the government loans - if you’re not a school with a reputation to uphold, there’s pretty much no reason not to admit as many people as you reasonably can and charge them as much as possible. Of course with no loans, a lot of people from poorer backgrounds wouldn’t be able to go to school without some form of charity from universities or private donors which is also pretty bad.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
Back in the day you only had the school's published stats to go on. Those are gently manipulated to show the best possible outcome, e.g. "95% of students found employment within 6 months of graduation".
Today you have LinkedIn. Type in a search for U Miami and do a quick count of how many recent grads come up, and where they're working.
[+] [-] gnicholas|4 years ago|reply
It's also worth noting that over the last decade, it's been increasingly easy to get into prestigious law schools. Students got wise to the fact that law school costs a ton and many students don't get high-paying jobs. As a result, applications went down and lower-scoring students got into better schools. In some ways, this most recent stat may be mostly a reversion to the prior mean.
[+] [-] caddemon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rshlo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arn|4 years ago|reply
https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/preparing-medica...
[+] [-] vwoolf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
> Experts attribute the crush of applications to a number of factors, particularly the slowdown in the entry-level job market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Law school and other graduate programs historically become more popular when jobs are tougher to come by in slow economies. Law school applicants shot up nearly 18% in 2002, amid the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble. The number of people applying also climbed nearly 4% in 2009, amid the Great Recession.
> But current events separate from the economy also prompted more people to consider a law degree this cycle, said Susan Krinsky, the council’s executive vice president for operations. The death of George Floyd, the national reckoning over systemic racism and inequality, and the death of iconic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all focused attention on the rule of law and the role lawyers play in pushing for a more equitable society. Election years also tend to yield more law school applicants, she noted.
[+] [-] aaron695|4 years ago|reply
https://report.lsac.org/View.aspx?Report=AdmissionTrendsAppl...
https://report.lsac.org/VolumeSummary.aspx
[+] [-] gigatexal|4 years ago|reply
It’s not an entirely thought out hunch on my end but I think it ties in with how complex the tax code is. To me the tax code is needlessly complex. Sure it’ll likely never fit on a single page but does it need to require tombs and be so complex that smart individuals spend time and brain cells finding ways around it to save corporations and the wealthy money instead of working on science or something else that would benefit society?
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-tax-si...
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doggodaddo78|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GaryTang|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] armchairhacker|4 years ago|reply
Both my current and previous university, year after year keep having record numbers of applicants. And IIRC the CS program is getting more and more competitive.
I'm not sure about liberal-arts though.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gverrilla|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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