Agreed: they are deploying tremendous skill, but not necessarily with the same level of academic achievement and formal traineeship. I say this as someone who h

Agreed: they are deploying tremendous skill, but not necessarily with the same level of academic achievement and formal traineeship. I say this as someone who has qualified and worked as a lawyer and subsequently cross-trained into and now works as a software developer. I suggest that you can be an accomplished hacker by the time you're 16 without any kind of formal qualification, but you can't be a lawyer (in the UK at least) until you've done yourself the unimaginable harm of forcing yourself to read legal dicta from hundreds of years ago. Part of you dies during legal training. I don't know much about NY first-year associates, but imagine they fall into the "rockstar" graduate category; perhaps a better salary comparison would be with rockstar (first-year) developers at a Silicon Valley giant?