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In the legal profession, you start off as a grunt, but with gray hair comes more competence, respect and money. Tech is definitely a better choice for the first
by speedplane 9y ago
In the legal profession, you start off as a grunt, but with gray hair comes more competence, respect and money. Tech is definitely a better choice for the first 5 years in career, but I'm not sure long term.
- ryandrake 9y agoTech has a notorious compensation plateau after about 5-10 years, particularly for individual contributors. Much more so than law, business, etc. Unless you’re ok with yearly raises that don’t even track cost of living, you’re probably needing to move into management or something after 10 years. It is not a field for “ladder climbers” or anyone who wants a fairly linear progression throughout their career.
- speedplane 9y agoCompensation is important, but not the only factor. The fact that older developers are viewed as obsolete but older attorneys are viewed as an asset makes a different too. Commanding respect and admiration over time is an intangible that tech lacks relative to other professions.
- ryandrake 9y agoTotally agree--I think the compensation problem is a direct consequence of the "respect and admiration" problem.
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoA lot is connected to the massive amount of churn in the tech industry. And I don't mean the infamous "JS churn". I mean that just twenty years ago, multicore computers were a rarity outside niche players, and twenty five years ago optimizing compilers were horrible at their job. So skills useful then (C + asm) are much less useful now. On the other hand, law 25 years ago is fairly similar to law now.