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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 - th

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106

brundolf 5y ago
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.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding. Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me. So transitioning from law to coding is maybe "just" learning some programming language and technical details, but the mind is already somewhat prepared to the thinking?
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    You might say playing Minesweeper prepares you for law. Or vice versa. Or coding prepares you for law. It’s omnidirectional.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Sure, I did not study law, but I think I have a way easier time decoding laws and contracts, than my liberal arts peers.
      - verst 5y ago
        Being mathematically inclined and having worked in software for a decade+ I'm also very good at understanding the complex laws and nuances for international travel in the age of COVID. I'm about to visit 3 countries and from my own research I feel like I'm the world's expert on the congressional bills and executive orders of these countries now (I'm only somewhat kidding) By the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math, comp sci and minoring in music)
        ethbr0 5y ago
        Modern software stacks are tall enough that the ability to find answers is a key skill. My favorite interview question is to take something the interviewee doesn't know, toss a laptop in front of them, and ask them to see if they can find an answer. You learn a lot about a person from the way they search.
        throwaway675309 5y ago
        "I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math and comp sci and minoring in music)" ... if you're majoring in math... you're not a liberal arts grad. I personally minored in music composition (with a masters in CS) but I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal arts grad.
        verst 5y ago
        I went to a liberal arts college - I don't think most people on HN are familiar with US liberal arts colleges. I have a B.A. degree because no B.Sc. was offered. Lots of requirements for courses outside one discipline or major field of studies - much more so than at non-liberal arts college. Generally liberal arts colleges only offer undergraduate degrees. They also generally do not have research faculty - teaching is the core emphasis. And the entire ethos of my school was about internationalism and utopian thinking, certainly not about doing real world practical things or even making money. So liberal arts graduate is still accurate for me.
  - jelling 5y ago
    Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.
      - lowercased 5y ago
        > and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.
      - sumtechguy 5y ago
        I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I've taught code-lite tools to a bunch of repurposed analysts, and your idea tracks with my experience too. Students that had an analytical perspective (e.g. from supply chain debugging) typically excelled. Students from more fuzzy, language-based perspectives (e.g. marketing) had a lot more difficulty.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant rate those who couldn't ended up failing at a significant rate. The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc. The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.
      - robinhouston 5y ago
        Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi? It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0] 0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        hmm, ok. I think I might have heard that as well one time but I forgot, probably less interesting to me than the first idea. I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either. I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.
      - hpoe 5y ago
        Sounds similar to this blog post by the founder of SO https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me. I think there is another benefit - in that if you have some legal background (not much needed, some business law courses and basic familiarity) then when you are looking at code that you can't figure out why did they do this and think I will improve it! Sometimes the reason they did things in a weird way is because of regulatory requirements and you might be better able to notice those situations. Also when you are planning features you might be able to determine this needs to be ran past legal more than other developers (at least I've had this experience a few times)
  - checkyoursudo 5y ago
    I was a lawyer for 15 years or so. Before law, I was a PHP programmer and a C/lisp dabbler. After law, I have been a university researcher doing tons of JS and Python for building experiments and running complex computational modeling analyses. However, I was a philosophy major who focused on logic, which is also a precursor to both law and coding, so it's hard to know what influenced what. Anyway, I would say that they can certainly be quite compatible, if ... If you are a certain type of lawyer, then law and coding are a natural fit. There are several different types of lawyers. Some like the code aspect of law (literally, the legal code), some like the more social aspects of lawyering -- like negotiating deals and trying to bullshit the answer when you are about to lose your case and networking and just all around helping people out. My wife is a lawyer. My brother was a lawyer. My wife's brother is a lawyer. Of those three, my brother would not have been a very good programmer, and my wife's brother would rather launch himself into the sun. My wife would be good at it (and she is; I have taught her a little to work on our own family web project), but she is also a good mathematician and good scientist, so it's hard to say how much of it might be from legal training.
  - kingaillas 5y ago
    >I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding Could work in reverse too. I met the author Ken Liu at a convention, and he mentioned he started out as a software engineer, and then went to law school. And then began writing on the side as well.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    The impression I've gotten from talking with her is that law is like the worst codebase you could possibly imagine, running on a machine that doesn't even execute it consistently, where every ambiguity (which abound) is resolved via interpersonal conflict. It sounds like my worst nightmare, personally. She didn't like it either which is part of why she got out. It's also a ton of rote memorization, which luckily isn't very important for programming because I'm terrible at it.
benatkin 5y ago
Even playing a lawyer on TV seems rough.
voidfunc 5y ago
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.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  > They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization. This has been my personal experience with most lawyers, and they all seem pretty regular, not working crazy 16 hour days for weeks leading up to a trial, etc. We say software is eating the world, but the law only ever gets more complex, not simpler, with more regulations being introduced on a seemingly monthly basis. The law and GRC is eating the world, so I only see the demand for these roles increasing.
bavila 5y ago
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.
gnicholas 5y ago
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.
- Fomite 5y ago
  A few caveats to this, in addition to the spouse problem: 1) You are shackled to this for ten years. Dropping out early isn't just bad - it's a financial catastrophe. 2) It's based on qualified payments, not "time served" or the like, and there's lots of things that can disrupt those. Plan to fight with your loan servicer. 3) Republican administrations tend to do a will they/won't they thing with approving the actual loan forgiveness.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    I wasn't referring to the governmental assistance programs (which have these risks/limitations), but rather the programs run by the elite law schools themselves. They will actually pay a portion of your loan payments if you work in a qualified job. I don't know which schools currently offer this, but 15 years ago (when I was dating a HLS grad), they operated this way. I would guess that HYS and probably a handful of other top-10 schools would be able to afford a direct-payment program like this.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      Most of the law students that go to HYS law schools are already wealthy, so the benefits are going to the wrong people. Furthermore, these graduates are mostly hired at elite law firms making huge salaries and are unlikely to take advantage of these programs. Easy to offer a generous program to people that don’t need it.
    - Fomite 5y ago
      My spouse went to an elite law school, and their answer was "There's the public service loan forgiveness program. Good luck with that."
ayngg 5y ago
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. [1] https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-curve/ https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...
- zumu 5y ago
  > few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries What entry level FAANG pays partner salary [1]? I need to apply. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sidley-Austin-Partner-Attorney-Salaries-E3375_DAO.htm?filter.jobTitleExact=Partner%20(Attorney) https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sidley-Austin-Partner-Attor...
  - google234123 5y ago
    Starting salaries are 200 to 300k at the best firms. Partners make much more.
    - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
      Well-paid/experienced partners, yes. Starting salary for partners is around 300k at a big four. That's true for FAANG starting salaries, too. The only difference is it takes 15 years to make partner at a big four, whereas (especially with college-age side hustle experience) you can start with a few years of experience. Oh, the other difference is you can spend a few hundred thousand to buy-in as a partner, as opposed to a 100k signing bonus at a faang. The fact senior partners make millions doesn't change the fact about starting salaries. At that point you're comparing a 25yo to a 45yo.
rayiner 5y ago
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!)
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Did you get back to law school and pass the bar after pivoting from a CS career (and a CS diploma) ?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Yes, though my degree was aerospace not CS.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. High five figures is not good money for a professional in the US.
user5994461 5y ago
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.
- lowercased 5y ago
  "only tech companies hire developers". Not sure that's really 100% true, although it may have more to do with a company considering themselves a tech company or not. Companies do hire programmers/devs/tech folks, but may look on them more as a cost-center than a revenue generation opportunity.
- badpun 5y ago
  All large companies hire plenty of developers. I suspect that, in total, there’s way more devs in non-tech than in tech, esp. outside of US.
  - neallindsay 5y ago
    Seconding this—every company has to have accountants, lawyers, and software developers. Sometimes they contract it out to external firms, sometimes they hire directly, and once they get to a certain size they almost always do both.
- the_monocle 5y ago
  > because only tech companies hire developers That is completely wrong? The FAR majority of developers do not work in tech companies. Most big corporations have internal developer teams, or they employ some contractors that do development for them. But MOST big companies employ developers in basicly all industries.
__s 5y ago
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
deleted 5y ago
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giantg2 5y ago
Median lawyer salary is higher than median software dev salary (about $105k v $120k).
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
>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.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>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)
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
I met a lawyer in a yoga studio changeroom once. 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.)
- isoskeles 5y ago
  > What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time. You asked him to think about it. Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, so I’m glad he knew how to advocate for his clients.
  - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    I asked him a simple question, not to rant for 15 minutes straight. He got extremely worked up over a simple question is the point I was trying to make. >Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, Which is easily prevented in a number of ways in the middle of a Canadian winter. Like preparing for a coming storm by buying what you need to survive it beforehand, or wearing ice grips on your shoes if you insist on venturing out into what is sure to be a slippy-step every 10 feet or so. Further reading about slips and falling on ice in Canada if you're interested [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/legal-pointers-on-slips-and-falls-in-edmonton-1.4998784 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/legal-pointers-on-sl...
commandlinefan 5y ago
> 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).
hncurious 5y ago
"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.
dpweb 5y ago
- 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.
hugocbp 5y ago
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.

brundolf 5y ago

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.

hutzlibu 5y ago
I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding. Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me. So transitioning from law to coding is maybe "just" learning some programming language and technical details, but the mind is already somewhat prepared to the thinking?
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  You might say playing Minesweeper prepares you for law. Or vice versa. Or coding prepares you for law. It’s omnidirectional.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Sure, I did not study law, but I think I have a way easier time decoding laws and contracts, than my liberal arts peers.
    - verst 5y ago
      Being mathematically inclined and having worked in software for a decade+ I'm also very good at understanding the complex laws and nuances for international travel in the age of COVID. I'm about to visit 3 countries and from my own research I feel like I'm the world's expert on the congressional bills and executive orders of these countries now (I'm only somewhat kidding) By the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math, comp sci and minoring in music)
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Modern software stacks are tall enough that the ability to find answers is a key skill. My favorite interview question is to take something the interviewee doesn't know, toss a laptop in front of them, and ask them to see if they can find an answer. You learn a lot about a person from the way they search.
      - throwaway675309 5y ago
        "I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math and comp sci and minoring in music)" ... if you're majoring in math... you're not a liberal arts grad. I personally minored in music composition (with a masters in CS) but I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal arts grad.
        verst 5y ago
        I went to a liberal arts college - I don't think most people on HN are familiar with US liberal arts colleges. I have a B.A. degree because no B.Sc. was offered. Lots of requirements for courses outside one discipline or major field of studies - much more so than at non-liberal arts college. Generally liberal arts colleges only offer undergraduate degrees. They also generally do not have research faculty - teaching is the core emphasis. And the entire ethos of my school was about internationalism and utopian thinking, certainly not about doing real world practical things or even making money. So liberal arts graduate is still accurate for me.
- jelling 5y ago
  Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      > and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I've taught code-lite tools to a bunch of repurposed analysts, and your idea tracks with my experience too. Students that had an analytical perspective (e.g. from supply chain debugging) typically excelled. Students from more fuzzy, language-based perspectives (e.g. marketing) had a lot more difficulty.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant rate those who couldn't ended up failing at a significant rate. The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc. The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.
    - robinhouston 5y ago
      Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi? It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0] 0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        hmm, ok. I think I might have heard that as well one time but I forgot, probably less interesting to me than the first idea. I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either. I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.
    - hpoe 5y ago
      Sounds similar to this blog post by the founder of SO https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me. I think there is another benefit - in that if you have some legal background (not much needed, some business law courses and basic familiarity) then when you are looking at code that you can't figure out why did they do this and think I will improve it! Sometimes the reason they did things in a weird way is because of regulatory requirements and you might be better able to notice those situations. Also when you are planning features you might be able to determine this needs to be ran past legal more than other developers (at least I've had this experience a few times)
- checkyoursudo 5y ago
  I was a lawyer for 15 years or so. Before law, I was a PHP programmer and a C/lisp dabbler. After law, I have been a university researcher doing tons of JS and Python for building experiments and running complex computational modeling analyses. However, I was a philosophy major who focused on logic, which is also a precursor to both law and coding, so it's hard to know what influenced what. Anyway, I would say that they can certainly be quite compatible, if ... If you are a certain type of lawyer, then law and coding are a natural fit. There are several different types of lawyers. Some like the code aspect of law (literally, the legal code), some like the more social aspects of lawyering -- like negotiating deals and trying to bullshit the answer when you are about to lose your case and networking and just all around helping people out. My wife is a lawyer. My brother was a lawyer. My wife's brother is a lawyer. Of those three, my brother would not have been a very good programmer, and my wife's brother would rather launch himself into the sun. My wife would be good at it (and she is; I have taught her a little to work on our own family web project), but she is also a good mathematician and good scientist, so it's hard to say how much of it might be from legal training.
- kingaillas 5y ago
  >I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding Could work in reverse too. I met the author Ken Liu at a convention, and he mentioned he started out as a software engineer, and then went to law school. And then began writing on the side as well.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The impression I've gotten from talking with her is that law is like the worst codebase you could possibly imagine, running on a machine that doesn't even execute it consistently, where every ambiguity (which abound) is resolved via interpersonal conflict. It sounds like my worst nightmare, personally. She didn't like it either which is part of why she got out. It's also a ton of rote memorization, which luckily isn't very important for programming because I'm terrible at it.

benatkin 5y ago

Even playing a lawyer on TV seems rough.

voidfunc 5y ago

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.

dimitrios1 5y ago
> They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization. This has been my personal experience with most lawyers, and they all seem pretty regular, not working crazy 16 hour days for weeks leading up to a trial, etc. We say software is eating the world, but the law only ever gets more complex, not simpler, with more regulations being introduced on a seemingly monthly basis. The law and GRC is eating the world, so I only see the demand for these roles increasing.

bavila 5y ago

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.

gnicholas 5y ago

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.

Fomite 5y ago
A few caveats to this, in addition to the spouse problem: 1) You are shackled to this for ten years. Dropping out early isn't just bad - it's a financial catastrophe. 2) It's based on qualified payments, not "time served" or the like, and there's lots of things that can disrupt those. Plan to fight with your loan servicer. 3) Republican administrations tend to do a will they/won't they thing with approving the actual loan forgiveness.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I wasn't referring to the governmental assistance programs (which have these risks/limitations), but rather the programs run by the elite law schools themselves. They will actually pay a portion of your loan payments if you work in a qualified job. I don't know which schools currently offer this, but 15 years ago (when I was dating a HLS grad), they operated this way. I would guess that HYS and probably a handful of other top-10 schools would be able to afford a direct-payment program like this.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    Most of the law students that go to HYS law schools are already wealthy, so the benefits are going to the wrong people. Furthermore, these graduates are mostly hired at elite law firms making huge salaries and are unlikely to take advantage of these programs. Easy to offer a generous program to people that don’t need it.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    My spouse went to an elite law school, and their answer was "There's the public service loan forgiveness program. Good luck with that."

ayngg 5y ago

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. [1] https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-curve/ https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...

zumu 5y ago
> few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries What entry level FAANG pays partner salary [1]? I need to apply. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sidley-Austin-Partner-Attorney-Salaries-E3375_DAO.htm?filter.jobTitleExact=Partner%20(Attorney) https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sidley-Austin-Partner-Attor...
- google234123 5y ago
  Starting salaries are 200 to 300k at the best firms. Partners make much more.
  - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
    Well-paid/experienced partners, yes. Starting salary for partners is around 300k at a big four. That's true for FAANG starting salaries, too. The only difference is it takes 15 years to make partner at a big four, whereas (especially with college-age side hustle experience) you can start with a few years of experience. Oh, the other difference is you can spend a few hundred thousand to buy-in as a partner, as opposed to a 100k signing bonus at a faang. The fact senior partners make millions doesn't change the fact about starting salaries. At that point you're comparing a 25yo to a 45yo.

rayiner 5y ago

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!)

johnchristopher 5y ago
Did you get back to law school and pass the bar after pivoting from a CS career (and a CS diploma) ?
- rayiner 5y ago
  Yes, though my degree was aerospace not CS.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. High five figures is not good money for a professional in the US.

user5994461 5y ago

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.

lowercased 5y ago
"only tech companies hire developers". Not sure that's really 100% true, although it may have more to do with a company considering themselves a tech company or not. Companies do hire programmers/devs/tech folks, but may look on them more as a cost-center than a revenue generation opportunity.
badpun 5y ago
All large companies hire plenty of developers. I suspect that, in total, there’s way more devs in non-tech than in tech, esp. outside of US.
- neallindsay 5y ago
  Seconding this—every company has to have accountants, lawyers, and software developers. Sometimes they contract it out to external firms, sometimes they hire directly, and once they get to a certain size they almost always do both.
the_monocle 5y ago
> because only tech companies hire developers That is completely wrong? The FAR majority of developers do not work in tech companies. Most big corporations have internal developer teams, or they employ some contractors that do development for them. But MOST big companies employ developers in basicly all industries.

__s 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

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giantg2 5y ago

Median lawyer salary is higher than median software dev salary (about $105k v $120k).

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

>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.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>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)

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

I met a lawyer in a yoga studio changeroom once. 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.)

isoskeles 5y ago
> What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time. You asked him to think about it. Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, so I’m glad he knew how to advocate for his clients.
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  I asked him a simple question, not to rant for 15 minutes straight. He got extremely worked up over a simple question is the point I was trying to make. >Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, Which is easily prevented in a number of ways in the middle of a Canadian winter. Like preparing for a coming storm by buying what you need to survive it beforehand, or wearing ice grips on your shoes if you insist on venturing out into what is sure to be a slippy-step every 10 feet or so. Further reading about slips and falling on ice in Canada if you're interested [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/legal-pointers-on-slips-and-falls-in-edmonton-1.4998784 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/legal-pointers-on-sl...

commandlinefan 5y ago

> 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).

hncurious 5y ago

"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.

dpweb 5y ago

- 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.

hugocbp 5y ago

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.