4 ms·

Enterprise programmers are like lawyers, in that we are mainly employed to interface with other enterprise programmers. We're in the business of automated burea

Enterprise programmers are like lawyers, in that we are mainly employed to interface with other enterprise programmers. We're in the business of automated bureaucracy, and sometimes we don't even get to do the automation part.

bmitc 4y ago
This really highlights something I've observed about lawyers. They don't operate on reason or logic like many think they do. They merely operate in this constructed world where they perform interpretation of contracts, bureaucracy, and laws. And it's a very one way street because of that. Just try to hold a lawyer to anything. They'll point to a contract you signed as if Moses himself brought it down from on high, like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove pointing at the big board, but when it comes time for them to act upon something in a contract that supposedly protects you, it's like putting your finger on one of those balloon toys filled with water. Trying to tell a lawyer that something they think is defined is in fact undefined is an exercise in pure futility.
- reverius42 4y ago
  Have you considered you might not know as much about how the law actually works as the lawyer does? Definitions of terms might come from lots of places other than the contract in question (laws, regulations, court precedent, etc.).
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Well, of course, that’s what I mean, and that’s the point. A contract is not some logical document that you can just read and understand. You “need” a lawyer to interpret with all sorts of hidden assumptions and communicate with all the other lawyers. We had an issue pop up after we bought our house, and our own lawyer was incapable of explaining why we weren’t covered although the contract had language to say that we might be. I pointed out several times that a thing was poorly defined, only be referred to some other section, where’d I’d need to point out that it was also poorly defined. It’s a very insular system that only makes sense to the lawyers, where you have to basically literally sign your financial life away without being able to understand everything. And the lawyers are really not willing to go through it. In my state, it’s required for them to be involved in home purchases, and so they’re on autopilot. Also, the lawyer would send something and ask us to sign the same day. Try sending a lawyer something and asking them to sign the same day. It’s not gonna happen. After reading the document myself, I found several typos, including a few serious ones (incorrect dollar amounts of coverage), and the lawyer acted like it was no big deal and almost annoyed that she needed to correct the mistakes, almost as if they weren’t even needed to be corrected. But the lawyer would constantly point to something as “you signed it! There’s nothing we can do.”. It was a strange dichotomy that the lawyers applied to the world. For them, they were loosey goosey towards us, never being clear in emails, but anytime you needed something from them, you got pointed in every direction but towards them. Even getting the final number to pay was an exercise in frustration. Lawyers cache everything in language that doesn’t pin them down in any way. They are like spiders weaving these webs throughout society. Silicon Valley really nailed how lawyers behave, especially the interaction between Hooli and Pied Piper’s lawyers. The lawyers create all these binding relationships but absolve themselves of anything and everything. https://youtu.be/M1Wl91bnAMI&t=4m29s https://youtu.be/M1Wl91bnAMI&t=4m29s
    - jstarfish 4y ago
      > Lawyers cache everything in language that doesn’t pin them down in any way. They are like spiders weaving these webs throughout society. > The lawyers create all these binding relationships but absolve themselves of anything and everything. Lawyers are professional social engineers...they achieve their goals through manipulation of the social fabric. There's a reason so many go on to become politicians.
      - tbrownaw 4y ago
        > There's a reason so many go on to become politicians. And there's a reason programmers like writing programming tools as well. And a reason some gamers seem to think game dev is cool. I suspect that all three are somewhat the same reason.
        smaudet 4y ago
        Burnt out programmers take up crafts/hobbies, burnt out gamers do, I don't know, drugs? And burnt out lawyers? Sow mayhem or become philanthropists?
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      They aren’t all like that. You should’ve fired her and hired another. That video is full of clips of a lawyer speaking candidly and clearly, too, and offering to shred a document that was just signed. :)
      - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        It's a protected job with no real oversight. Once you qualify you can be terrible at it and still continue working. In the UK the only thing that will get you struck off is embezzlement of client funds. In other words, a crime. You may get struck off for deliberately lying to a client, but that depends somewhat on the niche and on plausible deniability. The likelihood goes up the more prestigious and corporate the clients are. Otherwise, for basic everyday work like property conveyancing, you can minimum-effort paper push and no one will call you on it. Doctors, accountants and some parts of software dev can get by with a similar phone-it-in culture. You can be mediocre/bad and in some situations no one will notice and/or care.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Lawyer here. Perhaps you're making the same mistake that, e.g. whoever made up the term "Smart Contract" did? Contracts -- in REALITY -- do not "define" things about the world; that's sort of a programmy way to look at things. They are, by definition, not the "thing" itself, they are a bunch of words that you can hopefully refer to in the usually unlikely possibility that one of the two parties involved decides, justifiably or not, that something screwy happened and they want to fight about it. "The contract" is in no way necessary for real life things to get done.
- vjk800 4y ago
  Real world is messy. Sharp definitions and unambiguous statements about anything are not possible. Everything is, in the end, politics. Our collective way of dealing with this is packaging all the complicated questions inside an abstraction called "the law" and letting people called "lawyers" deal with it. The lawyer's job is to keep the complexity hidden from other people and provide a clean user interface for interacting with untrusted entities (with trusted entities, like our families and friends, we tend not to rely on the law at all). However, like in software, abstractions leak, and often the inherent messiness of human relations that we tried to package into a nice lawyer interface becomes apparent to the end user. We like to blame the lawyers for this, and maybe sometimes they really should be blamed, but on a much deeper level, at least part of the blame should be on ourselves - not you or me personally, but rather us collectively - for insisting that inherently complex and messy matters should be made simple for us even when it's not possible.

bmitc 4y ago

This really highlights something I've observed about lawyers. They don't operate on reason or logic like many think they do. They merely operate in this constructed world where they perform interpretation of contracts, bureaucracy, and laws. And it's a very one way street because of that. Just try to hold a lawyer to anything. They'll point to a contract you signed as if Moses himself brought it down from on high, like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove pointing at the big board, but when it comes time for them to act upon something in a contract that supposedly protects you, it's like putting your finger on one of those balloon toys filled with water. Trying to tell a lawyer that something they think is defined is in fact undefined is an exercise in pure futility.

reverius42 4y ago
Have you considered you might not know as much about how the law actually works as the lawyer does? Definitions of terms might come from lots of places other than the contract in question (laws, regulations, court precedent, etc.).
- bmitc 4y ago
  Well, of course, that’s what I mean, and that’s the point. A contract is not some logical document that you can just read and understand. You “need” a lawyer to interpret with all sorts of hidden assumptions and communicate with all the other lawyers. We had an issue pop up after we bought our house, and our own lawyer was incapable of explaining why we weren’t covered although the contract had language to say that we might be. I pointed out several times that a thing was poorly defined, only be referred to some other section, where’d I’d need to point out that it was also poorly defined. It’s a very insular system that only makes sense to the lawyers, where you have to basically literally sign your financial life away without being able to understand everything. And the lawyers are really not willing to go through it. In my state, it’s required for them to be involved in home purchases, and so they’re on autopilot. Also, the lawyer would send something and ask us to sign the same day. Try sending a lawyer something and asking them to sign the same day. It’s not gonna happen. After reading the document myself, I found several typos, including a few serious ones (incorrect dollar amounts of coverage), and the lawyer acted like it was no big deal and almost annoyed that she needed to correct the mistakes, almost as if they weren’t even needed to be corrected. But the lawyer would constantly point to something as “you signed it! There’s nothing we can do.”. It was a strange dichotomy that the lawyers applied to the world. For them, they were loosey goosey towards us, never being clear in emails, but anytime you needed something from them, you got pointed in every direction but towards them. Even getting the final number to pay was an exercise in frustration. Lawyers cache everything in language that doesn’t pin them down in any way. They are like spiders weaving these webs throughout society. Silicon Valley really nailed how lawyers behave, especially the interaction between Hooli and Pied Piper’s lawyers. The lawyers create all these binding relationships but absolve themselves of anything and everything. https://youtu.be/M1Wl91bnAMI&t=4m29s https://youtu.be/M1Wl91bnAMI&t=4m29s
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    > Lawyers cache everything in language that doesn’t pin them down in any way. They are like spiders weaving these webs throughout society. > The lawyers create all these binding relationships but absolve themselves of anything and everything. Lawyers are professional social engineers...they achieve their goals through manipulation of the social fabric. There's a reason so many go on to become politicians.
    - tbrownaw 4y ago
      > There's a reason so many go on to become politicians. And there's a reason programmers like writing programming tools as well. And a reason some gamers seem to think game dev is cool. I suspect that all three are somewhat the same reason.
      - smaudet 4y ago
        Burnt out programmers take up crafts/hobbies, burnt out gamers do, I don't know, drugs? And burnt out lawyers? Sow mayhem or become philanthropists?
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    They aren’t all like that. You should’ve fired her and hired another. That video is full of clips of a lawyer speaking candidly and clearly, too, and offering to shred a document that was just signed. :)
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      It's a protected job with no real oversight. Once you qualify you can be terrible at it and still continue working. In the UK the only thing that will get you struck off is embezzlement of client funds. In other words, a crime. You may get struck off for deliberately lying to a client, but that depends somewhat on the niche and on plausible deniability. The likelihood goes up the more prestigious and corporate the clients are. Otherwise, for basic everyday work like property conveyancing, you can minimum-effort paper push and no one will call you on it. Doctors, accountants and some parts of software dev can get by with a similar phone-it-in culture. You can be mediocre/bad and in some situations no one will notice and/or care.
jrm4 4y ago
Lawyer here. Perhaps you're making the same mistake that, e.g. whoever made up the term "Smart Contract" did? Contracts -- in REALITY -- do not "define" things about the world; that's sort of a programmy way to look at things. They are, by definition, not the "thing" itself, they are a bunch of words that you can hopefully refer to in the usually unlikely possibility that one of the two parties involved decides, justifiably or not, that something screwy happened and they want to fight about it. "The contract" is in no way necessary for real life things to get done.
vjk800 4y ago
Real world is messy. Sharp definitions and unambiguous statements about anything are not possible. Everything is, in the end, politics. Our collective way of dealing with this is packaging all the complicated questions inside an abstraction called "the law" and letting people called "lawyers" deal with it. The lawyer's job is to keep the complexity hidden from other people and provide a clean user interface for interacting with untrusted entities (with trusted entities, like our families and friends, we tend not to rely on the law at all). However, like in software, abstractions leak, and often the inherent messiness of human relations that we tried to package into a nice lawyer interface becomes apparent to the end user. We like to blame the lawyers for this, and maybe sometimes they really should be blamed, but on a much deeper level, at least part of the blame should be on ourselves - not you or me personally, but rather us collectively - for insisting that inherently complex and messy matters should be made simple for us even when it's not possible.