No, Lawyers Should Not Learn to Code | Hacker News Reader

No, Lawyers Should Not Learn to Code

lawyerist.com

14 pointsgeebee4 comments

This authors arguments were stronger before he brought up Sony. A new degree is significant investment and actually needing one is a good reason to consider another course of action. But Sony's code is crap, their policies were crap and they are assembled by people that couldn't give a crap. Liked many large companies they employed who could be retained not people that probably wanted to be there. It didn't matter that they had degrees, they did too many things fundamentally wrong. They had convoluted change control process that prevented quick fixes to script injection attacks a quick read of a Wikipedia page would have explained this and probably did, but bureaucracy probably demand tickets, a risk assessment and a business justification.

Any coder can succeed or fail with or without a degree, and largely shops don't actually care about your degree. HR might make it hard to hire someone without a degree, but the hiring managers generally gets enough say to interview people who show promise (github profiles, personal recommendation or years of experience). Then upper management wants to treat all coders as interchangeable cogs in an assembly line. Or at least that is how the 3 or 4 Sony size companies I worked for behaved.

All of that adds up to the author confusing credentials for competence. I have met coders with PHDs who could keep a programming job because of their incompetence and High school grads earning 6 figures because they produced results. I have seen more expected opposite as well of course. I see no correlation in skill and certification. That whole thing undermines this whole article.

Perhaps not all lawyers should code, but maybe some lawyers could have skipped school entirely and could pick up coding on the weekend. Instead this author advocates for institutionalizing incompetence and that is exactly how Sony got hacked.

This all ignores the ongoing trend that every job is being automated. Those who program can better adapt to this ever growing wave of automation. He works with legalzoom so he should know how tech can streamline the operation of even lawyers. What this article implies is that things won't get anymore streamlined. What happens when IBM points Watson at all the law books in the world and it produce advice better than 99% of lawyers? I know you need to cross a high bar to actually go to trial but isn't a large chunk of lawyer's money made on advice made well before that point? Wouldn't it be good to be ready for this or whatever tech comes to disrupt law.

The Sony thing was a bit jarring. I suppose I wouldn't expect people who hang out on a site called "hacker news" to agree that Sony, Target, and Yahoo set the gold standard for software development ;)

I do think the underlying point, though, is a good one - this is a difficult field, and success eludes people who spend their lives working on it and companies that spend a lot of money hiring them (or at least attempting to).

I like the author's notion that programmers would have a greater role and status in firms: "Coders are not used in law firms the way they are in most businesses. They are seen as tools to get things done, not as an integral and necessary part of law firm operations, let alone management." That I like this is no surprise, seeing as I am a software developer myself. Unfortunately, I don't think the "integral and necessary" part of a firm actually reflects the reality of open offices, scrum, limited autonomy, and short career spans.

Oh one thing - although the author talks about "expert technologists", I don't see anything here about requiring a degree, nor do I agree that the author has advocated for institutionalizing incompetence. I think he's trying to argue that software development is sufficiently complicated that asking lawyers to become programmers is on a par with asking programmers to suddenly become lawyers. I'd say the thesis here is: software is actually very difficult to do well, and the best solution is to integrate programmers into the firm - this author even advocates doing it at an equity level! Sounds great to me, though honestly I don't really see it happening (like I said, I think the author greatly overestimates the extent to which this occurs outside law firms. Organizations are often very resistant to providing this status and integration to software developers, though some have managed to do this, with success).

While I don't disagree that programming can be a difficult and I can see reasons to not want to program, I would even less like to argue with reality. Non-programmers are losing jobs quickly and programmers are gaining them.

Perhaps if enough people left other fields to code it might temporarily lessen pressure on those fields to allow the people who cannot or will not code to stabilize. In the I do not see a a guaranteed for any not making software.

As for the author's implicit assumptions on degrees. He never does state it, he just implies it several times. His first argument that one needs a degree so they can be as good as Sony was only one such assumption.

I have not had good opportunities at stock options yet... I guess I need to get in on the ground floor of something.

But legal code(law) should be written as strictly as computer code, so that we can detect errors(contradictions, circular logic, etc) automatically, as well as refactor millions of lines of regulations into more concise, spirit of the law, declarations.

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