Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

> t's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.

This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.

View on HN

You are comparing average salary for software engineers to the revenue number for a lawyer. That revenue number isn't his salary because it is unlikely that he is able to bill 40 hours a week.

A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.

Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.

https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...

Completely agree.

Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".

It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".

I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.

>Just not sure what the endgame is

Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.

True engineering is a regulated profession in at least Canada. Legally, I cannot call myself an engineer of any type. Ironically, my current and potential salary seems to be much higher than an engineer below P.Eng certification.

There are a bunch of underemployed lawyers. I think the supply constraint is really about the number of people who can do the job well (aptitude+knowledge).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com