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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

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Lawyers and doctors in the US effectively have union-style control on the supply of lawyers and doctors, via the Bar Association and AMA.

Developers have no such labor association. We also have headwinds like H1-Bs, that push down our wages.

H-1 is a good point. Where are the H-1 lawyers and doctors?

There are lots of H-1B doctors in the small towns and rural areas that are typically underserved by larger hospitals and networks.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...

> Just over one-quarter of doctors in the United States were “foreign-trained” as of 2017, meaning that they received their medical degrees from schools outside of the United States.

This is one of the challenges of the H-1B visa and that tech specialities are dominating the lottery it makes it more difficult for other areas to get doctors willing to work at, well, rural doctor rates.

if it's anything like where I'm from then you can't practice with a foreign license unless you convert it to a local one. the same organization that make a cap on the number of doctors/lawyers is the one that allows or reject the license conversions (permits). so foreign labors as a loophole does not work. when there were attempts to remove this the doctors went on strike. the justifications is removing the cap on number of doctors by allowing foreign labor would increase the variance in quality of the doctors and increase the risks to the patients.

Programming skills are more universal and don't depend on the country. Whereas lawyers and doctors have different standards and laws to operate on. It would be tough for immigrant to justify to spending 4-7 years studying laws of another country just to take a chance with H-1. If you fail to obtain that you virtually unemployable by your country and need to spend more time learning laws of you country

Perhaps eventually developers will organize one.

I don't think big companies will ever allow it. They're floating on bliss from being able to push in federal laws that exclude programmers from overtime pay. Places like Google would pay trillions to keep that going and push down wages more and more.

I think that's true, but the interview process for a SWE is (I think) unusually rigorous. I'm often surprised when I talk to my friends in other fields who get hired after 1-2 hours of get-to-know-you interviews. Meanwhile, almost every SWE job has 4-6 hours of technical evaluation proctored by the incumbents. It's true that if someone has done 12+ years of college, med school, and residency, you can trust a little more on their resume, but I've also turned down SWE candidates with impressive sounding pedigrees after seeing them bomb simple exercises.

Maybe we've figured out how to haze our way to exclusivity without centralized gatekeepers?

It's just a more inefficient way of gatekeeping because instead of doing the Leetcode gauntlet once and you get a license or credential that actually means something, you have to run it at every single company you apply to.

Developer burnout or attrition for various reasons is a real thing.

If salaries drop, even more programmers will leave the industry, so its a natural balancing effect.

Programmers don’t have to go to expensive law school or medical school. Programmers don’t have to pass the bar. Programmers don’t have to work 80+ hours a week for years in residency. Programmers don’t have to work face to face with infected people and put themselves in harm’s way.

Times are, imo, much better for programmers than doctors or lawyers right now.

That makes me think, doctors and lawyers have intensive training to minimize risk for other persons, each day our field has more impact on other's life, I wonder if we are heading to something similar...

> have intensive training to minimize risk for other persons > I wonder if we are heading to something similar...

We can't, unless there is like one standard CPU architecture, operating system etc for server, desktop, mobile phone with minimal updates....

how much to study and memorize, and about the zero-days..

Lawyers have not had good times since the GFC. Biglaw stopped being as lucrative and no longer needs legions of associates to grep dead trees.

Lawyers weren't doing too hot about a decade ago, especially entry level. Part of the problem is that just about every university wants a law school. Revenue is similar to a med school, but with far lower costs to operate, it's basically free money.

Lawyers and doctors are certified by their respective boards and bars. Individuals who aren't certified can't perform tasks that certified individuals can without non-trivial legal consequences.

I'd say they aren't really the same.

Actually AI will catch up to doctors and lawyers much faster than to programmers.

In addition, programmers have many more domains that they can switch into, however, once the AI lawyer or AI doctor will rise, it would practically replace 90% of the lawyers/doctors.

this is true for certain activities like structured information retrieval; legal opinion and binding decisions are not what is on the line.

Right. But most lawyers and doctors work (let say 95%) is routine work. The problem with fields like law / medicine, is that you invest heavily one time (I.e. at school) in a fixed body of knowledge (law or medicine) in order to enjoy life time of protected earning.

Note that the earning are protected mainly because you invested the time , and not because of some union.

The Achilles heel of those professions, is that the body of knowledge is constant, with very long half life. But this also make it ready for automation.

With AI, the destruction of those professions will be quick, as they will get destroy from the bottom. I.e. Even if AI make existing lawyers twice as productive, it would mean that you would need half the lawyers. If AI will make them 4x productive, you would need 25% of lawyers, etc.

With law I believe it can happen, but with medicine, not really.

Most visits to doctors it is not about only about the sickness (or information about what medicine to get), but about socializing and somebody inspect you and discuss with you. This part, the machine cannot do. It is what is called the doctor-patient relationship. If you think this is not the important part, I cannot disagree more with you.

I go to doctors only when I really need, but the pattern I see around is that people have a real long lasting trust relationship with the doctors they see.

That's not true for lawyers as far as I know (at least in the UK, I suspect the same applies elsewhere). There's an oversupply of law graduates, getting a pupillage/training contract is very competitive and fees are being cut.

Compared to law and medicine, programming is still a young profession. The field is evolving rapidly, and a lot of people are joining it. If the incentives remain as high as now, supply might eventually outstrip demand.

Lawyers and Doctors have

1) Very stringent standards, particularly in Medicine

2) Doctors guilds control how many people get medical education

3) It's often 'nationally dependent' wherein skills are not always transferrable.

'Software Developer' can mean anything which has advantages and drawbacks.

I for one, wish there were some kind of 'basic general certification' frankly. There are so many 'not very good devs' I would like to just completely ignore people with out some basic qualifications.

The 'exams' might even require us to 'fill in some blanks' in our education because all of us have blind-spots!

It might be hard to do something like that from an examination level though.

Don't forget both lawyers and doctors also pay huge liability insurance premiums to practice.

And the licensure bars and boards also ensure some level of customer safety by having an independent agency to turn to in malpractice cases.

Because they are smart and have built up huge barriers for entry. In contrast everybody can get into programming without any training.

In fact within our industry we’ve nearly normalized developers spending their own time and money to pull more entry level developers into the work force. I’ve participated in several weekend beginner bootcamp type things, donated money, and will probably continue to do so, but considering the incentives is interesting. Of course these bootcamp things get peanuts of sponsorship from whatever big players are in town, but the real sponsors are the volunteers that spend their own time on these things, and for what? Brownie points for helping beginners, or making tech more diverse, or so that tech companies have bigger, cheaper pool of labor? It’s cynical, but the tech biz really are masterful at propagandizing people against their own interests and distracting us from the fact that they have made the most absurd amounts of money imaginable.

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