The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary.
I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!
In medicine if you get things very wrong, you die, your patient dies, or everyone in the room dies.
In programming if you get things wrong, you give someone radiation poisoning and they die, a plane crashes, or someone loses days of work.
Surely, those are bigger injustices.
In theory, yes. In practice, not “everyone”, and very much not equally true of everyone to whom the law practically applies at all, even in the places which tout “equal protection of the laws” as a bedrock principle.
You can learn a lot by watching or asking others.
Your fear seems unfounded.
And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply complicated and we need to use complicated tools, specifications, processes and other such things in order to describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next.
This is why they are so against automation and simplification of their field. They know that if they automate the processes, that their field becomes very focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just realize that most of what they know can be codified in some sort of unambiguous specification format.
A machine cannot be held accountable, and therefore should not be in charge of making decisions.
And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
Computing became cheaper because it has layer upon layer of economies of scale.
Law doesn’t because every case is unique and is literally decided upon minutiae and exceptional details.
Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.
My personal suspicion is that software is one of the easiest fields in the world to learn, and it has the sneaky benefit that you don't have to brush up against many constraints of the real world, but then — this doesn't explain the apparent god complex many programmers have.
And smart software engineers never over-complicate their code, right?
“Wild” is the most generous word I could come up with, sorry!
Is software engineering arcane for similar gatekeepy reasons or is that for more legitimate reasons?
Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train.
Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
In that context, does it really seem so absurd that the rules are "obtuse"? Many people feel that way when reading someone else's code, but that doesn't mean all the weird conditionals are unnecessary.
I’ve done software (a lot) and worked in a legislative office (a little), they are extremely different.
> Laws are programs.
Laws are not programs, or even meaningfully analogous to anything so deterministic. They are more like, if we must make a computing analogy, components of prompt templates (other portions of which will be filled by evidence and…well, a bunch of other stuff you don’t control when writing the laws) that will be used by an extremely high temperature LLM. Which you can’t actually test freely against, though you can observe past behavior – but, even then, you are stymied by the fact that the LLM itself is constantly updated with retrained, and sometimes rearchitected, versions, without useful release notes.
It's just that the programming language is mushy-- 400 definitions of the word "set" is the example my AI offers-- and the interpreters vary. In a pinch, the code writers know that nearly anything they write can be rescued by the chief interpreter, which has led to a model of legislatures intentionally writing ambiguous code and top-level courts interpreting with an emphasis on public good.
But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with remarkable precision and it becomes obvious again, law is code.
If this were really true, there would be zero appellate cases (and probably not even trial cases, as the clear and only correct resolution would be apparent to all parties without a trial which would only add expense) in these areas, and yet... That's very much not the case.
If law, even in these areas, is “code”, it is so more in the sense of the Pirates Code in Pirates of the Carribean, not computer software.
If you look at code as in, only syntax and its meaning for the language, I can see how folks might reason along the lines of 'law is similar enough to code. You are saying what can and can't be done'
However, code is rarely only its syntax. Its meaning is contextual, often to the business of which it applies, and would have no real meaning outside of that context, and context may change at any given time, which means reinterpreting the code, replacing the code etc.
That is what law in practice, is what code is in practice. Its syntax is very technical, but its meaning is entirely dependent upon its applied context.
I been thinking alot about this lately, and understanding the sociological implications of code in an organization (or in more extreme cases, society) has really changed my point of view of how to build software
If I were to translate this into code, it would mean that variables that were constant will sometimes still change value. It would mean that operations on data would differ depending on the scope in which the operations were applied. And it would mean that certain variables that were closer to the base address (more money) would operate differently than variables stored in distant memory offsets [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxico_Burress#:~:text=On%2...)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_sentencing_of_Robe...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/part-II/chapter-3...
Realistically, you’re probably not going to go to jail immediately but you can have a bad time if you’re caught doing some things you didn’t even know were illegal.
But on the other hand, you shouldn't need a law degree and bar license to sue an insurance company to pay up. Their client hit you, you're injured, now pay up or have a judge order you to. But the lawmen have carved out their own moat that puts ordinary people in a position to rely on them.
Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs.
I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)