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Comment by ken47 | Hacker News Reader

"Law school can require as much as $200k and 3 years of opportunity cost on top of whatever was spent on undergrad."

You seem to be missing the economic realities at play. The cost of law school does not matter. All that matters is the supply and demand for lawyers and programmers. And if you've been keeping your ear to the ground, you may be aware that there is a significant oversupply of law grads nowadays.

There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training. If in the future, the salary of the average lawyer were to drop below that of the average programmer, Adam Smith would not bat an eye.

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If law school is so expensive, it is harder to become a lawyer. If less people become lawyers, the supply decreases (resulting in the demand for the shortage of lawyers to be greater).

"There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training."

You don't NEED a degree to do programing. Arguably a computer science degree is standard but even then, you don't need 7 years of schooling. In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school.

At the end of the day, it's fair for a lawyer to charge more. Why? Because someone is willing to pay the premium.

>In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school.

Not in California.

In order to be hired (by a top-tier firm) you'll likely need that top-tier law degree.

Though there are successful independent lawyers. And an awful lot of unsuccessful ones.

Technically, no. However, there _are_ requirements before you can take the bar exam. Unlike other states, California doesn't require that you attended an ABA-approved law school. However, instead you have to do 'Four years of study, with a minimum of 864 hours of preparation and study per year, at an unaccredited distance-learning or correspondence law school registered with the Committee;'.

So, you _do_ need to 'attend' law school, even if it's over the internet. (Unless you "study in a law office or judge’s chambers", which I guess is a type of apprenticeship.)

The number of people who go the apprenticeship route in CA is very miniscule. There are lots of law schools that are certified by the CA Bar and not the ABA, but you'd be a fool to go to one, unless you like being an unemployable lawyer with 200K+ in debt.

Actually, I wonder...I'm pretty sure the number of people who go the apprenticeship route is in the single digits (though feel free to prove me wrong). It could be a good way to set oneself apart from the pack when applying for a job. Goodness knows its a shitty job market for lawyers, and if you don't have a top tier law degree, strategically it could be a way to set yourself apart from the pack (especially at the level where you're competing against sorta middle of the road-ish ABA certified schools-like Santa Clara and USF).

Completely flawed logic, but not uncommon from an employee standpoint. Pay should be commensurate to value an employee provides to a company. This is why CEOs make 100x+ entry level positions.

From the company's perspective, whatever an individual put into their experience is almost completely inconsequential if they are doing their job. In a healthy, functional market, pay isn't about "fairness", it's about bottom-line results, and programmers and engineers make the products and services these companies use to generate revenue which in turn creates demand and subsequently the available funds for legal counsel!

A CEO does not deliver 100x more value than entry level employees. A CEO is in a position of power, which enables her to claim such a wage.

In theory at least, wage should reflect responsibility and liability within the company. If you go over those of the CEO, you see why they make so much more money. They should be held accountable for the wealth of the entire company.

As far as lawyers are concerned, their wages just reflect the fact that they (should) have been trained as A-list negotiators, and it is common practice for lawyers to have a fee based on a percentage of the deal they negotiated.

There is a corollary for programmers for the above: start-ups. Though not trained negotiators, skill and work ethic can get you far enough. And it is common practice to receive a percentage of the reward.

The grass always looks greener on the other side.

A CEO of a big company like Apple or Microsoft delivers way more than 100x value of entry level eployees. A 10% improvement at the CEO position would be hugely valuable.

No way. A CEO is held responsible for the decisions of EVERYONE under him/her by the board. A lousy programmer will cost the company a lot less than a lousy CEO.

The CEO is essentially the face of the company when things happen (good or bad) and has huge responsibilities. Managing a company is easy from the armchair.

That's a better way to see it. It's hard to see good management and its effects, but good management really does make a major difference. But it is so hard to see, that people sometimes don't even realize they need it. But to see the ability management has to change the outcome, look at bad management: they can totally destroy a company, no matter how good the engineers are. That people can see.

>Pay should be commensurate to value an employee provides to a company.

I don't think that's how capitalism works. Your pay doesn't scale with your value, otherwise teachers and firefighters would be making bank. It's completely guided by supply and demand.

In an efficient market, those two are equivalent.

EDIT: Let's consider that "supply and demand" has artificially increased the price of programmers above their value. It's now a losing proposition for a company to continue to employ a programmer as the company is losing money, so the demand goes down and with it the price.

Conversely let's consider that the price of a programmer is artificially lower than his value. Any new company can come along and pay a bit more (but still less than actual value, for now!) and attract the best programming talent. Other companies must keep up in order to keep the talent, so the price returns to the actual value to the company.

> Other companies must keep up in order to keep the talent, so the price returns to the actual value to the company.

Uh, no, that is not how supply and demand works. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus>.

The gap between what people are willing to pay vs. what people are willing to sell for is often substantial. People spend a lot of time fighting over the distribution of the value in that gap between consumers and producers (see, e.g., price discrimination).

Is "in an efficient market" the economic equivalent of the programmers' "with a sufficiently smart compiler"? It seems to be used in the same manner in arguments.

You need the concept of perfect market (or other models) to reason about things. "In a perfect market, x happens. y is not in line with the perfect market, so eliminating y (c)/(sh)ould bring us closer to x".

Replace x with "fair salaries" and "y" with "Tech companies making non-poaching agreements"

You seem to be confusing "demand" with "quantity demanded", at least in your wording.

> law school is so expensive, it is harder to become a lawyer. If less people become lawyers, the supply decreases (resulting in the demand for the shortage of lawyers to be greater).

Despite the expense of law school, there are about 25-35k jobs per year for 40-45k graduates per year. And maybe 5k per year of those pay the kind of salaries people think lawyers make. What keeps supply limited in law is that the growth of supply is gated by the amount of legal work in the economy. Law is unlike engineering in that nobody wants to hire fresh grads. They want the seasoned veterans who have been to trials or handled a big deal. Preferably a bunch of them. There is only so much of that work to go around, which bottlenecks the supply pipeline in the stage between fresh graduate to employable lawyer.

The moral of the story is that economic systems are more complicated than simple neoclassical tropes admit.

Actually, it does, and Adam Smith pointed this out over 200 years ago (he also noted the collusion that was typical among employers to suppress the wages of labor), noting the expense, trust, and risk assumed by would-be lawyers in determining their pay:

Education in the ingenious arts, and in the liberal professions, is still more tedious and expensive. The pecuniary recompence, therefore, of painters and sculptors, of lawyers and physicians, ought to be much more liberal; and it is so accordingly.... We trust our health to the physician, our fortune, and sometimes our life and reputation, to the lawyer and attorney.... Fifthly, the wages of labour in different employments vary according to the probability or improbability of success in them. The probability that any particular person shall ever be qualified for the employments to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greatest part of mechanic trades success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it as at least twenty to one if he ever makes such proficiency as will enable him to live by the business.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

I think you have a bit of a misunderstanding as to what this quote is saying. It does not support your argument, and actually supports mine (which would be the same as Adam Smith's in this case).

SUPPLY SIDE: "send him to study [x], it as at least twenty to one if he ever makes such proficiency as will enable him to live by the business." He is making is quite clear that the supply of qualified [x] is low (and giving a reason as to why it is low, but as Adam Smith himself would surely admit, the laws of supply and demand do not [directly] care about the 'why').

DEMAND SIDE: There is no explicit mention of the demand for these services, but as educated readers, we are able to deduce that during the time of Adam Smith, the demand for certain [x] heavily outweighed the supply.

*[x] blocked out because its specific value is not germane to the underlying logic of the argument.

I also think you have a misunderstanding. Adam Smith is clearly explaining the reason for the more liberal wages from the perspective of the one who is to commence the study, and his likelihood of succeeding. Smith is pointing to the fact that liberal professions are inherently more difficult to master, and often provide a value that is more rare (and therefore worth more money).

You cannot turn this quote into a formula, because it's a description of how wages ought to be, and the reasons therefore. And it is completely irrelevant to discussion, as I'm sure if Smith were alive today, he would count the art of programming among the liberal professions. There is more to making a useful application than to be able to think mechanically. Because programmers create and shoemakers copy.

I wasn't addressing lawers v. programmers, but just the relationship between the cost of education and the wages expected from undertaking it.

Of course, today you could point to a plethora of professions for which a long and expensive education is required, but for which compensation lags, often painfully. Though in some cases job security may be higher.

You're cherry picking. I addressed the overall demand for lawyers in the salary brackets we're talking about.

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