Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

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>Replace science with medicine, or law, and the same still applies.

I don't think that's true with law. The linked essay talks about "the 20 years of your adult life that a scientist typically spends proving they deserve a career."

You can be a newly minted, bar-passed, practicing lawyer after spending 7 years of your adult life, and 6 years if you diligently optimize your course selections (typically 4 years undergrad, 3 years law school, plus a few months studying for the bar exam). That's a heck of lot less than 20 years, and matters a lot in terms of female fertility, the topic of the essay.

And about 20% of new law school graduates will be making six figures in their new job. There's a sharp peak in the distribution of full-time salaries for new lawyers centered around $185K because of big law, with a larger, flatter peak centered around $60K thanks to small firms, nonprofits, and work that doesn't actually require a law degree. Those figures come from NALP data, and reflect the situation even during the lawyer/law school bubble the U.S. is in today.

Note I'm not saying law is a necessarily a wiser choice; I know one big law associate who slept overnight on a partner's couch so much I helped her with the transport of a small refrigerator so she could keep meals at work. That's even though she lived within about four blocks of the office. She eventually quit to write novels.

Passing the bar does not "prove you deserve a career" in law to more or less the same degree that getting a PhD does not "prove you deserve a career" in academics. Plenty of lawyers who pass the bar (these days) ultimately are not successful as lawyers, and the low levels of attorneys at big law firms are a grind designed to weed people out in much the same way that tenure tracks are.

Ditto finance.

That's not to say that either law or finance take AS long as academics do to get to the point where you're secure in your position, but neither get it right out of their degrees.

I think I largely agree with you; one major difference is the opportunity cost of science postdocs vs. other careers. Philip Greenspun's linked article elsewhere in the discussion is probably the best treatment I've ever read.

But I would disagree with your concept of being "secure in your position." I'm not sure that happens nowadays outside of tenured academia, government bureaucracies, and union jobs.

Perhaps you're "secure in your position" at a law firm if you're at the top of your game in terms of expertise, if the firm overall is well-managed, if you're responsible for a multi-million dollar book of business that's some multiple of your take as a partner, and if you're assured that your clients won't go elsewhere (or hire your associates to work as staff attorneys at a fraction of what you're charging). Meeting all those boolean AND requirements strikes me as a rather rare situation relative to the overall population of attorneys out there.

Sure. I was hand-waving "secure in your career." In a big law firm, my understanding is that partners are much MORE secure in their careers than associates, in as much as the system seems designed to winnow out associates, whereas it's much less designed to winnow out partners.

But of course it's not like old-style for-life-employment job security. It's not even close.

The issue with law is that it while it requires a bit less time investment, it requires a substantially larger investment of money.

PhD programs pay you, not a lot, but at least 20-40k a year.

A top legal program (the only kind that will realistically get you a decent legal job) costs about 75k a year in non dischargable loans. There is some merit aid, but it requires you to trade down to a worse school. A good bet if you can get into the elite schools and trade down to a good school (like from Harvard down to Cornell or UMich). But if you can just barely get into Cornell or UMich, you don't really want to trade down to GWU or WUSTL.

I'd rather spend another 5-6 years in grad school / post docs than have huge student loans.

Worse, law keeps weeding people out well past the bar exam. A lot of lawyers spend 7 years in school and 3 years in practice and just leave the industry, often with well over 100k in debt.

Legal salary statistics are a bit skewed by sample bias. NALP relies on reported salaries.

Also legal jobs tend to be in high cost of living areas, while a lot of PhD employers are colleges in bumfuck.

What's the source for your 20% figure and have you read any of Paul Campos' work on the state of legal education in this country? He's been saying for years that it's a scam. Only half of graduates get jobs as lawyers, applications are way down, and this year schools have been accepting more people with lower LSAT scores in an attempt to keep admissions up.

This interview has a summary of some of his claims at the end:

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_23733599/carroll-many-law-schoo...

He used to blog on the subject anonymously at:

http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/

He's also written a book on the subject.

>What's the source for your 20% figure and have you read any of Paul Campos

It's NALP data; they post it on their site.

I like what Paul Campos has written, at least what I've read of it, and agree with many of his points, which is why I referred to the "lawyer/law school bubble." I wouldn't go as far as to call it a "scam," but he knows more about the topic than I do, and it is a more memorable name for a blog.

By way of disclosure, I've taught law school classes as an adjunct and enjoyed it. But if I were giving a 22-year old advice, I'd tell them to think strongly about alternate careers barring acceptance to a short list including Stanford/Harvard/Yale, precisely because of the oversupply of lawyers (last month I suggested to my cousin that she not go to law school, for instance). Also as a practical matter look at the GCs of everyone's favorite tech companies and estimate whether you're likely to get to that level if you go to a lower-ranked school: Facebook (Harvard), Yahoo (UChicago), Google (Stanford), Twitter (NYU), etc. Whether you like it or not, biographies matter more in law.

But nowadays I'm working on http://recent.io/ and not paying close attention to Paul's or other legal blogs except for indexing and semantic analysis purposes...

OK, cool. The 20% figure sounded high to me after years of reading Campos, which is why I asked. I definitely agree with you about the short list.

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