The Falling-Down Professions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I attended a single semester of law school before dropping out and getting an MS in Engineering, and believe me, it wasn't because law is "too hard". I'm convinced that you can get through a top law school while sitting on your thumb, dude. There's nothing in there that a reasonably bright and literate high school student can't handle. I'm not saying it's easy - a reasonably bright high school student is a pretty well educated person. But it's not in the same leage as grad programs in hard science, math, or engineering. I think the main reason for the 3-year grad degree is to keep smart people who could figure this out more quickly and offer services for less money out of the field. To make it worse, lawyers lobby heavily for regulations that tend to increase their billable hours. Restrict supply, increase demand, largely through government manipulation. I just couldn't be a part of it.
Medicine is a bit less objectionable, but I do believe that the Nurse Practitioner field has shown that a very high quality of independent care provider in less time. Nurse practitioners have to do quite a bit of grad school and apprenticing, so it's still a degree-intensive field. But physicians have definitely tried to use licensing to limit the competition they feel from NPs.
This is why I like, and admire, the software field. It's totally open and free. If my clients want to open up a book and try to learn it themselves, they are free to do so. If they want to hire someone right out of high school, they are free to do so. If they want only a PhD out of Stanford, that's fine too, as long as they're willing to pay. It's a genuinely open and free market - and while that means there are a lot of truly crap programmers, it also means that a brilliant person who is ready to contribute doesn't have to deal with a cartel that wants to keep him or her out.
As actual evidence goes, this is typical innumerate newspaper crap.
* "20% of lawyers experience depression sometime in their careers." As compared to... what? In my anecdotal experience, for physicists this number is closer to 80%. For software engineers... well, let's just say that PG is one of the most happy and successful ones I know of, yet he claims to have been pretty depressed as a Yahoo employee.
* "Law firms have a 20 to 30 percent annual turnover in associates." As compared to... what? What's the equivalent number for software engineers, dental hygenists, grade school teachers? How have all of these numbers changed over time?
* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale." Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw.
* "The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003."
This sentence deserves it's own special multi-paragraph gripe. First, as usual, we must ask: compared to what? What percentage of the job applicant pool do these numbers represent? Could these just be fluctuations in the population of recent college grads? Are they correlated with the state of the economy? If someone doesn't go to med school, where do they go? The article deploys anecdotes to suggest that they've all gone into Web 2.0 companies and Wall Street... are there statistics for that?
Despite his best efforts, the author of the article has presented some data with an interesting anomaly... which he then utterly fails to explore! Why did the number of med school applicants dip in 2003? My own hypothesis is that this is the ghost of the dotcom boom... folks who started school during the boom avoided hard stuff like organic chemistry in favor of classes in HTML and check signing and Maserati selection, and that depleted the pre-med population. But it'd be nice to look at the evidence.
Studying the dip in 2003 is particularly important because this article may suffer from the same problem: anyone want to bet that, assuming that the legal and medical professions really have been shrinking in relative terms, the leftover people have been going into real estate, and real-estate-fueled banking, and the cashing of giant real-estate-related checks? Anyone want to guess where all those people are going next, now that the bubble is collapsing? Law school!
* "Nearly 60% of doctors have considered getting out of medicine because of low morale. Yes, that certainly never happens in other fields, like real estate, or Wall Street, or software development. Just ask Zed Shaw." Yeah, but real estate agents take a 2-6 week class at their community college. Doctors go to school for an average of 12 years and end up with an average of $200k in student loans. It's a little harder to switch careers when you've dropped that much on your education.
What I dislike is this style of journalism where the storyteller tries to tart up the anecdotes with meaningless numbers in an attempt to make them seem more significant. Meaningful numbers would be nice; meaningless numbers just distract you and dilute the directness and frankness of the stories.
Reading a story like this is like having a conversation with a day trader: they are anxious to impress you with their detailed knowledge of the up-and-down movements of randomly-walking lines on charts, but they barely know what their favorite company's product is or who its customers are.
In any case, unless you've personally served time as a doctor or a lawyer, you might want to tone down the rhetoric a notch. Because whatever the intangible benefits of devoting your young life to a startup, I can guarantee that ten years from now, there are going to be a lot of cynical 30-somethings who feel screwed that they didn't get rich from web 2.0.
It seems that every generation has to discover the law of "no free lunch" for themselves.
I'm a cyncial 30 something that screwed myself by not getting rich in web 1.0.
More than one friend is a veteran of the first boom, with little to show for it.
(Obviously an efficient job market is a big assumption, but that's a different question.)
Oh, come on. Now you're just being silly.
Even the article tells you that you're wrong. Legal and medical jobs may be boring and/or tedious, but they pay about as well as you can ever expect to be paid in this country, without being insanely lucky.
Basically, you're succumbing to survivor's bias: you see the stories of the lucky entrepreneurs, so you're relatively unaware of the (vast majority of) people who never make it big (and who end up working in corporate jobs for the rest of their lives). Meanwhile, the people who labor for decades to achieve career success as doctors or lawyers strike you as unglamorous wage slaves, next to the Paul Bucheits and Jamie Zawinskis of the world.
But as I said before, there's no free lunch; nobody is going to let you succeed without a lot of work, or a lot of luck. So you either trust your fate to randomness (high variance; a lot of luck), or you methodically start climbing your way up the greased pole (low variance; a little luck).
Overall, the expected value of career success is higher for the doctors and lawyers, and the variance is lower. That's why people pursue the degree -- not out of some blind faith in title and prestige.
This one was labeled "Economic Conditions-Economic trends-legal profession-lawyers-prestige-doctors - New York Times"
Dammit, Jim!
Look at the lady in the article who spent a week in a hotel sticking post-it notes on documents. Unless there are extenuating circumstances (e.g Erin Brockovich), she's not going to get much respect for doing that sort of thing regardless of how much time she spent in school.
We all ought to consider, too, the absolute worthlessness of venture capital in a social sense (and the basic worthlessness of the web, I might add). How much should people expect to make for playing with computers -- in one form or another -- while other people make their bread and clean their houses?
Of course, it's always been that way -- income is not proportional to work. If it was, the grape pickers would be shopping at Neiman Marcus.
What do you mean? What is value "in a social sense?"
However, my point was a little more general -- it makes most sense in connection with the bit about work and reward. Doctors and lawyers are portrayed as civil servants in the article, and this is used to drum up some sympathy for their relative impoverishment (relative to VCs). Why don't they mention the poor nurses?
Doctors and lawyers have ridden the demand curve long enough; they now find themselves contending with people who do even less and make even more, and they complain. Reflection would have been a more respectable response.
The problem we are having is that the economics are being changed in a occluded space. The doctor makes 250k, but has to shell out 60k for malpractice insurance, and 30k a year to repay student loans for nearly a decade. The lawyer trudges to work every day to stick postits on briefs in order to get that "big score" from a medical liability suit, knowing that he is part of the problem; I'll just grin and bear it until I make partner...
Picking grapes starts to look pretty good.
What will we do when all of the good doctors decide to pick grapes?
If it was, there would be no Neiman Marcus, or much of anything else.
Good example. Just coming off the wine tour at Napa are we?
In the intervening years, many kind people tolerated me as I wormed my way into IT. Now I live in a house and, yes indeed, drink the wines of Napa and other places.