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I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps not the Bay Area), lawyer is a higher-status job than most. I'm 35 and I can already feel this happening. There just isn't much of a career path if you don't go into management or own a business. Maybe at the huge companies (Apple, FB, etc), but not most, and definitely not in most geographies. What I don't understand is why it's different in tech vs. other fields. Maybe because they're professionalized and can't be cut out? Whereas tech is more capitalistic overall and reinvents itself every 5-10 years in a way most other professions couldn't imagine? Not sure. "Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing. Heading into my late 30s, I'm not game for that anymore. It's not even just the money, it's the overall approach to work, the open-plan offices, having little autonomy, little networking or visibility into the business, routinely having my judgment overruled by the latest VC-backed 22-year-old, dealing with stupid and avoidable tech debt, death marches, and cleaning up others' messes. After three failed startups, it's gotten tiresome to the point that I've decided not to work in those companies anymore, and really given a hard think to my personal career plans. Even as the executives of these bankrupt businesses have all failed upward into senior director roles at larger companies and sama and co. continue to preach the gospel of fast wealth and career growth at the latest darling run by "geniuses" 3 months out of YC. |
You point to two pretty important reason why lawyers continue doing what they do, and why the career path remains attractive compared to engineering, even if lawyers ultimately earn less.
1 - In general, as a lawyer, your perceived value goes up over time (gray hairs are money-makers). Whereas, in general, as an engineer, your perceived values goes down over time.
2 - A lawyer has a sense power. The legal field requires them to be independent (they are beholden to their clients, but not anyone else) and also knowledgeable on how to navigate (or manipulate) the system of rules that society has put in place. This provides some sense of power and agency. Today, even though many engineers probably "know" more about how individuals or society is manipulated, they generally work for major companies, and even those that do not don't have the incentives to properly bring such injustices to light.
If engineers were somehow incentived (i.e., make money) from outing perceived technical injustices, I suspect they would quickly eclipse lawyers in both compensation and stature.