[Ancalagon]

Why is a lawyer position irreplaceable, but an engineering/blue collar one is not?

Not trying to be spiteful or angry, just geniunely curious about the business logic and psychology behind that kind of decision making. Isn't every job replaceable?

[District5524]

I think the reason is not that lawyers are irreplaceable, to the contrary perhaps. The reason is most likely that law firms are always led by lawyers, while that's rarely true for firms where most engineers work (or for most other professions). Typcially, law firms can only be owned by lawyers due to regulatory constraints (the UK, Australia being a notable, but not particularly successful exception). While this rule restricts the possible size, scalability, efficiency and profitability of law firms compared to many other sectors, it can ensure a certain degree of independence (insulation) of the management from extra-professional influences. Like "Das Kapital" trying to change the way the firm works to achieve better returns in the next 5 years. That leads to law firm management and owners being composed mostly of people who have previously worked in that exact field and PROBABLY being better at judging the worker's worth in terms of potential revenue he/she may earn, the client trust they have and the chance that they may transfer that to another firm... Maybe law firms also have less of an illusion about what is valuable in their law firm as opposed to those companies relying on engineers who have or believe they have some special moat outside their people (technology, source code, inventory etc.). No professional law firm would have any illusions that their lawyers are special - perhaps outside trial lawyers and some very special field of litigation, the firm just needs burnout resistant cannon-fodder with the capacity to run for at least ten years, so they may acquire the sufficient experience, plus a number of bland human skills and patience in coping with other human beings. There never was a genuine myth of the "10x lawyer", that's something that only ChatGPT invents. (Sidenote: I wouldn't call an engineering job blue collar as long as you work in an office - WFH, we are all collarless workers now.)

[Ancalagon]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining!

[rramadass]

Two main reasons;

1) Power/Politics - This is basically Human Nature at work and institutionalized as Management/Leadership/etc to put themselves at the top. A lot of it is BS (see the books by https://jeffreypfeffer.com/) but unfortunately only the enlightened in the industry have woken up to this. It is also the case that in these domains many of the objectives are intangible/subjective and difficult to measure thus allowing the actors to create an illusion of "Importance".

2) Nature of Engineering - The output of any Engineering activity has a well-defined boundary. This makes it more tangible/manageable/measurable and reason about. All the main costs are paid upfront and once gizmo-x/software-y is done the recurring costs are generally pretty low. This gives the illusion that the Engineer is now not worth his pay compared to his current output and hence replaceable/dispensable based on bean counter calculations. It also doesn't help that Engineers do a pretty good job so that a product/software once released and accepted in the market is generally very stable and not in much need of rework. This is the reason "Planned Obsolescence", "Subscription Model" etc. were invented by the Industry.

[1oooqooq]

a lawyer very much can, but 1. there's no machine or script capable of replacing one yet, and 2. they are half sales people with their own client lists.