The lawyer median wage is 125k, and the 75 percentile is 186k. I consider 186k to be a high wage, it's 6 times the national mean wage. And according to the sources below, 1 in 4 lawyers are above that.
Median wages https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm
Lawyer wages https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary
I am sorry, but I just don't see how the commenter above is wrong, the numbers say he is spot on. But anyway, I am not a lawyer, and I am not trying to be disrespectful, but I see a lot of high earners in many fields that complain having small wages and tough life, but when you compare it from the outside, it doesn't look so bad. For example, the guy in your article:
said Dylan Boigris, a 2016 Miami Law graduate, who began his career making about $45,000 as a public defender
Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year,
Consider, when comparing starting salary your accountant or whatever not only makes money in both years a lawyer is in law school they also likely have two raises before the lawyer gets his first paycheck and start paying back undergrad loans while a lawyer is still adding interest and new debt.
If your opportunity cost from loans, tuition, lost wages and delayed carrier advancement adds up to a conservative 10k/year after taxes for the rest of your life, then your 72k pre tax lawyer is actually making the equivalent of ~58k pre tax and 1/2 of starting Layers are doing worse than that.
Lawyers have higher salaries than most other professions, though. They are 10% better paid than software developers. We have a huge amount of really well paid developers in SF, Seattle and NYC, and lawyers still have a higher median salary.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/mobile/lawyers.htm
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
I'm not sure what source you're using, but no, it isn't even double the median US salary ($56k): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school.
Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sources, so I guess it depends on where you look. Regardless, you're correct in your overall point, I just wanted to point out that a $100k salary does not necessarily make it worth going to law school.
With that said, you're right: if your goal is to go into law to make money, it shouldn't be very difficult earn well into the six figures a few years in. I imagine most competent lawyers earning less than that are working in public defense or a similarly underpaid aspect of law, knowing the tradeoff. For reference, the median salary for software engineers is only $110k, but that is clearly on the low end of what a competent engineer can make after even just 5 years in the industry.
The number I want to see his how much their salaries increased after law school, what they made over and above their pre-lawyer income. At law school I ran into many students who "earned" lots of family money prior to school. Some were on trust funds but other had token jobs in family firms. One of the top earners in our class was a guy hired immediately by his father's firm, but I think he was already some form of on-paper employee with them prior to law school too. Other people came from relatively stable jobs prior, only to struggle to find work afterwards.
Army Captain. Someone with a degree and a few years in the job. Someone in command of perhaps 50 people. A federal employee. The sort of person who most Americans would consider solidly middle class.
Base monthly pay = $6,023
[0] I can't afford a $2 million house, therefore I am not middle class if don't earn at least $200k.
* If you are deployed, I believe there may be some tax advantages?
* You may get combat pay
* Don't you still get a pension? And free/subsidized healthcare, even after you leave?
* Does a captain typically pay for housing?
All that said, your point is taken. However, I'm not sure anyone is joining the US Army to get rich.
GP's point and your own are not necessarily at odds. A lot has to do with which real lawyer is used as representative. Are we looking at average experience, median, 76th percentile... Taking into account those who never started practicing, etc.
The same can be said of other professions, but the details vary a lot. Relative merits depend on where we put the probe.
A well to do lawyer, 40+ lawyer can be in a more comfortable career place than a comparison programmer going forward. Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority. Competitive, yet prestige based career starts. A nice seniority ratchet as a winners reward.
OTOH, scrapy starts seem like a tough place for lawyers. In tech, skills, hustle and attitude can get you a start... when times are good. Tech is a good business to be in, but volatile... even when times are good. I wouldn't say only chops matter, but you can get by on mostly chops.
Play the game you stand to win, I suppose. If you are en route to line up prestigious degrees, internships and such... 1 in 4 doesn't necessarily mean 1 in 4 for you. There's a harsh distribution.
I suspect this explains attrition. More prestige oriented success factors and a harsher distribution. Beyond a certain threshold winners win a more prestige oriented prize. The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward. Seniority isn't even a value, it's only valued for implied experience.
If you have good odds at a prestigious internship or starting job, it makes a lot of sense to pursue law. If you aren't, it often won't. I reckon that reality sinks in during law school. Programming doesn't really have that. False starts, scrappy starts, and such are fine. Average results for working programmers are fine. An uncle who can advise and groom you before eventually recommending you for a great internship is great, but it's not the stuff most tech careers are made of.
Everyone goes into law school thinking they will be the one to get high grades, but in my experience, working hard was not well correlated with good grades. Even if you work harder than anyone else, it still somewhat comes down to a coin flip. This can be so frustrating, I cannot even begin to describe it.
Even if you then make it into biglaw (a low percentage), you then need to make partner (an extremely low percentage). This is far more about a) office politics, b) connections, and c) your ability to "rain make" by bringing in big new clients; than about your skill as a practitioner of law.
I would also caution against looking at numbers like salary in isolation. Law is full of unhappy rich people. 36% of the profession suffer from alcohol use disorders, compared to ~12% of the general population. Nearly half experience depression at some point (compared to 15% in the general population, in the stat I was able to locate). It's not a happy field.
Up to this point, a tech career has a lot more options and opportunities. Didn't get google? Work at a bank, a startup, a salesforce solutions techshop.... Didn't get MIT? There are other paths forward, including quirky ones that will work too.
Past this point, well-to-do lawyer at Biglaw has the cushier path. Law firms respect seniority. They give them nice offices, autonomy. Senior partners don't worry about wippersnappers running circles around them in some new law paradigm. They don't need to relearn contract law periodically.
The point about happiness is valid, but complex. That competitive prestige game is, empirically, often misery making. Programming has more realness, but there can be a lot of performance stress, especially if you're thinking in decades.
The equivalent of tech progressing into management is lawyers progressing into sales. The people who make the most aren’t the ones who know the law the best, they’re the “rainmakers,” the ones bringing in all the business. At a certain point your career and monetary progression will be limited if you’re not moving to a relationship-building/sales-style role. It’s like investment banking in that regard.
> The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward
If he's still a "senior programmer" at 44 and not Staff level engineer, it's indeed a rough path ahead.
If it were easy to earn high five figures with a GED, wouldn't the earnings of GED holders be much higher?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
I'd consider 75k/yr "high 5 figures" and this is extremely doable where I'm from. It's not a major metro, just an average industrial city near a port. Everyone in my family does factory work and has done so for 3 generations, I'm the only one in tech.
There are indeed plenty of folks out there making less than 40/yr. They are almost exclusively temp/contract labors with poor work ethic. The people who are dependable typically get hired on full time which comes with a significant pay increase and full benefits.
Not in a way that counter acts the effects. Plus, it doesn't address other health issues like eye strain.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/even-with-...
I never said factory work is backbreaking. It can vary greatly by industry, but is generally more active than an software dev job but harder on knees and such. Yes, there are some manufacturing jobs that you just sit at a machine, but many of the machines still need someone to load them, reset them, etc.
Maybe for you. For me, when I was practicing, law was a very human-oriented thing. My job was about convincing people and companies to do things that they didn't want to do (mostly security). I felt like Charlie Sheen's therapist: If they don't make any changes the client will wind up in jail. But push too hard and they will walk away.
The job is certainly demanding and detail oriented. Analytical, I guess it depends on what you mean by analytical. What I became disillusioned with was how brutally incoherent legal arguments can be. And to be honest, the Python code I encounter is often in better English than the legal code that I encountered. You can try reading the Illinois Compiled Statutes if you would like a taste.
Underrated comment -- literally half of all lawyers I've worked with (financial regulation) admit they chose law because they didn't like math.
I have no personal familiarity with law school but I know in (a good) business school, I had plenty of classmates who struggled with anything beyond very basic math--and sometimes even that. Read any of the "my first year in business school" literature and an essentially universal theme is that the math part was really hard.
Which it's not. And I say this as someone who even back then didn't consider themselves especially strong with mathematics in spite of having an engineering degree.
it evidently wasn't for them and they usually had or were inclined to do an arts degree anyway.
I would love the detailed and analytical aspect of it. Sadly, I hate the contradictions, mistakes, etc that I have experienced with the system. With the vast number of laws and opinions, it seems it's just as much about making the judge like you because they can pick and choose what laws apply (just look at stuff like split opinions). Even if you're not a litigation lawyer, any documents being worked on could lead to litigation. So it seems to me that luck and manipulation play a big part.
I tend to view this as analyzing the same problem under different rule sets. Like, making an argument to a “living constitution” judge can be different than making none to an origins list judge, but there’s an internal logic to each argument. It’s just different axioms and rules.
For example a judge said that he wouldn't dismiss a case during a trial de novo because there was no record of the original trial (magisterial courts are considered courts not of record, but you are allowed to make a recording) showing that the objections were raised there. Then he later said he won't allow the use of prior statements at that magisterial trial to be used to discredit a witness. He also explained that the trial de novo is "a complete do-over". If it is in fact a complete do-over then why won't the petition to dismiss be considered? I understand that you can't introduce facts from the prior trial at a de novo trial, but any documented statement by a witness can be used to discredit them (ie you don't present it like facts in an appeal, but rather question the witness on why their answer is different from their prior statement). Too many details to list here to show the full legal argument.
Then take conflicts of interest and rules of statutory construction. If I have a precedential ruling saying that the letter of the law cannot be ignored to pursue its spirit, but the judge does just that... or how the judiciary has granted themselves special protections not found in the laws passed by congress, specifically that complaints against them are so secret that even if they contain exculpatory evidence it cannot be revealed. But this explanation would turn into a dissertation.
Perhaps the best example is that magistrates aren't even required to be lawyers. I had one think that I was calling him prejudiced for requesting that the case be dismissed with prejudice. How does one tailor their argument to a functional idiot while still adhering to legal procedures/ideas?
Pretty narrow thinking of a liberal arts degree.
As someone that works as a software engineer with a liberal arts degree I've found a lot of my STEM degree holding peers to be lacking considering my expectations and all the high and mighty talk about STEM degrees.
As far as actually teaching them things they would use on the job the STEM degree was no better than any random humanities degree. The only value they say they get out of the STEM degree as opposed to any other degree or no degree is that many employers use a STEM degree as a filter when hiring.
You can also see this whenever any thread about software interviewing comes up. People complain about having to cram memorizing a bunch of algorithms and data structures that companies like to ask about.
Those questions would be right at home on a CS class homework assignment. If the class material was something that working programmers actually had to use they would not need to cram for it when it comes up on interviews.
So yeah, a STEM degree is more valuable for a typical programming job than a humanities degree--but not for any good reason.
And yes, there is a good reason that it's more valuable, particularly for a recent grad. It shows that a prospective job candidate has already put forth some effort in the field (from working on class projects, to exams, to working with other students on larger programs)
I majored in comp sci but I'm not gonna sit around and pretend every aspect of culture and humanity can be solved by my engineering work...
The idea that you intentionally pay huge sums for something whose value shouldn't depend on how much it costs is ridiculous and only acceptable if paying those huge sums will also help you pay them back.
Magento is not cloud based. It's a self-hosted e-commerce platform.
Adobe is really pushing for their cloud solution since they purchased them but the core is OpenSource and still maintained.
High five figures is not good money for a professional in the US.
Not sure that counts as a profession.
Law, medicine, etc.
There's no professional body for corporate design is there?
From the Wikipedia link you provided, graphic design has achieved the first 4 milestones of being a profession:
"an occupation becomes a full-time occupation, the establishment of a training school, the establishment of a university school, the establishment of a local association".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_of_Graphic_...
> many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life.
I have friends with no degree at all pulling down $250k in software. I have a lawyer friend with a law degree and 10 years experience in corporate litigation who makes $125k (but has student loans on top of it, so take-home is way less). Given the amount of stress and long hours, I would view it as a poor move for burned out engineers.
I don’t know if the value proposition is there anymore, but when I burned out from engineering I went the MBA / tech executive route and that absolutely has been worth it from a comp standpoint. I work a lot less, I can delegate the tasks I’m not good at, and feel like I have control over my career in a way I never did as an engineer.
I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.
For the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, however, it can be very rewarding. I’m a decade out of law school, and still enjoying the grind. So is my wife, snd most of the people I graduated with. I’ve got a STEM degree and was a programmer in a previous life, and enjoy the analytical aspect of law. It also combines an element of verbal advocacy and adversarial competition I found lacking in engineering.
I would certainly recommend my kids to go into the profession, at least my oldest who has the temperament for it. What personalities the younger two will have remains to be seen, but I would certainly counsel against them becoming lawyers out of inertia or because they got a useless undergraduate degree. (As an Asian parent, I have no compunction about insisting on STEM degrees for all of them!)