They're both trimodal if anything.

- People make the most in Big 4 law/tech firms, as well as a handful of boutique firms.

- Most people work elsewhere, making a respectable living but nothing extraordinary like the baove.

- Last but not least, there are folks working as IT/paralegal, who did not manage to break into developer/lawyer.

This last one is very brutal for law careers, if you did not manage to qualify or pass the bar the year you were supposed to, you've lost your chance for life, whereas in technology a formal engineering degree is not a hard requirement.

Tri modal in US (public sector and nontech companies, tech startups and midsize tech companies, big tech), except that any of the US citizen programmers can switch between any of the tiers

People are pushing harder to make programming more inclusive simply because it is lucrative (aside from more accurately addressing societal needs if it was more inclusive), but it already has some realities that are way more open than other lucrative professions

I don’t think they are as bimodal like lawyer salaries. I have no quantitative data to back that assertion though.

Dan Luu wrote a blog investigating this exact comparison and also didn't have good enough data to draw a strong conclusion.

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

Yeah, you have this stereotype that you have partners at white shoe law firms who all went to Harvard or Yale and all the other lawyers doing real estate closings from an office in a strip mall.

In practice, there are plenty of lawyers who are in-house counsels for large companies, own successful law practices in smaller cities and large towns, etc. who make decent money often in moderate cost of living areas.

This is old data, and not really conclusive, but it indicated that things were heading that way in 2016. I don't know of anything that would have changed that trend, FAANGs are even more of an outlier now I'd guess.

http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/