From what I can tell, this is just to keep money in the hands of lawyers and keep prices high.

There are plenty of things that could be done better now by non-lawyers with the help of lawyers (look at Rocket law).

Why shouldn‘t money from law be kept in the hands of lawyers? It‘s a grueling education with an even more grueling exam and even now a lot of law graduates can barely afford to keep a roof over their head

Because the profession is meant to serve the public interests and not just be a money grab. According to government data, the median lawyer is in the top 10% of income earners.

To put numbers on it. To get to the top 10% of income you only have to make around $120K.

Correct. ONet data puts the median lawyer at about $127k. From what I could find, 90th percentile of income is around $126k.

While I know HN is probably SV and software biased, saying "only" $120k comes across as out-of-touch for the way most people live. For comparison, the median SF lawyer makes $191k according to BLS data. I could not quickly find 90 percentile data for the area.

Your average Enterprise CRUD developer in any major city in the US can hit that number within 3-5 years and a job hop. It’s not exclusively a SV thing.

And your number is correct according to Census data.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...

I agree, but it's still out of touch. (not a knock on you, we are all subjectively influenced by what we come into contact with the most and interpreting it as 'normal'. It's also why something like 90% of people consider themselves middle class.) The fact that you have to narrow it down to software development and major cities should tell you that much. That's also why my original comment included both SV and software as biasing factors.

The average person does not develop software and does not live in a major city. If somebody is making double the median wage and 2.5x the average wage and complaining about keeping a roof over their head, they can probably expect some sideways glances. It's like when people complain about the difficulty of making ends meet once they make their Lexus payment and pay their kids private tuition bill. The subjective struggle may be legitimate but it's still out of touch with the experience of most people.

Many states of laws regulating the "corporate practice of medicine." But it seems like that leads to a hospital just being bunch of loosely held together independent businesses/contractors.

What does that even mean? All lawyers have support staff where the lawyers “share” their billable votes with non lawyers

I'm pretty sure no jurisdiction allows lawyers to share their billable hours with their support staff. You have to pay them either hourly or salary, not linked to how many hours you're billing. You can't give them a law firm stock package or say they get a 10% commission on all billed revenue or something. At best, some jurisdictions allow law firms to give an annual bonus if the firm does well.

> I believe states typically require accounting and engineering firms to either be wholly or two-thirds owned by such professionals as well.

What states are these, Canadian states?

In the US, many many many SaaS shops are wholly owned by businessmen / bean counters. It's like, weird, to be an engineer who runs a software company.

I feel like the person you are responding to was not meaning software engineering. Electrical engineering, Chemical engineering, Civil engineering, Mechanical engineering, etc are all more likely: especially as what you say about software engineering is definitely well known.

> engineering firm

> SaaS shop

Now, I get we like to refer to ourselves as Software Engineers, but surely you understand he means actual certified engineering firms, not groups of code monkeys, right? Software is virtually never engineering, you'd have to get to a situation like flight control software before you're doing anything legit

I am a software engineer and do not consider myself a code monkey. Do not speak for all of us.

If you have never stepped into a domain where you have to formally verify your software, I think you should probably not take too much offense to such a comment. While I admit it may be slightly negatively connoted, I primarily used it to illustrate that the kind of engineering going into making a bridge differs greatly from making your UI widget pixel-perfect or your SQL query from being too polynomial

I’m sure “sales engineers” feel the same way…

I believe this is in reference to Professional Engineering firms, which often requires PEs either as owners or in certain roles. As far as I'm aware software engineers are not required to be Professional Engineers in the US for most tasks, nor are SaaS shops required to be licensed as Engineering firms.

[1] https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/engineering-fir...

NCEES did toy with the idea of a software engineer Professional Engineer license, but it went away due to too little interest. I think it was in part that industry didn't want it because it would give more leverage to SEs. IMO the only way that will become commonplace is if it is forced by regulation.

They are talking about the "applied physics" engineering fields.