Re:The Falling-Down Professions
by geebee on Monday January 07, 2008 @09:45AM
(#95619)
My gripe with the legal and medical professions is that I think they use licensing, ostensibly meant to protect the public, to create cartels and up the cost of their services.
I attended a single semester of law school before dropping out and getting an MS in Engineering, and believe me, it wasn't because law is "too hard". I'm convinced that you can get through a top law school while sitting on your thumb, dude. There's nothing in there that a reasonably bright and literate high school student can't handle. I'm not saying it's easy - a reasonably bright high school student is a pretty well educated person. But it's not in the same leage as grad programs in hard science, math, or engineering. I think the main reason for the 3-year grad degree is to keep smart people who could figure this out more quickly and offer services for less money out of the field. To make it worse, lawyers lobby heavily for regulations that tend to increase their billable hours. Restrict supply, increase demand, largely through government manipulation. I just couldn't be a part of it.
Medicine is a bit less objectionable, but I do believe that the Nurse Practitioner field has shown that a very high quality of independent care provider in less time. Nurse practitioners have to do quite a bit of grad school and apprenticing, so it's still a degree-intensive field. But physicians have definitely tried to use licensing to limit the competition they feel from NPs.
This is why I like, and admire, the software field. It's totally open and free. If my clients want to open up a book and try to learn it themselves, they are free to do so. If they want to hire someone right out of high school, they are free to do so. If they want only a PhD out of Stanford, that's fine too, as long as they're willing to pay. It's a genuinely open and free market - and while that means there are a lot of truly crap programmers, it also means that a brilliant person who is ready to contribute doesn't have to deal with a cartel that wants to keep him or her out.
I attended a single semester of law school before dropping out and getting an MS in Engineering, and believe me, it wasn't because law is "too hard". I'm convinced that you can get through a top law school while sitting on your thumb, dude. There's nothing in there that a reasonably bright and literate high school student can't handle. I'm not saying it's easy - a reasonably bright high school student is a pretty well educated person. But it's not in the same leage as grad programs in hard science, math, or engineering. I think the main reason for the 3-year grad degree is to keep smart people who could figure this out more quickly and offer services for less money out of the field. To make it worse, lawyers lobby heavily for regulations that tend to increase their billable hours. Restrict supply, increase demand, largely through government manipulation. I just couldn't be a part of it.
Medicine is a bit less objectionable, but I do believe that the Nurse Practitioner field has shown that a very high quality of independent care provider in less time. Nurse practitioners have to do quite a bit of grad school and apprenticing, so it's still a degree-intensive field. But physicians have definitely tried to use licensing to limit the competition they feel from NPs.
This is why I like, and admire, the software field. It's totally open and free. If my clients want to open up a book and try to learn it themselves, they are free to do so. If they want to hire someone right out of high school, they are free to do so. If they want only a PhD out of Stanford, that's fine too, as long as they're willing to pay. It's a genuinely open and free market - and while that means there are a lot of truly crap programmers, it also means that a brilliant person who is ready to contribute doesn't have to deal with a cartel that wants to keep him or her out.