Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.
This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.
My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.
This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.
A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.
Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.
https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...
Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".
It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".
I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.
Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.
Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.
An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.
Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing my property taxes in Cook Country, IL. The attorneys who do this regularly work on commission and charge 10-20% of what they save you. This nets them in some cases 3-5K for a day, or even half a day's, work.
I'm not suggesting there's some terrible moralistic injustice being done here. Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL. Keep in mind, huge numbers of people graduate college in the US and can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone manipulate symbolic logic or apply the kind of structured, rigorous thinking required to write bug-free code. And then consider how much overall demand there is for it, all the things computers can be made to do, the reach, and the scale, and it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.
Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.
Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.
That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.
That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.
While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.
Well your lawyer isn’t running around telling everyone that what he does is easy and anyone can do it, he isn’t slagging off every other lawyer and telling you the contract needs to be totally rewritten in a very slightly different style every 6 months, he isn’t crowing about a lawyer shortage and calling for open borders to get foreign lawyers to make up the numbers...
Plumbers and electricians don’t do this either. In fact no one else is so eager to devalue their own work.
The general disempowerment of tech workers relative to lawyers, accountants, doctors, MBA’s and so on is 100% of tech’s own making.
You should do some research on how much mathematicians and theoretical physicists who actually do crazy feats of applied and/or pure math (as opposed to using some standard library sorting routine and calling that crazy feats of applied math) and put insane hours into incomprehensibly difficult problems get paid. (Granted, there’s seldom immediate effects on economy.) Then you’ll probably feel lucky.
Bear in mind that the tradie who does the job is most likely not getting paid $90/hr. There's overheads and profit margins involved.
Now, add in liability insurance and other normal business overhead, custom tools, and niche market effects, and $500 an hour isn't out of the question.
I guess they fall into the dumb-ass category of your binary classification of everyone as either software engineers or dumb-asses.
In the end, pain, especially financial, teaches; and its what helps people push themselves forward and up.
Why is it that these high $ software jobs in CA have not been outsourced to India?
It typically takes 4 years of undergrad + 3 years of law school + passing the bar exam to be a lawyer. If software engineers had to overcome similar hurdles to legally work in the industry, there would be significantly less of them.
