Ask HN: Have you ever considered leaving tech because you didn’t feel fulfilled?

To be clear, when I see or use "tech" on HackerNews, I think modern (2006 and after) software companies that either started as startups that sought and received venture funding, or adopted a similar playbook, and which are culturally in that mode.

With those caveats/assumptions stated, the key ways in which tech is better:

1) People take the work seriously, but not themselves seriously. I find in law this isn't really the case. People are obviously serious about the work, especially in biglaw or dedicated nonprofit orgs, but there is a lot of pomposity in law, and a lot of just bullshit work politics stuff. This isn't totally absent from tech, ofc, esp in really big tech companies, but I think there is less of it, and also we have a discourse about how stupid/toxic it is, which is almost totally absent from law.

2) Obviously, tech is in the business of innovation and change, and other industries aren't going to match it, but in law in particular, there is such an active suspicion of it that it makes me feel point number 1; that they don't actually prioritize getting the stuff done. I do not think the perverse incentive of the billable hour fully accounts for this. I think a lot of it is plain arrogance and blindness. This one is definitely more law-specific; you could work at places like stodgy Fortune 500 companies, and they'd likely be way more open to innovation and change than law.

3) Absolutely no planning and everything just being a flurry of low-skill ad-hoc projects/tasks. Devs are the only ones who do sprint-planning and try to define what they are doing. Outside of tech, people abuse email instead of using things like Slack for certain communications (I know Slack can also be abused and become useless), and think that email is a project management tool. This might sound silly, and maybe devs hate standup (I used to) and PMs who spend a bunch of time hand-wringing in Jira or w/e, but I can tell you now that the entropy when you don't have that stuff is wild. Everyone knows that lawyers are high-strung and anxious and stressed. I can tell you the practice of law doesn't have to be that way, at least not all the time, but they make it way harder than it needs to be because they are incompetent and like feeling that what they do is hard when it isn't.

4) Skill: Software development is a skill and a hobby in a way that almost no other job can be. Lawyering involves skill too, but it is obscured by the fact they have no tooling and processes to allow them to focus on actual lawyering. Instead, because of the other stuff mentioned herein, such as lack of planning, lack of proper software tooling, etc., much of even the upper echelons of lawyering simply involves performing or managing very stupid secretarial bullshit tasks. Plus, one can't just sit down and lawyer if they want. There has to be a case etc. Can't just make one up.

5) Lack of autonomy and creativity. I guess this is more personal preference; I am a creative type, and I consider software engineering to be a creative job. That was my experience of it at least, and since I always worked at small startups, I had a good amount of freedom to get things done how I wanted and to exercise creativity within certain parameters. There is just none of that in a lot of other jobs. Bureaucracy governs most other jobs, esp law. In law in particular, no lawyer can truly be autonomous; at the end of the day, you are an agent for a client. This bothers me a lot, personally.

I had to write this on the fly, and I feel like it isn't comprehensive...