31–40 of 82 posts
I've known network consultants who charged banks and other Wall St firms $2600/hr for troubleshooting. A network outage could easily cost some of these firms millions of dollars per hour, so paying $2600/hr to fix such an outage is petty cash in comparison.
> $2600/hr for troubleshooting
1. Lawyers incur more liability with their work. 2. The quantity of workload they provide per job is less, thus pricing is more dense (i.e. companies realize programmers work thousands of hours for a project and that the project viability would collapse at $700/hr) 3. In many cases you have no choice but to hire a lawyer, while more often you can say no to a programmer should the economics not support the project. 4.…
Presumably the majority of "bread and butter" legal cases don't require an innovative step? Rather, they involve rolling out a set of standard arguments and countering a set of standard arguments put forward by the opposition, a bit like a chess game? I'm talking straighforward stuff, rather than the types of cases that set legal precedent.
If so, wouldn't it be a case of cramming a machine full of the necessary legal information, then doing a search to navigate a path to a winning position? If a winning position with the required certainty could not be found by the machine, the legal advice might be "call a human lawyer".
A failure of a free market for legal services. Anyone can become a professional ios developer, there is free entry/exit in this market. The ABA artificially limits the number of potential lawyers with the Bar and requiring you go to an accredited school.[1] An intelligent individual cannot educate themselves in the legal field in their spare time and get to the point where they can hang their own shingle in the same…
That's not it, there are too many attorneys as it is (new grads aren't finding jobs). One big difference is people brag about a high paid attorney (it's considered a good thing to pay a lot for legal advice) but never brag about how much they pay their developers (it's considered a good thing to pay less for developers).
Moreover the "new grads without jobs" is a fairly recent development.* Recent grads with jobs are certainly not billing $700 an hour, so I'm not really sure what that has to do with the original question.
* Given the recent decline in LSAT registrations it is clear that this supply surplus is temporary and is not the new normal.
* law firms are inefficient in their use of technology * legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above) * if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs * lawyers are more at the beck and…
I'm sure there are as many lawyers who love or hate their job as there are developers that do... some people (like myself) love doing the work but I have many colleagues who find it tedius and boring. I would say also not an excuse.
Security or data integrity flaws are no more apparent than contract holes, and often are equally as disruptive.
Developers aren't at the beck and call? Lol I would say that's a misconception. Late nights and weekends are NO stranger to developers. Especially in actual companies (vs independent) where deadlines are approaching its very common to be strongly encouraged (read: required) to work weekends.
It's more likely that the combination of cheap alternatives (outsourcing, developer living in a carboard box in san diego, etc) are numerous and you don't need indepth knowledge to click buttons on your program to see it works like you wanted it to but you do need all that knowledge to look at a contract and confirm its legitimacy.
* You can't just read a legal book over the weekend and call yourself an attorney.
* Open source and Free software. While lawyers do do some pro-bono work, there's not nearly as much of it being done as there is volunteer work being done by software developers around the world.
The second answer, which is also helpful, uses graphs from these articles, which helps illustrate the bimodal distribution: http://www.gradschools.com/article-detail/worst-reasons-law-... http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/the-two-track-l...
* law firms are inefficient in their use of technology * legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above) * if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs * lawyers are more at the beck and…
Sweeping floors and cleaning toilets is also pretty boring, but I don't see anyone paying janitors more because of it.