Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#61

Post by SilasX » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

imcrs wrote: post #7

Law has changed since the 80s and 90s. The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial. Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive). It's no surprise to me that law scho…

I've always suspected it was an artifact of the legal infrastructure failing to scale with demand. This chokes the courts and forces disputes to be settled outside of it (perhaps with a minimal final-stage "blessing" from a judge).

The "demand" (number of disputes) increases with the number of interactions, which is roughly the square of the number of people (each pair is another potential dispute). So if

- population is increasing, and

- supply (courts and lawyers) does not increase as fast as the square, and

- legal technology does not increase output per person[1],

then the backlog steadily increases and people have to work around it.

[1] Many economists insist that law inherently experiences Baumol's cost disease of resistance to technological improvements due to high human component of output, but I think that's more an artifact of the constrains we place on courts.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#62

Post by throwaway344 » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #26

theVirginian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree

I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+…

Where did you go to business school?

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#63

Post by mmanfrin » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

[Anecdotally] I was on my way to Law School but decided to start a job in QA at a startup. Three months later I was writing code, and 9 months after that I left to find my first truly-engineering spot. Haven't looked back.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#64

Post by chojeen » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:00 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #9

woah wrote: post #8

We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.

Believe it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job. Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.

And it's not like these people are useless. I knew a guy like this in college, and he eventually settled into a decent job. Not everybody needs to be passionate about their work.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#65

Post by woah » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #27

kps wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding ... and personal time allocation that reveals things you're not legally allowed to ask directly.

I used to write code in my free time before I married and had kids. I used to do a lot of stuff in my free time before then. For a self-insured employer, the fact that I have a family makes me more expensive to employ. Hiring only young, single males or young, single, and sterile females allows them to raise base salary offers without inflating total compensation. But they are not allowed by law to use the size of my…

I think that we should expect employers to allow open source contributions where it is appropriate. Breaking out general purpose stuff into libraries is more maintainable code anyway. If your current employer is hurting your career prospects, you should quit.

I'm not really concerned about whatever supposed "hidden biases" there are in open source, the simple fact is that the best way to judge someone's work is to see it.

If you're concerned about hidden biases I would direct you to the status quo brainteasers used today, where the interviewer simply has a blank slate to project whatever personal biases they have onto the candidate in a highly subjective, highly unrealistic situation that has nothing to do with actual programming.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#66

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:04 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#67

Post by cbd1984 » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

theVirginian wrote: post #35

arjunnarayan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a tim…

Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.

CS is also about creatively using fixed rules to get a desired result.

But then, so's engineering.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#68

Post by bigger_cheese » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:32 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #26

theVirginian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree

I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+…

When I was at uni we used to talk about "contact hours", which was basically how many hours you spent per week in lectures, labs and tutorials. In my first year (studying Engineering) I had about 20-25 contact hours a week, that didn't include time spent studying working on assignments etc. From what I remember that was at the upper end of most undergraduate courses.

In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks.

While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week.

There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#69

Post by vezzy-fnord » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #56

stephengillie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying this is a good time to start a law career?

In ten years, a huge amount of legal work will be done with software. A gigantic codified legal system is a job almost tailor made for machine learning.

Could you elaborate? I think a better approach would be to revise the legal codex so that it becomes simple enough for individuals to research and lower dependency on professional lawyers.

Moreover, I disagree with the common analogy made in circles like HN that laws resemble code. Perhaps in some esoteric probabilistic language they might, though I don't believe thinking such as "ML will fix this" will yield a proper correspondence.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#70

Post by amyjess » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 10:59 PM UTC

theVirginian wrote: post #35

arjunnarayan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a tim…

Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.

You could also think of law as a form of code.