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From Lawyer to Programmer

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11–20 of 44 posts

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#11
Good for you. I'm in the middle of a similar career shift. I studied food science in college with bright-eyed dreams of entering food product development. Instead, I ended up a front-line supervisor at a factory and it was the most miserable experience. I knew I was good at programming and I was obsessed with it as a young kid, but it was never something that I felt was "cool" to study and none of my friends did anything like that. (Girls don't like computers, that stuff's for nerds! And I still felt like that in college, even at a heavily engineering school.)

It makes me really happy to see other women become programmers after other careers. We aren't alone!

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#12
I've often thought that legal reasoning and thinking computationally are very close kin, being the only two vocations with the job description of "logician" so to me this just sounds like a very reasonable lateral move—albeit, one with more challenges than most. I wish the OP luck... although I think excellent software engineering requires a healthy dose of pessimism too.

Sidenote: Charles Stross explores the intersection of computation and law (and many other ideas) in Accelerando (think, as the Singularity takes hold, sentient business plans with Turing complete articles of incorporation rule the ball of mostly dust that used to be the solar system). It's a free and enjoyable ebook:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#13

The "Law School changes how you think" line seems to be a popular one, but I'm not sure I buy the premise that it's inherently different. Anyone know of studies done to compare neurological effects between fields of study? I wonder if she'll feel the same about coding after finishing hackbright.

Not quite what you mentioned, but somewhat relevant: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/08/22/intense-prep-for-l...

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#14
post #9

The article states "law is perhaps the only field where being a pessimist is actually an advantage", but I actually find this is an attribute that programmers and lawyers share. In developing code, one is always trying to think of all the possible inputs and outputs includes the unintended corner cases in order to write robust code. I would say the two professions are more alike than credit is given, and working as a…

[deleted]

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#15
I quit law school because I could see it was going to be a misery.

(This is a less dramatic situation in Australia because law is an undergraduate degree in this country).

Nevertheless, I greatly value the habits of thought that law school taught. I find the legal way of thinking illuminates a lot of the work I do, and the practice in writing brief upon opinion upon statement upon tutorial paper is an education in itself.

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#16

The "Law School changes how you think" line seems to be a popular one, but I'm not sure I buy the premise that it's inherently different. Anyone know of studies done to compare neurological effects between fields of study? I wonder if she'll feel the same about coding after finishing hackbright.

> The "Law School changes how you think" line seems to be a popular one, but I'm not sure I buy the premise that it's inherently different.

I've done both.

Law teaches how to bring rigour to fuzziness. In software we can set boundaries and push the fuzziness back into the problem domain. Lawyers can't do that, they must address the world as it is.

Let me explain what I mean.

Suppose you use constants with values for HOT, WARM, COOL and COLD. In a normal computing system you will need to define these precisely -- you'll need to give float or decimal values to the thresholds between them.

By setting those thresholds, we simply make the complexity go away. Users wind up carrying the bag for any paradoxes that arise.

Lawyers can't do that, they deal with linguistic variables:

The reasonable person similarly circumstanced.

The buyer at arm's length without notice.

Offer and acceptance.

Reasonably foreseeable.

You can't give any of these a hard value (though the general features of each are pretty clear for almost all cases). They are fuzzy sets.

Dealing with fuzzy sets without destructively reducing it to ordinary logic is almost unique to law. About the only other people doing it are some control engineers and the attendant theoreticians.

edit:

I'd also add that the experience of extremely careful examination of facts and teasing out subtle distinctions are useful skills. So too the learned ability to do that with buckets of documents, quickly, and then having to draft reasonably straightforward briefs or case notes.

I find that skill particularly useful when discussing requirements / user stories.

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#18

The "Law School changes how you think" line seems to be a popular one, but I'm not sure I buy the premise that it's inherently different. Anyone know of studies done to compare neurological effects between fields of study? I wonder if she'll feel the same about coding after finishing hackbright.

Look up "legal reasoning" on ssrn: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2000788&#... http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2145478

There are a bunch of papers on what counts. My take away was that many courses of study say they have a way of reasoning, but at the end of 4 years (or an additional 3), most students perform no better on abstract tests of whatever metric was selected for that major (e.g. law, analogic reasoning

Re: From Lawyer to Programmer

#19
Here's another one (not written by me): "My Story: From Lawyer to Ruby Hacker" http://coffeespoonsofcode.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/my-story-...

It's always interesting to see these types of posts on HN. I disliked the whole 'law thing' so much that after graduating from law school and passing the bar, I never applied for a single legal job but instead went into tech (which has been my true passion since I was 9 years old). In my case, I learned that it's always a bad idea to live out someone else's dreams instead of your own. In other words: don't go to law school simply because your parents/spouse/etc want you to.

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