My point is that in terms of average Joe and how he is going to see lawyers and other professionals, every medium (and up) city is going to have a substantial - not majority, far from it, but substantial - bunch of top lawyers earning big money (mid to upper six or even into seven figures). That is going to create a certain impression. And such people are going to be perceived as lawyers: if you are introduced to one they are going to say they are a lawyer, if their name is in the paper they are going to be described as a lawyer.
Contrastingly, outside certain highly rarified and unrepresentative locations like Silicon Valley, most medium (and up) cities are not going to have a bunch of professionals (such as IT professionals) earning that sort of money. And if someone is an IT professional earning that sort of money it’s probably because that person has crossed the line into business owner/entrepreneur, and that is how they will be described and perceived.
I’m not, you understand, saying that lawyer should have such prestige as they may have, but I think it might well be how they get the prestige they get.
Let’s look at what the actual average incomes are for the highest paid careers in the U.S.:
Doctors and surgeons: $168,650-$234,950
Orthodontists and dentists: $161,750-$204,670
Chief Executive Officers: $176,550
Petroleum engineers: $138,980
Lawyers: $130,490
Architectural and engineering managers: $129,350
Natural science managers: $128,230
Marketing managers: $126,190
Computer and information systems managers: $125,660
Industrial-organizational psychologists: $124,160
Financial managers: $120,450
Airline pilots, co-pilots, and flight engineers: $118,070
Sales managers: $116,860
Air traffic controllers: $114,460
Pharmacists: $112,160
That comes from this website:
They list a range for doctors and dentists because it matters what specialty they are.
Note that there isn’t really a huge difference among these jobs. If you can finish your degree, get hired, and stay working in these careers, you’ll be doing all right. The best paying jobs are ones where you don’t have to become a manager to make this much money. This is why being a doctor or a dentist (or a lawyer if you can get a job) is actually a pretty good career. It’s not necessary to ever go into management to do well. I guess going into management for a doctor would be becoming the head of the hospital or the hospital chain or a medical insurance firm. I guess going into management for a lawyer would be being a partner in a huge law firm where one just manages and doesn’t do law work anymore.
For most jobs like the ones above, to really do well it’s necessary to go into management. It’s certainly not true that average IT people do that well. If you get a computer science degree and find a job, you probably won’t make it into this range of salaries unless you either become a manager at a big company or start your own company which does well over the long term. I think it’s unrealistic to list CEO as a job category. Many people get their M.B.A.'s and go into business. Few of them end up as the CEO of a big corporation. Mostly they end up as a mid-level manager at a moderately large company and do no better on average than the jobs listed above.
I don’t know that is necessarily true. It’s a career that skews young because they tend to hire students right out of college and work them 100 hours a week. But usually after a few years, you either burn out, made enough money to do what you want to do or have settled into it as a career.
And yet I never seem to meet a poor lawyer.
Solid skills and job prospects are not the same thing as prestige. Being a Broadway singer is prestigious but there aren’t a lot of transferable skills or jobs in that field.
High income isn’t the same thing as prestige either. Salespeople are often looked at as vapid charlatans and scam artists looking to chase a buck.
Doctors and lawyers are “people jobs”. The perception is that a good doctor is helping sick people. A good lawyer is convincing a court or a judge to their point of view or negotiating with an equally competent counterpart. Engineers and CPAs OTOH are viewed as number crunchers and bean counters.
Corporate lawyers (like the ones who handle M&A stuff) are also viewed as being very close to wealth and power.
For doctors and lawyers, they have the ability to own their own practice or be co-owners of a practice with other partners. So can engineers and CPAs. A marketing manager or air traffic controller typically doesn’t.
Law partners are still required to bring in clients and bill hours.
When people talk about professional prestige, they are typically talking about the upper potential for those fields. Not the statistical mean income.
For IT, they are thinking of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, not Peter and Michael Bolton from Office Space
For lawyers they are imagining some high powered TV lawyer in a $3000 suit or maybe a idealistic crusading DA, not Mitch the real estate attorney from Old School.
Finance people think they will be Gordon Gecko or Warren Buffet, not one of the cold-calling meatheads from Boiler Room.
And I don’t think any med school grad aspires to be JD from Scrubs.
And what I think is interesting is that even with those highest salaries, it would be extremely difficult to buy a condo and raise a family in Manhattan in any way that one might consider “prestigious”.
That’s just something college dropouts and failed lawyers say.
At the partner level, your salary is made of of corporate profits as well. At these levels - this is just salary without stock options, grants or bonuses, which will be the biggest part of your yearly income in a year. Yes, software architects and engineers at the top of their fields working for top companies can pull in $1M a year.
Sure at partner level your income is not just from your own efforts. But this thread is about why law is perceived to be prestigious. Partners in law firms are still perceived as being lawyers because they are typically still “on the tools”. Owners of IT companies are perceived as entrepreneurs.
And as I said above, yes, sure software architects and engineers at the top of their field who are working for top companies might be pulling down $1M a year (though Do Not Taunt’s cite gives no support to that contention) but such people are few and far between . However, what is a your average successful 20 year experienced software architect or engineer working in your average middle American city firm pulling down? $150k? They are what people base their perception on. Not the tiny percentage of architects or engineers who hit the biggest of bigtime.
But those software engineers and architects aren’t enteprenuers either (or not anymore, although sometimes they started that way) - they are employees - like Mark Russinovich or consultants (which, frankly, is what attorneys are). And yes, they are few and far between (though you might be surprised, because I know more than one), but so are million dollar law partners.
Which isn’t to say I don’t completely agree about the perception - the perception is that all lawyers are partners at multi million dollar firms, and all software architects are some version of sweatshop coders. But the truth is that many lawyers scrape together a modest living as an associate or in solo practice, and there are a few software architects pulling seven figures after their options and bonuses.
That’s only if you can get a job. The field is oversaturated for the first time in recorded history, and most places are only hiring new graduates who have done residencies or fellowships (i.e. a way to get a pharmacist for a year or two at half-salary).
I’m still licensed, but I walked away from that last year and have no desire to go back. It doesn’t help that this degree prevents me from getting a job doing anything else.
p.s. My sister’s BFF has a law degree, but for many years, she has worked in an unrelated field and doesn’t even have her law license any more. She found the theory interesting, but didn’t care for the practice.
Are those guys actually going to be slinging much code, though? Usually when you get something like “lead” or “senior” added to your job description, you’re now a manager supervising a group of people who do the thing you used to do. IME, what makes “the professions” unique is that you can get into those high dollar salary ranges while still actually working in the trenches. You can also move up to something like a hospital administrator or a senior partner where you’re supervising groups of doctors or lawyers and make really silly huge amounts of money, but you an also move pretty high up the salary scale simply by being a good practicing doctor or attorney. Are there really any programmers out there who are making into the high six figures simply by virtue of their skill as a programmer? My impression is no.
The interesting thing, though, is that the most successful private attorneys do lots of sales. Most of your business is bringing clients in the door. I mean real attorneys at real, run of the mill law firms… not the shite you see on TV.
I practice in a large county in NoVA, but the community is very insular and old school. My husband hung out his shingle, so to speak. He is an excellent small businessman, and spends a good deal of his time focusing on this aspect of having his own law firm. He approached advertising from a new perspective (i.e., the internet - how avante garde), and really changed how a lot of folks advertised. Because they literally couldn’t compete. He is very successful, but most of this is because of his business savvy, rather than his orating skills.
As a public defender, I don’t need to advertise.
To answer the question though, being a practicing lawyer is being a part of white-collar profession; with a long and rich history. There is prestige in that (even if it is mostly self-congratulatory), regardless of how much money you are making. And the market wasn’t quite so bad when I went to law school in 2001. But I am lucky that I live in a state that cares about indigent defense.
I do wonder how many people earn law degrees, and wind up not practicing law (at least, not in the long term).
Out of my circle of close friends in college (which was also my D&D gaming group), three of them went on to law school, earned their degrees, and passed the bar. Of the three, none practiced law for more than four or five years:
One (the one who practiced for five years) went back to school to get his PhD in his undergrad field (microbiology) – he’s now working as a researcher
One is getting his PhD now, in order to teach at a law school
The third left law, tended bar for a while, and is now in IT.
My dad is a pharmacist and despite him being in poor health and close to retirement he would get various job offers all the time. Pharmacy is supposed to be a field experiencing a shortage over the next 10 years. Maybe this is just a temporary trend due to the recession.
But that is the problem with jobs like that (and nursing). There is a shortage so they increase workloads and stress on the remaining workers, causing more people to quit or retire and making the shortage worse.
I know two pharmacists who went to law school. One works as a lawyer (at a health insurance company, no less!) but has kept her pharmacist’s license and does some relief work. The other one realized halfway through his L3 year that he really didn’t want to be an attorney after all, but he did graduate and take the bar exam, and last I heard was working at Wal-Mart. THAT Wal-Mart knows not to screw HIM out of pay or benefits. :dubious:
I get postcards in the mail all the time advertising jobs here and there. They’re usually from Wal-Mart.
A while back, I met someone whose pharmacist father had died many years earlier, and he lived in that house now and STILL got mail for him, which included ads for job openings. :smack:
I recently found out that a pharmacist I used to work with whose license was revoked (for theft, no less) is now working at a steakhouse. I wonder how she managed that, because if you Google her name, this pops up.
True. I think they both are (or can be) noble professions that require lots of smarts, dedication and experience. However, you can make similar statements about several other professions that aren’t glamorized or idealized nearly so often. That is why I asked. It isn’t to disparage doctors or lawyers. It has been a long time since the typical practitioner of those professions enjoyed the benefits that are popularly perceived to be associated with them while some other professions have caught up with them or passed them by some measures.
The discussion above almost immediately drifted off into a focus on money but that is not what gives doctors and lawyers prestige. Money is secondary and almost a tawdry consideration.
The reasons are complex but deep knowledge and intellect are part of the answer. Both professions deal with people in their most vulnerable moments and remain fiercely independent from outside pressures.
In the 19th century, doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and men of the cloth were all accorded a high social standing. But times and attitudes do change and the latter three have faded from public respect.
