From Lawyer to Programmer
erincodes.wordpress.comThe 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 programmer in a lawyer-heavy firm, I've often been told by those in the legal profession that programmers have the ability to think logically stepwise through law more clearly than others.
The thinking process behind both are very similar indeed. At the core of both is true problem solving. You are given a set of constraints and facts, and you have to apply some set of rules (man made laws, or algorithms) in order to take the input and create a result that you want.
I think it is for this reason that many on HN enjoy discussing the law (of course it does have many other practical consequences as well). And although OP did the opposite, I would encourage many technical minded people to consider law as an option - much of the reason that laws suck for technology is because the people who work with the law on a daily basis do not understand the technology, and it would be great if we had more general tech literacy in the legal profession.
"You are given a set of constraints and facts, and you have to apply some set of rules (man made laws, or algorithms) in order to take the input and create a result that you want."
I'm a programmer and I have a law degree, but I don't quite agree with your assessment. Practicing law (as opposed to the study of it) isn't usually about applying the law to facts; most of the time, it's representing the facts in a way that is favorable to your party under a given set of rules. It's a lot more soul-crushing than I thought it would be (I still like the theoretical, academic aspects, so I stick to those areas now)
"I think it is for this reason that many on HN enjoy discussing the law"
Well now we're getting near a pet peeve of mine - the absolute cluelessness about law that most technologists have. Most take one or two paragraphs, read it literally in a way that is beneficial to their prejudices, and call themselves lawyers, using the 'law = algorithm' analogy. I see very little nuanced legal reasoning when it comes to topics nerds like to discuss (look no further than all the nonsense written about the Aaron Swartz case a few months ago, and the idiotic responses when people like Orin Kerr write an actually informed piece about it).
See, I found Orin Kerr's piece to be incredibly uninformed (as to the specifics of the case) because he literally wrote it by taking the complaint at full face value - this was despite the entire controversy being about whether there were facts to support allegations that Aaron was trespassing, broke and entered, stole property, etc...
but that's another topic, it was as you said at least more informed than the average person (but disappointing for a law professor and former CAFA prosecutor/defender).
and just to add to this conversation, I will have my law degree in a month and I'm just now starting to learn programming. I plan to use it in conjunction with things like Latex for building better briefs, building a robust issue bank, etc... - things that will enable me to be a better lawyer in practice.
Latex for briefs? Ah, the idealism of youth. (I was going to revolutionize legal research through artificial intelligence) Most lawyers don't have the time, and almost every court I practiced in had rules specifying a utilitarian uniformity that made fancy formatting superfluous.
I would agree. I think using Latex for a brief is likely to get a deputy clerk sending you a notice. District Courts will have local rules on formatting (with California having the oddest one I have seen yet).
What little similarity I found between the disciplines in law school evaporated in practice. I was at a middle of the pack Biglaw firm (not exactly chasing ambulances) and very few partners could form a logical argument. Not that they needed to - threats, leverage, and obfuscation were plenty effective with emotional clients, overworked/underqualified(domain knowledge) judges, and dumb opposing counsel.
I think programming is a bit more rewarding in this special case as you can preempt the outcome with unit tests ;)
Unit tests are merely approximations of what challenges you can imagine your application will need to face. An analogy can be drawn to the body of precedent in case law.
Precedent only deals with regression, which is also useful to document in code, but should not be your only source of documentation.
The purpose of testing, though oft missed due to the name we have given it, is to document your code. The tests explain intent, usage, etc. that can often not be conveyed by the code alone. Verification that the documentation does what it claims comes as an added bonus, of course, and is why we recommend testing over writing comments. Though comments can also be useful in certain situations – right tool for the job and all that.
I feel like law could benefit greatly from something that mirrors TDD, not only to help convey intent of the law, which is information often lost as years pass, but also to help third-parties better understand what the law says. The exact same reasons why we write tests for code. Starting to write that documentation after the code is already in production, so to speak, seems too late.
Law is like code. Documentation is nice. For law it's widely available. But all that counts is the law. Well-written documentation is not a substitute and a court will not give you leeway if you were mislead by mistaken documentation.
In common law countries, the entire process of law is actually a black box functional test. And again: that's the only test that counts. Everything else might be wrong.
Also painters.
It's been just over 3 years since I last practiced law, and I just let my last state license go inactive. I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out. The job hunt can be frustrating, but after a few months, someone took a chance on me as a mobile developer, and now I've got 3 years experience in a decently hot field. The best part may be the people. There are jerks in every occupation, but nothing attracts and cultivates horrible personalities - bosses, co-workers, and especially clients - like a law office.
Keep running hard! Great to read about other people taking a leap like this.
I went through something similar. Quit finance, hacked my ass off for a year then Google gave me a chance. Everything has been amazing ever since :)
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.
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!
What is a recommended accelerated developer program like hackbright but for everyone(not just women)?
Check out App Academy (http://appacademy.io), a 9 week accelerated developer program that I help run. Email's in the profile if you have any questions.
There are lots of them. Dev Bootcamp and App Academy come to mind, but google and you'll find plenty of options.
There's lots of material online if you just want to learn. ADUni, OCW etc etc.
The Disruption Institute has a mobile development program http://www.disruptioninstitute.com
We run Tealeaf Academy, which is an online based web dev bootcamp focusing on Ruby and Rails. Read more on our website: www.gotealeaf.com
I quit teaching very recently (I have a Masters in English) to pursue programming as well. In all careers you make a lot of mistakes, but with teaching, you only get another crack at the problem once a year. If you create a terrible lesson, you agonize about it, and you might not get it right the second time either.
Add to that the fact that schools are always really slow to change, requiring you to fight for anything remotely progressive (the school I was teaching in graded multiple choice entrance exams by hand); it's really easy to get sucked into the traditional educational model even if you don't believe in it; and teaching doesn't allow for the creativity I want in my life.
I suddenly realized that I wanted to be creating not evaluating — to be always learning and building on what I know. Programming does seem to offer that.
"I had considered only my ambition and values, without stopping to think in an honest, meaningful way about what would make me happy on a day-to-day basis"
Sad thing is, most people don't think about what makes them happy. They simply try to live up to societal norms & expectations.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from John Lennon:
"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life."
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...
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.
I'm a developer who has worked in law firms for over 10 years. There is an interesting overlapping career for legal/IT literate people - the Business Analyst. A good Business Analyst can analyze legal processes and recommend suitable IT solutions to help automate/streamline the legal workflow. One of the biggest problems law firms face is the disconnect between lawyers and technology. Anyone who can understand both will find a rewarding career in a Business Analyst position.
This is an interesting story, and as a hardware engineer looking to get into pure coding, I find it encouraging. That said, there's no shortage of online code-camps that are willing to accept your tuition. As my company isn't going to front the $5-10k that many schools want to charge, I'm more interested in hearing about the employment prospects/ROI that result from these schools.
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.
I apologize in advance for what will be at least a partially incorrect comment.
But don't lawyers deal with this fuzziness to some extent by putting the question to a jury? For instance, suppose we were writing a software application to decide when to shut down a machine because it got "too hot". We could go ahead and assign a specific temperature, or perhaps set up an equation with a few different readings.
Now suppose there was some litigation because a tennis player collapsed during a tournament that was "too hot". Would the lawyer define "too hot", or would the jury? You could have a situation where all parties agree on the law, and that it turns on whether it was "too hot", and the legal system would treat the jury's definition almost as definitively as a temperature reading input into an algorithm, right?
You would never have such litigation in the first place--there is no such tort or legal concept of "too hot".
On the other hand, if the player were to sue for negligence, then the question of whether it was "too hot" is a factual question that the jury would decide, after the lawyers present evidence for their preferred answer (and possibly evidence against the undesired answer).
The jury's finding would be a finding of "fact" as to whether it was "too hot" would apply only to that case, because their finding would necessarily depend on the specific facts of that case. Juries cannot make findings of "law", which are general principles/rules that can be applied to other cases.
> Would the lawyer define "too hot", or would the jury?
The jury.
> the legal system would treat the jury's definition almost as definitively as a temperature reading input into an algorithm, right?
For this case, yes. For all time, no. The fuzzy set of "too hot" would become the legal precedent (the stare decisis). The actual temperature would remain a question of fact and not law.
If you read up on how fuzzy logic is applied in control systems, you'll see that there's always steps to take non-fuzzy inputs and "fuzzify" them before performing the fuzzy logic itself. Afterwards you de-fuzzify to get a crisp output.
Courts work very much like that: the law retains fuzziness because no crisply algorithmic system can encompass the total complexity of the human world. That's how equity arose ... which is a law history lesson for another day.
Very well and succinctly put.
At the top of the list I'd put "the learned ability to do that with buckets of documents, quickly, and then having to draft reasonably straightforward briefs or case notes."
One's goggles in going through the rooms of buckets of documents are tuned to those "fuzzy sets" of legal issues. An ancient lawyer once said that lawyering is the art of finding the relevant.
Or as Edmund Burke put it: "Law sharpens the mind, by narrowing it."
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
Not quite what you mentioned, but somewhat relevant: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/08/22/intense-prep-for-l...
One of my former colleagues shocked me when he revealed that he was a medical doctor but gave it up because he hated it. Instead, we hacked on software together. It's amazing how many different backgrounds there are in the field of programming (I went to uni to be an economist).
Hehe... Good luck in your new career, I hope it's a good fit. The last lawyer-turned-software-guy I met decided to go back after a couple of years!