
No, Lawyers Should Not Learn to Code - geebee
https://lawyerist.com/135690/counterpoint-no-lawyers-not-learn-code/
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sqeaky
This authors arguments were stronger before he brought up Sony. A new degree
is significant investment and actually needing one is a good reason to
consider another course of action. But Sony's code is crap, their policies
were crap and they are assembled by people that couldn't give a crap. Liked
many large companies they employed who could be retained not people that
probably wanted to be there. It didn't matter that they had degrees, they did
too many things fundamentally wrong. They had convoluted change control
process that prevented quick fixes to script injection attacks a quick read of
a Wikipedia page would have explained this and probably did, but bureaucracy
probably demand tickets, a risk assessment and a business justification.

Any coder can succeed or fail with or without a degree, and largely shops
don't actually care about your degree. HR might make it hard to hire someone
without a degree, but the hiring managers generally gets enough say to
interview people who show promise (github profiles, personal recommendation or
years of experience). Then upper management wants to treat all coders as
interchangeable cogs in an assembly line. Or at least that is how the 3 or 4
Sony size companies I worked for behaved.

All of that adds up to the author confusing credentials for competence. I have
met coders with PHDs who could keep a programming job because of their
incompetence and High school grads earning 6 figures because they produced
results. I have seen more expected opposite as well of course. I see no
correlation in skill and certification. That whole thing undermines this whole
article.

Perhaps not all lawyers should code, but maybe some lawyers could have skipped
school entirely and could pick up coding on the weekend. Instead this author
advocates for institutionalizing incompetence and that is exactly how Sony got
hacked.

This all ignores the ongoing trend that every job is being automated. Those
who program can better adapt to this ever growing wave of automation. He works
with legalzoom so he should know how tech can streamline the operation of even
lawyers. What this article implies is that things won't get anymore
streamlined. What happens when IBM points Watson at all the law books in the
world and it produce advice better than 99% of lawyers? I know you need to
cross a high bar to actually go to trial but isn't a large chunk of lawyer's
money made on advice made well before that point? Wouldn't it be good to be
ready for this or whatever tech comes to disrupt law.

~~~
geebee
The Sony thing was a bit jarring. I suppose I wouldn't expect people who hang
out on a site called "hacker news" to agree that Sony, Target, and Yahoo set
the gold standard for software development ;)

I do think the underlying point, though, is a good one - this is a difficult
field, and success eludes people who spend their lives working on it and
companies that spend a lot of money hiring them (or at least attempting to).

I like the author's notion that programmers would have a greater role and
status in firms: "Coders are not used in law firms the way they are in most
businesses. They are seen as tools to get things done, not as an integral and
necessary part of law firm operations, let alone management." That I like this
is no surprise, seeing as I am a software developer myself. Unfortunately, I
don't think the "integral and necessary" part of a firm actually reflects the
reality of open offices, scrum, limited autonomy, and short career spans.

Oh one thing - although the author talks about "expert technologists", I don't
see anything here about requiring a degree, nor do I agree that the author has
advocated for institutionalizing incompetence. I think he's trying to argue
that software development is sufficiently complicated that asking lawyers to
become programmers is on a par with asking programmers to suddenly become
lawyers. I'd say the thesis here is: software is actually very difficult to do
well, and the best solution is to integrate programmers into the firm - this
author even advocates doing it at an equity level! Sounds great to me, though
honestly I don't really see it happening (like I said, I think the author
greatly overestimates the extent to which this occurs outside law firms.
Organizations are often very resistant to providing this status and
integration to software developers, though some have managed to do this, with
success).

~~~
sqeaky
While I don't disagree that programming can be a difficult and I can see
reasons to not want to program, I would even less like to argue with reality.
Non-programmers are losing jobs quickly and programmers are gaining them.

Perhaps if enough people left other fields to code it might temporarily lessen
pressure on those fields to allow the people who cannot or will not code to
stabilize. In the I do not see a a guaranteed for any not making software.

As for the author's implicit assumptions on degrees. He never does state it,
he just implies it several times. His first argument that one needs a degree
so they can be as good as Sony was only one such assumption.

I have not had good opportunities at stock options yet... I guess I need to
get in on the ground floor of something.

------
danschumann
But legal code(law) should be written as strictly as computer code, so that we
can detect errors(contradictions, circular logic, etc) automatically, as well
as refactor millions of lines of regulations into more concise, spirit of the
law, declarations.

