zootar

Do SAT scores correlate highly with parental income after controlling for parental SAT scores?

1) Civil engineers and architects can design any bridge they want (though not build it). True, SEs can actually "build" any software they want, but without users it can be hard to tell how good it is.

2) What's the medical / engineering / legal equivalent of a hackathon that those professions aren't doing? Doctors and lawyers can always choose an interesting or deserving client (possibly pro bono), or do a research project.

3) If it's hard to explain, is it possible software isn't changing the world all that much?

4) Imagine Google sharing its Search code. It won't, but as lawyers get to learn from the best lawyers in any area of the law by reading their briefs and watching their trials (all public).

If you're a programmer who can pass algorithm interviews, you have a great chance of scoring near the 90th percentile the first time you attempt the LSAT, and the 96th percentile with practice. Scoring much below the 80th percentile on the LSAT is very poor. In Canada, few students are admitted to any law school with scores that low.

Say you spend $300k on law school. Over a 30 year career, you only have to make an average of $10k extra per year to break even.

The "Jobs Data" tab offers more details: "79.2% of graduates were known to be employed in long-term, full-time legal jobs", "93% graduates were employed in long-term jobs", etc.

The number of software jobs are expected to grow, but is the growth going to be in jobs you really want, or will they all be for 23-year-old coding bootcamp grads?

Again, who cares about the nationwide averages? The 50th percentile Northwestern law grad makes $160k right out of school, and is on track make several times that as a law firm partner, or somewhat less as in-house counsel. My impression is that most programmers struggle to hit $160k any time in their careers, at least outside of SFBA.

When someone describes the downsides of their job, I take it with a grain of salt. Often, it's a case of "the grass is always greener". Sometimes, members of high-status professions want to downplay their success. In any case, most of the lawyers I've talked to say they enjoy their work (though they do work much longer and less predictable hours than programmers).

If you're saying some jobs that today require "Excel" will require "Excel with VBA", sure. But I'm skeptical that programming will become some sort of new literacy. It seems to me that programming has narrower applicability than, say, high school math. Still, most non-programmers seem to forget their high school math, and they get by just fine in careers where numeracy would be useful from time to time, but is just not essential. No one considers them illiterate.

The world is increasingly dependent on lawyers, the demand for which increases with the size and complexity of the economy. More economic activity means more agreements to be negotiated, disputes to be resolved, and regulations to be enforced. Moreover, this is high-end legal work, and many new lawyers will enjoy long, lucrative careers. It's not clear to me that I should advise my children to embark on a short, low-pay, low-status career in legacy software maintenance.

Null means "without value, effect, consequence, or significance; being or amounting to nothing".

Google "reproducibility crisis", "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ionnadis, "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Gelman.

Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.

You're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".

Is your wife a tenured professor? What is she thinking of doing instead?