Goodbye Mr. Siler
- Thread starter honz
- Start date
Guilty as charged. What's funny is that he sent me a whole bunch of direct messages after that trying to justify the decision to me.
Some cold, hard truths he didn't understand:
1. He is probably the only person who has decided to become a lawyer as a lifestyle choice. That is very unlikely to work out.
2. He is entering law school in the middle of the worst legal recession in his lifetime, and the quirks of the profession's hiring process means he has to hope for a rebound in one year rather than getting to wait all three. That's very unlikely.
3. Jobs straight out of law school follow a pretty harsh bimodal distribution curve when it comes to salary. How harsh? This harsh:
The median or average salary for the profession is misleading. The reality is that there is a sizable cluster of people who start at exactly $160,000 and if you don't make that you're unlikely to make a little less and far more likely to get shunted off way to the left in the $50,000 a year range. $50k isn't a bad salary theoretically, but you've given up three years of earning and, in most cases, taken on a lot of debt to get there. For a group that by definition already has a college education, that's not a good value proposition. The sad truth is that the group of students who occupies that big peak on the right largely are a pretty homogenous lot taken from the top 25-30 law schools in the country. There are exceptions to that generalization, but they're of the "you have to be in the top of your class at law school" variety. Siler's law school is slightly outside that group, and thus he's statistically likely to end up on the left side of the distribution. Only 49% of students at his law school landed firm jobs last year, and in looking at the list of employers, most of those are smaller firms that aren't paying the peak on the right.
Even scarier, that's the distribution if you land a full-time gig somewhere. If you have to hang your own shingle or are only given part-time or contract work, the outcome is much worse.
Damn, you can make more than $50,000 being a truck driver.
Siler was about as good as I've seen at getting the news out as quickly and accurately as any beat writer. When it came to editorializing, he was still a Kool-Aid drinker, though with some odd quirks that Nerd noted above. But the most important part of him leaving is that it leaves us with Steve Luhm.
And Steve Luhm is just terrible.
And Steve Luhm is just terrible.
