Fed up with law practice? In about a year, you can be a computer coder, says lawyer who made switch
Will Ha, author of the book Quit Law and Code, is good with numbers.
In this blog post, he compares earnings and possible lifetime savings for lawyers and software developers, based on average salaries, student loan payments, years of work, and interest rates. His conclusion: The average paid lawyer, after student loan payments, will make about $1,400 less money in a month than an average paid software developer. Over a lifetime of work, the software developer will save about $833,000 more than the lawyer.
Above the Law notes Ha’s conclusions and interviews him about his career change from law to coding. Ha says a lawyer who wants a career change could make the transition after about a year of training.
Ha felt bored and trapped as an associate. He intended to become a criminal law practitioner, but his career took a turn when he took a temporary job at an ad agency that worked on website development. Those working on an iOS app were making a good salary and leaving work “on the dot at 5 p.m.,” he tells Above the Law. Ha and a co-worker eventually decided to learn app development.
Ha got a job about 10 months after starting to learn to code, though it took about six months on the job before things really started to click. “For anyone who has been through law school and passed the bar exam, making the shift to becoming an entry level software developer in my opinion is possible within a year,” he says.
Anyone who has a JD and practices law is a “professional learner,” he says, and those with reasonable intelligence could learn coding. “Programming is much like motion writing in that there are rules and ways to make the court rule one way or another,” he says. “But, instead of writing for the judge, you’re writing for the computer, which in a lot of ways is much simpler given that you’re dealing strictly with a formal language–something in which competency can be attained in a matter of months starting from zero.”
