I think you are right (as you often are). I think it is some version of I get the feeling that a lot of the stories come from lawyers who feel that an accurate description of what it can be like to work in a big law firm doesn't sufficiently convey the true awfulness of it, although we disagree on how awful it is. It sounds whiny and spoiled to say "I'm tired of doing stuff I do not always see the point of and working a huge number of hours; sure, I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's really wearing on me." So, people embelish this other stuff to give themselves a more viable grievance.
I haven't said this exactly right, but the answer is in this direction.
It sounds whiny and spoiled to say "I'm tired of doing stuff I do not always see the point of and working a huge number of hours; sure, I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's really wearing on me."
That does sound whiny and spoiled. There are worse complaints that are true, just not, in my experience, the ones about stapler-throwing.
I don't know if that really sounds all that whiny and spoiled to me. Doing repetitive work without being able to see the big picture is one of the primary indicators for stress. I don't think the pay is relevant to the stress complaint; it seems the primary point of bringing the pay thing in is to make the complaint sound whiny.
(Although, of course, saying that many people willingly endure X stressful conditions because they are well paid and have hopes of being even more well paid, is valid--but it doesn't dismiss the complaint, imho.)
That kind of tantrum is not special to law firms. The abusive behavior of one of the principals in the last ad agency I worked for was famous.
People who are very good at what they do may be spectacularly bad at managing or just getting along with people.
I should think the hundreds of thousands of dollars would help some.
Of course all that's beside the point of what you are saying, and I agree with B that repetition and not being able to see the big picture take the joy out of a job.
And of course, sometimes you do see the big picture, and it's a stupid, stupid, stupid picture.
I don't think the pay is relevant to the stress complaint; it seems the primary point of bringing the pay thing in is to make the complaint sound whiny.
The point of bringing the pay thing in is that I think that most people feel a bit uncomfortable complaining about their jobs when they get paid huge sums of money to do them. I think many people feel vaguely apologetic about the amount of money they make. And complaining about the work they have to do to get it can seem lame when the complaints are "I work too many hours." So, they come up with complaints--the partners throw staplers at people--about which they feel less apologetic.
Sure, doing repetitive work without being able to see the big picture sucks. However, if you are being paid $200,00 a year to do it, you feel like a bit of a dick complaining about it.
6: Thank you so very much for that ray of sunshine on my rainy Saturday in the office, as I spend yet another day beavering away for the immediate purpose of structuring a transaction to comply with a particularly convoluted and silly set of tax rules and the ultimate purpose of further enriching a small group of people who chose their ancestors very, very well. But hey, we get our little golden crumbs off the table, so it's all good.
Me, bitter? Never!
7: Oh, I see. Interesting. Are people really ashamed to complain about working too many hours? I wish we'd all start complaining about that stuff loud and long, myself. It seems to me that the work hours problem is one of the major problems in a disintegrating social sphere.
Of course, part of the reason everyone works such long hours is probably in reaction to their terror of losing economic ground, which is real. So, fewer hours and raise the minimum wage and roll back some of the tax idiocy of the last few years, maybe.
9: Again, it's the pay. For what they pay me, I'd feel like an ass complaining if the job involved being beaten with barbed wire. Which it doesn't.
Fwiw, Nick Laird's Utterly Monkey is a decent law-firm novel, not great but entertaining enough. No abuse, just insane work schedules and internal politics driving someone batty. With added Ulster terrorists.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060828366?v=glance
The reviews on Amazon seem fair. Both the positive, his use of language, and the negative.
Are people really ashamed to complain about working too many hours?
To non-lawyers, I think there is reluctance. Imagine that you and I are hanging out in a bar talking about our jobs and I talk about how much it sucks that I had to work this weekend (as I am doing). And you express sympathy, because as an academic, you often have had to work hard too--things to write, classes to prepare for, etc. I respond by saying "Yeah, it sucks, it hardly is worth $200,000 a year" (imagine I am a big firm mid-level associate, rather than a poor small firm partner). Upon hearing that we both are working hard, but that I make four or five times what you make, it might not be hard to imagine that you would at that juncture give me a look that lets me know that you think I am a complete tool.
Of course, part of the reason everyone works such long hours is probably in reaction to their terror of losing economic ground, which is real.
People who make $20,000 maybe. While I always feel like I am financially overstretched, I am not so clueless that I do not realize that I can survive on way less than I make. Most of the country does.
12: Yes. I can do a pretty good job of feeling sorry for myself sometimes, but it gets harder when I think about the number of people in this town working two or three crappy jobs to make ends meet. A decent paycheck is a pretty good consolation, as is the fact that most of the people I work with (colleagues and clients) are good people and often interesting to be around.
But it's still a strange and silly existence in a whole lot of ways.
I think 13 is right for many people, including me.
Pretty much. There are things I really don't like about practicing law, but they don't change the fact that it's 'indoors, and no heavy lifting.' Which makes complaints ring a bit hollow.
My wife is a doctor, and she gives the following line about being in residency: "every day in the hospital, you see people on the worst day of their lives. They are sick. Their children are sick. And the miracle of it is, you can still feel sorry for yourself."
I point this out not just because I like to show off how funny my wife is, but because it's true. It's also true that she has reason to feel sorry for herself. 30 hour shifts and 100 hour weeks are no way for anyone to live. And it's no way for anyone to live despite the fact that it would be much worse to be a coal miner. Many professionals view their jobs as pointless and deadening. That's bad, even at 200k a year. You can't buy your way out of that feeling.
9 - bitch, I love you and want to have your babies. Keeping everybody anxious to the point of desperation about their economic status is a great way to extort (and I use that word precisely) unearned value from labor.
Eat the rich.
10 shocks me. Feeling guilty over what you earn is idiocy, unless you are Dick Cheney. Who doesn't, in fact, actually "earn" a paycheck at all--he lives off of his obscene investments.
12: I respond by saying "Yeah, it sucks, it hardly is worth $200,000 a year" . . . . Upon hearing that we both are working hard, but that I make four or five times what you make, it might not be hard to imagine that you would at that juncture give me a look that lets me know that you think I am a complete tool.
Well, first of all, there would be no point in responding that way, by mentioning your salary, and if I gave you a "you're a tool" look it would be because it would seem like a gratuitous brag disguised as a complaint.
But second of all, no: if I resented you for making a good salary, it would be misplaced resentment. Big research U mid-level professors damn well should make that kind of money (some few of them do, especially in med schools), and it isn't your fault that those of us in, say, the humanities are paid about 25% of what we should be paid. Resenting people who are getting a reasonably fair shake because you yourself are getting fucked is a natural human response, but it's also a very effective divide and conquer strategy, the kind of thing that's behind working-class white racism. (Note: I am not saying that working-class whites as a class are racist.)
Of course, part of the reason everyone works such long hours is probably in reaction to their terror of losing economic ground, which is real.
People who make $20,000 maybe. While I always feel like I am financially overstretched, I am not so clueless that I do not realize that I can survive on way less than I make.
See, this is that mistake of buying into the divide-and-conquer strategy. "Don't complain that we pay you ten cents an hour; there are people starving outside the factory walls." Bull-shit. The fact of the matter, Idealist, is that you are losing ground economically, whether or not you realize it/feel like it's the case. I don't know if you saw Krugman's column today, because it's behind the stupid TimesSelect firewall, but here's the relevant portion:
Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?
The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.
There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people
who were already in the economic stratosphere.
Modest gains relative to big gains effectively amount to losing ground. And I honestly think (capitalist that I am) that when people at the top of the professional income group are losing ground and feeling guilty about not being in poverty, that we are fucked up. Effectively, that means we have been brainwashed into feeling (D'Souza notwithstanding) that the baseline of acceptable economic status is, "well at least I'm not earning minimum wage." That's nonsense. Hypereducated professionals should not feel guilty about being paid professional salaries. Which is not to say that we shouldn't give a shit about the poor or that we shouldn't recognize how fucking good we have it compared to almost everyone in the world. We should do both those things. But doing those things doesn't mean not complaining about increasing or unacceptable work conditions (which includes ridiculous hours), precisely because feeling like complaining about unacceptable work conditions is unacceptable lowers the bar for everyone with unacceptable work conditions. It feeds into the argument that the *real* difference between us and Wal-Mart workers is just that they don't "work hard" enough, the criticism that workers who complain about mandatory overtime are being unreasonable "because at least they're getting paid for it," and all sorts of other crap.
Unacceptable work stress or work demands are unacceptable, period. Rationalizing them because there are people worse off is the logic behind radical free-market arguments against any and all worker protections. Particularly in a time when those in power are actively pursuing policies that push everyone except themselves further down the ladder, we should be focusing on the things we have in common with the poor, rather than the things that make us different from them. Thinking of yourself as "rich" feeds into the increasing rich/everyone else divide, because it helps people identify with the rich who are writing laws for their own benefit, without realizing that those laws don't, in fact, benefit them.
(Okay, the pronoun referents in that last bit are a little fuzzy, but ykwim.)
>Modest gains relative to big gains effectively amount to losing ground.
In zero sum games, yes. In an economy, not so obviously. Let's grant that the super rich get a higher percentage of economic growth now than in 1980. I would nonetheless much rather be the randomly-selected US worker now than in 1980. Wouldn't you?
That we've gone from Ataris to Xbox 360s doesn't exactly cover up the marked increase in insecurity of income, as well as the massive loss in health insurance stability. In many practical and very real ways, workers today, even middle to upper-middle class ones, are worse off than their relative peers of 1980.
If most workers today had kept the kind of economic security (with special emphasis on health insurance) that the US came to expect from the 50s to the 80s, no, nobody would give a damn that the really rich got really richer. Everybody would be better off and everybody would be happy.
But that's not what happened. Everybody but the rich is worse off than they used to be. More likely to suffer serious reductions in economic standing due to crisises. More likely to have their children be poorer than they were themselves. More likely to have to work longer hours or past when they had hoped to retire.
Before giving an absolute answer to 'Would you rather be a randomly-selected US worker now or in 1980?', I would have to check some actual data, but the answer is not so clear cut to me as it seems to be to you.
I formally agree with the substance of 18. Doesn't mean that I don't still feel like a pathetic whiner for being discontented.
Law is structurally dissatisfying. To begin with, every case has a winner and a loser, so the profession as a whole never gets above a .500 W-L percentage, and half the people are below that.
Second, as an burnout-lawyer friend explained, everyone's lying. Not true for every case, but a high proportion of defendants and plaintiffs have reasons to conceal or deny certain facts that they know are true.
A different burnout lawyer was the local small-town fair-haired boy and went to Harvard Law. He worked hard for six months on the biggest case of his career and thought he did a great job. It was settled out of court, though, and one provision of the settlement was that all his research be destroyed.
Maybe he was the hero whose great research forced the other guy to settle, but he found it terribly depressing. (Probably in part because he had uncovered a lot of serious dirt on the other side, and it depressed him to know that he'd essentially been paid off to keep his mouth shut about it.)
re: 24
There is something to everything that you have written. Notwithstanding, as someone who is occasionally worn out by being a lawyer but who basically really likes what he does, let me add a bit of perspective.
every case has a winner and a loser, so the profession as a whole never gets above a .500 W-L percentage, and half the people are below that.
Not surprisingly, this is one of the first things a litigator learns to be philosophical about. If I get a good outcome for my client, I'm happy, even though they ended up paying. This is the yardstick I suspect most litigators (well, civil litigators, anyway) use. If my client had to pay $1 million dollars, it was a great victory if there was a non-trivial chance that it could have lost $10 million. The lawyer on the other side would be happy too, because while she would have won less than she wanted, there was a non-trivial chance that her client could have received nothing. So, everyone can look at themselves as doing OK.
This is even more likely becasue most cases settle. Usually (but certainly not always) no client walks away from a settlement feeling like a winner, but that usually means that both sides did OK. Again, as a lawyer, I am happy with a settlement if it came out as well as it reasonably could be expected to have done in light of the law and the facts.
Everyone's lying.
I find it pretty rare that lawyers lie. They may spin the heck out of facts and the law, but it is not (in my experience) common for lawyers to flat out lie. Witnesses, on the other hand, often have to be encouraged to say what really happened rather than what they think you want to hear. I think it is a combination of self-interest and the mistaken belief that it is what is expected.
one provision of the settlement was that all his research be destroyed.
This is not uncommon (well, it would be unusual to have to destroy your own legal reasearh or factual research from public sources, but it is very common to destroy all evidence collected from your opponent or from third parties via subpoenas. On the other hand, the one who was paid was his client, and the client gets to decide whether to take a settlement for more money that gives up the right to make bad things it knows about its opponent public.
My friend felt that he was frequently being expected to present falsehoods to the court. He was in street-level mostly-criminal law, as I remember. He didn't flatly lie based on his own experience (deny that an event he witnessed personally took place or misrepresent it, etc.) but he felt implicated in the lies of others. (He also felt that his clients were lying to him in order to make it possible for them to lie to the court.)
I think that the depressing thing for my friend was that some of the information he had involved third-party victims who were not paying his bills, so that the deal cut between the principals was cut at the expense of others who were not part of the case in question.
When truth is defined as a kind of property, you end up with really marvellous philosophical and ethical paradoxes. Suppose that the Catholic church had had the good sense simply to buy the heliocentric theory and the law of gravity and hide them in an archive, instead of prosecuting Galileo. We would have avoided a lot of trouble that way.
re: 26
It does sound like your friend's experience sucked. I guess I have been fortunate.
Suppose that the Catholic church had had the good sense simply to buy the heliocentric theory and the law of gravity and hide them in an archive
The truth comes out. The advatages of trying to suppress it usually are short term, and you often lose more in the long run from suppression.
27: Didn't you work on that case with the many issues about where our client actually resided? There's room for argument about how much you should let it get to you (probably not much), but you have to have worked on cases where you were pretty darn sure that your client's position was a misrepresentation of the facts.
Didn't you work on that case with the many issues about where our client actually resided?
I know what you are talking about, but no, I did not work on the case. Based on what I understand the facts to be, our client had most of the evidence on his side, but because he was caught in a lie about the location of his primary residence on one document, all the other evidence was ignored.
you have to have worked on cases where you were pretty darn sure that your client's position was a misrepresentation of the facts.
No doubt I have had clients lie to me, and if they were good enough, it is possible that I passed on the lie thinking it was true. But I work pretty hard to get a sense of the facts before I make representations regarding those facts to a court. I do not remember it happening, but I imagine that it has happened that I have told a court something that I later found out not to be true, but the fact that I do not remember it happening shows how rare it is. Not only is it unethical, it's bad lawyering, as you know. Nothing sinks your case faster than the court deciding that your or your client are lying to it.
The people I've talked zero in on whether anyone knows X, or whether there's documentary or concrete evidence of X, or whether X is provable. In those cases lying is bad policy.
But sometimes there's no objective evidence, or it's just A-said / B-said, and yet you can be pretty sure the client is lying. When Franklin said "Honesty is the best policy" that puts a sly spin on it, because it's natural to ask whether there are cases when honesty is not the best policy. And obviously, there are.
Many not-guilty pleas are pretty much lies, depending on the way the case is defended, though as someone pointed out awhile back, convicted defendants are rarely charged with perjury too.
because it's natural to ask whether there are cases when honesty is not the best policy.
True. However, that lying is wrong and must not be done is an independently sufficient reason not to do it, so this does not come up for me and I try to not have it come up for clients. I know that it goes against the conventional wisdom regarding lawyers (or maybe it reinforces the belief that I am just naive), but I think my view of it is common among lawyers.
Many not-guilty pleas are pretty much lies
This is a good point. I do almost nothing in the criminal law area. I think this is one of those areas where it is understood by one and all that a claim of not guilty actually means, "I am not pleading guilty and will put the government to its proof." But it does not literally mean that, so you are right.
think this is one of those areas where it is understood by one and all that a claim of not guilty actually means, "I am not pleading guilty and will put the government to its proof."
This is how I understand it (IANAL). Elegantly put, at that.
Now let's all watch Anatomy of a Murder.
NB: I've never seen this movie, just read an essay or two revolving around one scene in it.