No, Lawyers Should Not Learn to Code
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&#x27;s code is crap, their policies were crap and they are assembled by people that couldn&#x27;t give a crap. Liked many large companies they employed who could be retained not people that probably wanted to be there. It didn&#x27;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.<p>Any coder can succeed or fail with or without a degree, and largely shops don&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t a large chunk of lawyer&#x27;s money made on advice made well before that point? Wouldn&#x27;t it be good to be ready for this or whatever tech comes to disrupt law.