People who reach their late 20s and realise the dream job they had since childhood isn't going to pay that much money for them, so they retrain as a corporate lawyer

You are surprised by the size of this phenomenon = you are one of those people.

You mean like working at an arcade or owning an ice cream stand or something?

Or being a music journalist.

I'm a Production Editor.

lol at these people. i was in my mid-20s when i realized this.

Or being a music journalist writing about anything you're remotely interested in. Go and write about hedge funds, you'll make shitloads.

try early twenties dude

i've seen the 'brightest minds of their generation' snapped up by the unholy trifecta of Deloitte, Accenture and PriceWaterhouseCooper, i've seen law conversions like confetti, i've seen corporate buttering-up drinks'n'chatz invitations, all of these things will see london further clogging up with the libertarian yuppie classes, it sucks yeah

I wanna do this in reverse.

Go and write about hedge funds, you'll make shitloads.

-- Matt DC, Friday, June 20, 2008 11:09 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell. Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics.

Yeah usually corporate lawyers are all about ethics.

btw if i do this you all have my permission to go vigilante on my sorry ass

n/h

To be honest this is preferable to investment bankers who quit aged 35 and go and run B&Bs in Dorset.

To be honest this is preferable to investment bankers who quit aged 35 and go and run B&Bs in Dorset.

-- Matt DC, Friday, June 20, 2008 11:15 AM (16 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ they all say they're going to do this: cash out once they've made their first £5m or whatever it is you need these days. about 3% of them follow through.

Yeah its either youthful idealism tempered by realism or youthful cynicism giving you carte blanche to live the rest of your life like it's a fucking fantasy world.

My favourite are dudes who do PhDs in molecular biology and then a couple of years post-doctoral studies and then go and edit ultra-specialist medical publications for £16k a year.

that's my gameplan.

Seriously, utmost respect for those people.

everything is fucking sponsored by these cunts in this place. sports teams, blind dates, newspapers...when i see my exam results in 45 or so minutes it'll probably say LJ 2:1 in association with PWC

Everyone needs accountants dude, there are a lot of worse professions in the world.

child labour gangmasters, pimps, PE teachers.

big up that crew

It's weird, in all the time since reaching that age where hanging out with teachers in the pub seems more or less normal, I've never met a PE teacher. Presumably they're all still in the army for a few more years.

If things carry on like this in Iraq and Afghanistan there's going to be a serious shortage of skilled badminton players in this country in 20 years time.

I'm a Production Editor

i'm a production editor until 9pm tonight.

see how other people negotiate pay rises and promotions? i've negotiated a pay cut and a demotion. and i couldn't be fucking happier. as of monday: three days a week, and i get to flick the Vs and say "not my problem" to absolutely everybody.

when i see my next wage slip, i'll probably have to start retraining as a corporate lawyer.

I work with exactly these people.

I should make it clear, I'm not a corporate lawyer.

it's not a great time to be getting into law, is the word on the street anyway. but then, it's not a great time to be getting into journalism either.

Never a shortage of wannabe lawyers, though.

there's a glut.

it's not a great time to be getting into journalism either

fucking awesome time to be getting out, though.

What's the collective noun for a glut of lawyers, I wonder?

A conversion?

I was thinking of something more insulting, but that's good!

Assuming that the "corporate lawyer" part is deliberately specific rather than loosely illustrative: I've seen this a few times but late twenties is pretty much too late to be starting out as a corporate lawyer - usually by the time you hit that age you have a fair sense of self and of self-respect, so doing the hours and the type of work you'd get as a trainee (and post-qualified) corp. lawy. grates hard. Plus, it can be (is) powerfully boring. Most late-twenties big firm trainees end up plumping for the softer option, like employment law. I'd guess that that's the case for any of the "professions", but.

I wanna do this in reverse.
Me too.

anyone here not work for the money? i'm guessing a small minority. after that, you're just discussing how good you are at it.

I have no problem with people making money, it's just that certain wannabe lawyers, in my experience, want to make money and also be congratulated about how brilliant they are.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/28/orwellturnsinhisgrave

^^ though it turns on a totally mendacious presentation of how johann hari got his break (as researcher for jeffrey archer, as it happens), and is written by a young libertarian, this piece is instructive.

The biggest problem with the traditional ladder into (traditional) journalism is the effect of the slowing advertising market on local newspapers. School leavers or graduates used to scrap their way up through local newspapers etc and those who were good used to cut their teeth on the dirtiest rung of the ladder and could adapt much more easily to nationals.

Now that seems to be viewed as a bit of a cul-de-sac, or actually advised against by media types or careers officers or whatever. Everyone aims for work experience on the Guardian as first rung on the ladder without actually getting a grounding in how to do the job properly, and people on locals end up getting stuck there, or shifting from county to county on shit pay for years.

I'm not romanticising locals here, there are loads of shit journalists on them, but the good ones get a grounding on how to work in some of the worst and most uninspiring conditions.

those who were good used to cut their teeth on the dirtiest rung of the ladder

nice mix there

think matt is otm. rusbridger (and, therefore, a number of old grauniad hands), earned their stripes on the cambridge evening news. (i did work experience there, when i was 16: they were o_O when i tried to use the word 'androgynous' in a feature.)

I did have an interview for a jnr reporter role at my local newspaper, didn't get it though. Disappointed at the time, very not now.

people in title

vs

People who reach their late 20s and realise the jobs that pay loads of money isn't going to be very interesting, so they retrain for their dream job they had since childhood

The biggest problem with the traditional ladder into (traditional) journalism is the effect of the slowing advertising market on local newspapers. School leavers or graduates used to scrap their way up through local newspapers etc and those who were good used to cut their teeth on the dirtiest rung of the ladder and could adapt much more easily to nationals that newspaper journalism is totally fucked and proprietors have made such an arse of the move to "digital" or "multimedia" or whatever they want to call it that they've no idea what they want.

also, that most people have completely unrealistic ideas of what journalism involves. and i don't just mean wannabe hacks: i mean the aforementioned proprietors.

good luck with your degree results LJ

I wrote something about the low quality of my local newspaper on my blog a few months back - I think the word "pisspoor" was in there somewhere. Their journalists quickly found it and spent an afternoon writing abusive anonymous comments.

Their problem is probably just that they have a minimal budget, and minimal interest and/or ability to go out and find stories. Most of their content either off the wire, or "reader-generated" - two or three pages of letters, two or three pages of "reader's photos", a page of photos of kittens that need rehoming. Their sports coverage of local teams is largely based on reports written by the teams themselves and published uncredited and not paid for.

People who reach their late 20s and realise the jobs that pay loads of money isn't going to be very interesting, so they retrain for their dream job they had since childhood

^^^^ me

except I still haven't figured out what my dream job is. is buying records a job? eating cereal?

There was a time when you could have almost any job and it would pay a living wage ... teacher, writer, editor, garbage man, whatever. That was back when economic disparity was nowhere near as apocalyptic as it is today. It's thanks to corporate lawyers and lobbyists we're in this situation, and it's what causes people to become ... corporate lawyers and lackies. If you ever want to have a family and feed your children, it's tough as a 36 year old editor raking in 45k/year.

It's thanks to corporate lawyers and lobbyists we're in this situation, and it's what causes people to become ... corporate lawyers and lackies.

ronald reagan and the bush family were corporate lawyers?!?

i mean ... i think that you're focusing on the symptoms, not the disease, by blaming economic disparity on corporate lawyers and lobbyists and not on the politicians who set the economic disparity train in motion to begin with.

It's mostly the Goldwater/Reaganites, with help from the RAND Corporation

lawyers are great but i'm not friends with too many.

What's annoying is when old people harangue the young generation for being such quick sell-outs and it's like, dude ... your generation is what put us in this situation. Those libertarian fruitcake dotcommers haven't helped much, either, with their "keep the government out of everywhere, down with all regulation!" Great war cry there, Gen X, you've made us proud.

i am kind of doing this, but with finance and not lawyering. hello age of 29.

I need a lottery ticket.

burt you have many opinions on this subject!

ladiesandgentlemen4U

i am kind of doing this, but with finance and not lawyering. hello age of 29.

Apparently, I am, too (financial systems, specifically, at 30). Except that I kinda don't care what I do for a living as long as I don't hate it, it doesn't necessitate acting like a shitbag, and it pays a wage that's comfortably above mere subsistence level. Yes, thank you: I will run SQL queries all day if it means I can buy a new computer and travel out-of-state on occasion and get my teeth fixed.

What's the collective noun for a glut of lawyers, I wonder?

-- Neil S, Friday, 20 June 2008 10:43 (5 hours ago) Link

A "bar."

bad girl

I got you all beat, I ditched college three years in and enlisted. I saw the writing on the wall. Also I sucked at college.

gnarly sceptre otm. dream job to me is no job, except ppl send me checks.

my job pays pretty well, but sucks beyond belief. And if that's going to continue to be the case, I might as well be making for real $$$. It looks like every option involves more school though :/

axioms of experience:

idealism is much easier in a state with socialized health-care and semi-decent public transportation than in the wild and wooly west

it's easy to condescend to those who have made pragmatic concessions for financial gain from a youthful position before which such concessions are ever presented.

I want to try to make some kind of case for the argument that life need not be a choice between irreconcilable career extremes in the end. I have in mind the specific example of a friend who tried for years to be a pop star singer-songwriter, then was finally forced to give it up and become a full time lawyer - not corporate, but reasonably well paid, dull, government work. For a while he was very depressed about the situation, and heavily in debt.

Eventually, he picked up his guitar again and gave it another try - and failed again - and returned to law. At this point I think he was on medication, and had some real problems with anger - he was very upset and frustrated about the situation. Via a music connection he had made, and at her suggestion (and somewhat against his own will at first), he picked up his guitar for a third time and started writing children's songs for kids acts. These acts are, I am told, relatively unaffected by the downturn in the record industry due to falling CD sales, as young kids can't operate an iPod or computer, so CDs and DVDs still sell very well in this market. Right now, there a lot of money on the table for one of these acts. Various extremely large media entities are getting involved to make movies, dolls, franchises and so on for this act. Nothing's actually happened yet, but it's his songs that the act are performing, and of course as a result he has a good chance of getting into the songwriting business at a high level.

Now he spends his days in the world of music as both a lawyer and a songwriter, gets to travel, makes enough money from his legal work to live reasonably well and expects to be making plenty of money from his childrens acts - if not this one, then another - in due course. Best of all, he can write Motown and soul influenced pop songs much like the 50's music he always loved, as this is the kind of music that kids just love to jump around to (many of us still do). I think some careful and canny manouvering, plus the kind of luck that comes with persistence and intelligence, got him very close to something resembling his dream. He really was down in the dumps for a good five years before it all started to fall into place. Now he's off the medications and his teenage sunny disposition has returned. It is very gratifying for me to see this all happen, as he is one of my best friends.

Now to be very blunt, this is not quite the dream realised: it's something nearby, and more realistic and humble. Certainly he is not the pop star he dreamed of being as a teenager, and no doubt others are living his abandoned dream to a higher level. However, he's now 40 years old, and on his way, with a bit of luck, to becoming either a professional songwriter or a respected music lawyer who also has a nice sideline hobby writing music on commission. He also knows enough about contracts to negotiate good deals for himself and his music friends and clients, and what he is learning on the job is invaluable, genuine, field expertise. The cogs are all turning together, and there is observable synergy between these two, once apparently mutually opposed, professions. It's not a bad result - in fact, it is a highly sustainable one.

Perhaps I'm being presumptious in implying that something similar may be possible, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of us when we are forced into similar career swerves, but I really think there is something valuable to learn from this guy's example.

guys being a musician/writer/artist etc has as much meaning (or whatever the fuck you want to call it) as being a lawyer ie none. youre not special for "following your dreams". in fact youre probably a huge pain in the ass to most people around you.

wtf does that even mean

plenty of people, artists and non-artists alike, are huge pains in the ass to the people around them.

i think about this like 40 hours a week

im only 20 so im gonna bookmark this now so i can remember to bump it in 4 years

sunny successor otm

i dont think its a matter of "feeling special" at all-- idk why sunny brought that up

Sunny Successor a bit harsh, I think, but still kind of otm. You have every right to give a fantasy career a try, and you have to believe in what you're doing if you're going to go that route. But to be self-righteous about it is ridiculous and extremely obnoxious, because what you're doing is as selfish, if not moreso, than any other career. You're not making some great contribution to society (unless your art is awfully fucking good), and there's already a glut of people doing what you're doing in most cases.