Life in West Los Angeles

45 thoughts on “Life in West Los Angeles”

1. All I can say is “Strong Unions.”

   Doctors and Lawyers have them, engineers and programmers don’t because of some libertarian BS ideology they all bought into.

2. Publish the company name, Philip! The shareholders who don’t sell when you publish it don’t need your protections.

3. Doctors and lawyers have unions? I don’t know of too many unions for doctors or lawyers. Please provide hyperlinks. I know of unions for automobile workers, textile workers, and retail workers. But you are correct in your basic argument. Those unions are doing a fantastic job of protecting their few remaining U.S. workers, keeping their wages high and pensions well funded!

4. Hi Gun Nut, here are the links you wanted:

   American Bar Association: http://www.abanet.org/index.cfm
   American Medical Associations: http://www.ama-assn.org/

   As a law student, I can tell you that the state bar association is somewhat union-like in that it has a monopoly on all legal work, membership is mandatory (as are the fees) … but unlike a normal union in that there are obviously no CBA’s and strikes and things like that.

5. “How can anyone support a family on $300,000 per year?” Too funny. Over 95% of the families in the U.S. do. Of course some better that other. This blog and Paris Hilton are two very good arguments on why repealing the Estate Tax is a bad idea.

6. To Gun Nut. The euphemism for doctor’s and lawyer’s unions is “professional associations.” The AMA and the state bar assocations are in fact much stronger than other unions – there are few closed shop unions (if you don’t belong you can’t work) left in the US except for those. They control the supply of new “professionals” and ensure that cheap foreign accredited workers can’t easily enter the market.

7. With respect to lawyers, there isn’t a threat from foreign workers – how many Chinese are there that know about ERISA, let alone have the command of written and verbal English for it to matter?

8. Actually, Jose, membership in the American Bar Association is not mandatory. If it is, I’m in big trouble! Rather, each lawyer must gain admission to their own state’s Bar, and to the Bar of any other state in which they practice regularly (with each state having its own rules about that). In my view (as a labor and employment defense lawyer), neither the ABA nor the individual state Bars operate like a union at all. The ABA is more like a lobbyist for the legal profession, which also publishes guidelines for ethical conduct that are essentially trumped by the state guidelines for such conduct. At least in Texas, the state Bar does little to regulate its members, with only the most egregious violators of the ethical rules ever being punished. They regulate lawyers, but certainly do nothing on their behalf to improve wages, working conditions, etc. My two cents, for what it’s worth.

9. Sorry Jose, just saw that you were referring to state bar membership, not ABA membership, as mandatory. But the rest of my comments stand.

10. I see Phil’s anti-engineering phase hasn’t let off during his visit to our merry city. 🙂
    While I’m not on the idealogical extreme that money isn’t important at all, the whole idea of basing the entire value of one’s life decisions (which Phil seems to be doing) based simply on current income is kind of sad. If these are engineers are passionate about what they do, I’m sure they’ll be fine. Assuming they’re just smart and have no particular passion about anything, then yeah, they should have gone to law school. 🙂

11. Charles:

    Ouch. But if you lived in a city like LA and want to have all amenities this woman has (presumably big house, PT, 3 kids in PS, etc), then $300K probably won’t cut it, sadly. Most of that is eaten up by property values in places like LA and the Northeast. Of course, considering the divoroce rate in Southern California (65%+ by most estimates), she may not want to get too comfortable with all the amenities provided for by her well-off husband since statistically, a trade-up is likely. Presumably the dough spent on the PT will delay that time for a while. 😉

12. Philip is not antiengineer, he just calls it as he sees it, and I tend to agree with him. At 48 I have pretty much given up on engineering and am now in the family real estate business. Engineering salaries in the NYC area are very low ($80 – 120 for a senior level position) and competition is fierce. Engineering is not a “profession” like law and medicine, and medicine is in danger of losing that status. I am actually considering going back to school and getting a law degree, even at my age.

13. believe it or not, some people manage to get by without nannies and cleaners and personal trainers. gasp!

14. Engineers (at least software engineers, I’m not very familiar with prospects for real engineers) don’t get paid too little. We get paid an amazing amount given the lax education requirements and relatively interesting work. Doctors and lawyers get paid too much. I’d prefer to break down rather than imitate the legal and medical cartels. See for example http://volokh.com/posts/1103225773.shtml and http://www.policyreview.org/fall95/thband.html

15. “Doctors and lawyers get paid too much” … I wonder how you would define getting paid too much – with lawyers (doctors are often paid by insurance companies, so the economics is different), the price is set by the intersecton of the supply and demand curves. There are many lawyers out there and clients are always free to negotiate whatever price they want, so one would assume that whatever someone pays to a lawyer is alway a fair deal to them.

16. Peter:

    I’ve got a theory with almost no scientific backing, but I won’t let that stop me from presenting it as if it were deeply researched. 🙂 I’m guessing that if most engineers worked the same insane hours as the $300K+ (pre-malpractice insurance) lawyers and doctors, they’d probably not be that far off salary-wise. But we don’t. Most of us want to work our 40 hours and go home. Our situation isn’t that much different from a typical tenured professor at a typical university, many of whom could be earning far more money if they whored themselves to corporate America. Also consider that law sucks, plain and simple. At least that’s the opinion of most law students and lawyers I’ve met/know. Few lawyers get any joy of their “profession” other than the paycheck. The medical field is slightly different. I’ve noticed many doctors enjoy medicine in the abstract sense, but don’t particularly care for their profession (talk to some to understand the difference). On the other hand, I’ve met many who are truly passionate. What does all this mean? Heck if I know! 🙂 However, the cynic might be tempted to say that our choices seem to be (1)making tons of money working long hours doing something we absolutely hate in a field despised by the general population(law), (2) making lots of money working long hours in a field where malpractice insurance and govt red tape has stamped out our passion (medicine) or (3) making good money working “normal” hours in something that many of us developed a passion for in childhood. (Aside: You’ll find docs and lawyers have some of the highest suicide rates among all professions, though presumably these guys should be perpetually thrilled given their salaries. Coincidence? I’ll leave the answer to that as an exercise to the reader.).

17. cynthia:

    If said MIT grad doesn’t want her husband to trade-up for some fit 6 foot, statuesque floozie cruising LA for a mealticket (there are LOTS of these out here), the personal trainer is probably not optional. 🙂 And nannies and cleaners are a virtual right of passage out here after a certain income level is reached. It’s almost like the upper middle class equivalent of a college degree. I imagine NYC isn’t that much different in this regard. OK, now I’m just depressing myself, so I’ll stop. 🙂

18. jose: The supply of lawyers and (especially) doctors is restricted. If the supply were allowed to increase the price (individual doctor’s earnings) would go down.

19. I’m a software engineer, I do not make enough money as compared to my expenses.

    Choice A, make more money by expanding career through education.

    Choice B, perform same job, but reduce expenses.

    I am currently pursuing an MBA with the hope of breaking into executive management for the last 20 years of my career. It is not as exciting as taking on an endless series of database puzzles, but it is a valid option.

    If I was given the opportunity I would consider moving to some cheap housing in the middle of nowhere that is supported by some form of networking. However, I have not yet seen a valid work-from-home software development methodology that could support this.

    Based on my experiences, I would rather live a mile from the coast in Santa Monica, so option B is out, career change and a difficult transition is what I am faced with.
    Cheers!

20. I think something needs to give in both the law and medical professions. Your anti-engineering rants are getting so depressing, I feel I must unsubscribe.

    I should point out that I just finished paying off my student loans and have a significant amount of equity in my retirement accounts and my house. My girlfriend is taking out over $100k to become a lawyer. With interest it might take awhile to equate the income vs cost of an engineering degree. Also with that kind of debt there is no taking chances.

21. Jose said:

    “With respect to lawyers, there isn’t a threat from foreign workers – how many Chinese are there that know about ERISA,…”

    With respect to Jose, who has respect for lawyers, a view I do not share, check this NPR story, and smile:

    Lawyers Find Work Outsourced

    All Things Considered, May 1, 2005
    Many in need of legal advice find they can’t afford the high fees. Indian lawyers hope to offer a cheaper solution. Host Jennifer Ludden talks about the latest in outsourcing with Puneet Mohey, a Detroit resident and the president of Lexadigm, a business that provides Indian lawyers to American companies.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4626716

22. Gary, there’s also Choice C, and since you’re on the West Coast, might have the jump on the competition:

    Out-of-work man gets the scoop on poop
    Former programmer makes living cleaning up after dogs

    Updated: 7:22 p.m. ET April 29, 2005
    DELMAR, N.Y. – Computer programmer Steve Relles has the poop on what to do when your job is outsourced to India.

    Relles, one of a rising number of Americans seeking new opportunities as their work shifts to countries with cheaper labor, has spent the past year making his living scooping up dog droppings as the “Delmar Dog Butler.”

    “My parents paid for me to get a (degree) in math and now I am a pooper scooper,” Relles, a 42-year-old married father of two told Reuters. “I can clean four to five yards in a hour if they are close together.”

    …

    Ralles has over 100 clients who pay $10 each for a once-a-week cleaning of their yard.

    …

    Relles says his business is growing by word of mouth and that most of his clients are women who either don’t have the time or desire to pick up the droppings.

    …

    “St. Bernard (dogs) are my favorite customers since they poop in large piles which are easy to find,” Relles said.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7680734

23. Gary: Howdy neighbor! I’m in nearly the same boat as you, only I live a half mile from the beach in Santa Monica. You attending the UCLA executive MBA program? If so, how do you like it?

24. crimson–i’m well aware that it’s the norm for certain people, it just seems that everyone here acts as if it’s a tragedy to have to live in a way where that’s NOT the norm. but there are plenty of people who do it (make it to the gym without a trainer, actually clean up after themselves-gasp), and happily. there’s a whole world out there outside that tax bracket, and it’s not tragic to live there.

25. cynthia — you’re welcome to stay in your tax bracket with the rest of the white trash. that will make one less person i have to compete with for a nanny.

26. cynthia: I wholeheartedly agree. My comment was meant to be a tongue-in-cheeck retort to the assumption surrounding Phillip’s conversation with this woman that to live in any other state is actually not living at all.

27. sorry crimson i missed your sarcasm. and seasull, you and your rich high school teacher buddies better watch your backs or we’ll put a shantytown right in the middle of your precious lincoln conservation land.

28. mjo – cleaning up after business analysts that don’t document parameter changes is close enough to poop-scooping for me…

    Crimson – I have only contracted on projects where the client has paid for me to live in santa monica. In the mean time, I live across the desert where former californians are currently raising the cost of living. I did get a chance to take some courses at ucla tho’. Beautiful campus, nice terrain and I nearly fell over the first time I saw a squirrel run around.

    cynthia – just because you can take care of yourself is no reason to mock the people that would rather have somebody handy to wipe their ass for them. That’s why the service economy can’t be off-shored.

    Seasull – take a few notes from the life of Warren Buffet (small house, station wagon) and realize that wasting a ton of money is no badge of honor. It just means that people do not understand how to move from upper-middle class to ‘wealthy’. Upper middle class is mc-mansion, suv and a bunch of service workers at your beck and call. Wealthy is three generations of money locked up in trust funds where the descendants can go do charity work if they want a meal ticket.

29. I’m coming to this discussion a little late… but part of the perspective I think Phil is trying to drive home here is that there’s a huge gap between the percieved “need” for engineers and the rewards for actually becoming one. Seems like every other day I read yet another article with lots of hand wringing about how young americans aren’t studying s/e, and lots of headscratching about why they aren’t pursuing these “high wage jobs”. But these articles never seem to point out the obvious – that engineers only make poor salaries compared with the lawyers, doctors, etc… I find Phil’s rants a little depressing as well, but I don’t think they’re anti-engineer at all – I think he’s just pointing out how little *financial* sense it makes to go into engineering these days… and that’s a point of view that more people need to understand.

30. crimson – you are right about the hours put into a job. As a hardware engineer it was pretty much 9-5 with the occassional crunch and the salary was ok but not great. Some years later I had a job at an investment bank writing analytical code for high yield bonds. There the hours were very different… 80 hours per week was not unusual, and was in fact expected. All-nighters were common, sometimes more than one in a row. This was in NYC and for that kind of job you really have to live in the city, which I did not. They let you call a private car if you needed to work into the night but since it was right near Grand Central I would just hop the train. The salary plus bonus was about twice the hardware engineering salary. It ended up I started not liking the job so what you said about job satisfaction being important rings true. I am still interested in law and not just because of the income potential. Having been involved in litigation and now reading all about the SCO v. IBM case I am finding myself fascinated by the convoluted “logic” and manipulations that occur. If I do end up going into law, it would be in Intellectual Property law, and I would probably want to work toward a more equitable position for the actual engineers who do the development and inventing.

31. I’m convinced that the way to make money in engineering is through entrepreneurship. Paul Graham has been discussing this at length recently, and I tend to agree. Engineers still have the ability to build great things. If we build it for ourselves, we increase our potential of reaping the rewards of our work. Consider people like John Carmack, Ev Williams, Burt Rutan. If financial success is a goal of an engineer, then those people should be role models, and I bet they all have pretty good job satisfaction.

32. gee bee: Not anti-engineering? You’ve missed his past posts saying all the smart young people he knows are becoming lawyers and doctors. Ergo, the rest of the idiots are majoring in things like engineering. Maybe anti-engineering is the wrong word. Perhaps “contempt” better suits his attitude.

    Peter: Service economies can’t be offshored, but they don’t have to be. We’ve got our own third world labor supply south of the border, so no ocean liners are necessary! Witness the various illegal nanny scandals of the politicians and wealthy people over the past several years. Checkout through “Fast Food Nation” to read how immigrants and migrant workers are taking over low end jobs such as fast food chains (the proverbial Silicon Valley PhD at McDonald’s has to compete with Central and South American illegals) and even formerly high end job such as meatpacking.

    Christopher Baus: (I think)You can make money doing anything, given the right circumstances. This discussion seems to be centered around the well-worn traditional paths that you hear about starting in grade school (doctor, lawyer, etc).

33. Hi Crimson,

    I guess it’s up to Phil to say if he’s anti-engineer, anti-engineering, both, or neither. I should probably just talk about my own opinions 😉

    My perspective is that engineering *should* be a highly respected profession, as it 1) requires a high level of intelligence, formal education, and hard work, and 2) is a wealth-generating field (ie., instead of shifting wealth around, engineers tend to create it). So in that sense, I’m very pro-engineer. But I also think that the rewards clearly aren’t sufficient to induce smart young people (well, young americans anyway) to go into the field. Plenty of the smartest kids in college still major in engineering (or math/science), they just go to grad school in something else (law, MBA, med school). And the sad thing is, when you look at the salary, job stability, working conditions, and so forth, that’s probably the right choice. Does pointing that out make me anti-engineer?

34. gee bee: I think “anti-engineer” is the wrong word. As is my m.o., I was being lazy and so thought of the easiest “bad” word I could think of (i.e., take something you like and add “anti”). Also as I have mentioned, “contempt” is probably a better description. Again, it would help you to have read some of Phil’s previous posts, as my (and other’s) description is based on more than this single entry.
    And note, I’m not saying completely has no point (I also mentioned this too, but looks like I may need to pop out a reminder).

35. As a consumer of factory-new airplanes, helicopters, and minivans I certainly hope that smart folks continue to go into engineering! And if I had a kid who wanted to live in Utsunomiya, Japan (1 hour by bullet train from Tokyo) or Marysville, Ohio I would say “You could have a good career working at Honda as a mechanical engineer.” Software is another matter, however. The older programmers don’t seem to get the same respect as older mechanical, electrical, and civil engineers. And with that lack of respect comes a lack of employment opportunities past age 45. Furthermore software engineering jobs seem to be concentrated in parts of the U.S. where the cost of living is very high, e.g., Silicon Valley, Boston, and Washington, DC. Finally the methods of software engineering haven’t changed since either 1957 (if you program in an imperative language such as C or Java) or 1970 (if you program in SQL). This has made programmer careers more vulnerable to offshoring than the careers of traditional engineers.

36. Look at the Forbes rich list – I see far more programmers and engineers than lawyers and doctors. People in technology have far more earning potential than people in other fields. The other option to re-educating and getting an MBA would be to take some risks.

37. Nik: You’re forgetting to adjust returns for risk. A person who invested in the Nasdaq in 1995 and sold out in 2000 isn’t necessarily smarter by Wall Street standards than someone who invested in bonds. There is a concept of “risk-adjusted return”. Some of the people who take big risks will end up rich but you have to factor in the percentage who took similar risks and ended up poor. Oprah and Tom Cruise are rich but you wouldn’t tell a young person to expect to earn more money by becoming an actor than by studying to be a dentist.

38. As Phil has pointed out lots of times, a *top* student (i.e., a student from a top university with a high GPA and the ability to score above 95%ile on standardized tests) is virtually guaranteed a salary above 200K (maybe even 300K) in medicine or patent law. If they’re looking for risk, using those engineering quant skills on wallstreet is more likely to provide a big payout. The people who want to hire engineers don’t seem to make this connection – they’re not just competing with other technology companies for the current pool of existing engineers, they’re competing with law firms, medical practices, and investment banks for the smartest college (or even high school students) who are trying to decide what to do with their lives. In other words, the tech companies have lost much of the top talent 5-10 years before they even start thinking about hiring.

39. Philip: What I was trying to say is that there is much more room to move and options in the tech field than what there are in law or medicine. For eg. I can come up with an application that people will pay money for out of my bedroom with just a PC. The word ‘startup’ has become synonymous with young technology companies. Lawyers dont have that option, doctors need a lab. So a programmers potential risk in starting something up is a few months of no-salary work (or lower wages and options when joining a new company), and requires a bit of alternate thinking. I know a lot of people who are talented programmers who have potential to be very wealthy, but complain about salaries and the shortening of programming-based career lifespan, but these people just averse to taking risk. This is a mass generalisation since the topic as a whole is huge, but while I do agree with you one thing that the tech field provides are different scales of risk (and corresponding potential rewards). On one side of this is starting your own company with just an idea (risk huge, value zero) to idling in the corporate foodchain as an employee for a large, stable firm. Between them there are many scenarios.

40. If you’re smart and you see your career-life simply as a financial risk/reward ratio, then really your best option is to go to med school and become a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles. Whether or not pursuing this kind of life is “worth it” could be the subject of another Phil G. post. 🙂
    And I’m not sure if there exists an engineering discipline invulnerable to offshoring, though the activation energy for offshoring software engineering is certainly lower than most. (Ironically, America is an offshoring *destination* for some companies like Mercedes who build plants in places like Alabama to avoid the red tape of Europe.)

41. Ideas and innovation can not be offshored. Name a decent software product to come out of India..

42. Nik:

    Ideas and innovation can’t be offshored? Sure they can. Microsft R&D has offshored work to India. So has Intel and plenty of other companies in a variety of industries (biotech, pharm, etc). In fact, my old company offshored some R&D to China. I don’t think the US has cornered the market on being able to come up with new ideas or innovating. I can’t think of a *new* product to come out of India, but it’s not like I’ve been looking and I wouldn’t be the least bit suprised to find out that I’m using one.
    That said, I don’t think it means the end of the world for the top end American engineers (software or otherwise).

43. If we look closely at the ‘Engineers’ that are on the billionaires list then we might find that they have additional skills that most enfineering school graduates may lack.

    Among these skills would be social skills, marketing and an innate sense of how to make a buck.

    Unless engineering schools decide to take on these challenges students will have to pursue business education to gain skills that may not be part of their normal up-bringing.

44. Crimson: Perhaps they can be but it is nowhere near as effective. Actually I remember reading something about MS and IBM offshoring R&D work. Overall point is that if you are a smart enough programmer/tech that you should be able to save your hind from offshoring.

45. The blog is very useful.

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