I’m a lawyer and I’m not sure what this means. The practice of law defines is a very broad range of professional activities. But one common thread that runs throughout all areas of practice is the need for judgment, and a lot of it. Even the negotiation over the terms of one of those “well-structured” documents you speak of involves knowing your client’s risk tolerance and allocating particular risks on a basis that fits that particular client in that particular situation on that particular matter at that particular point in time. I’m going to do this for about another 5 years, so I’m not too worried about AI. But I see the law as a tough one. They may pick off some really low hanging fruit functionality, but I think it’ll be a while before AI becomes the driver behind fewer people going to law school. There are presently other factors driving that trend.
Put it this way. If they can truly AI the legal profession, accountants, engineers (other than those writing and designing the AI of course) and a whole lot of others should be running for cover. At my company, we are making bots for all kinds of routine accounting functions and have eliminated several FTEs as a result. And we’re just getting started. I can also think of a lot of finance functions that can be botted too. But we are far from doing that for tasks that require judgment.
Let me get this straight: you think that (1) the people who bring in the money are the first to go and (2) making a lot of money in sales is rare. Did I read that correctly? You might want to become acquainted with the concept of overhead, particularly if things slide further in 2023.
I think this every time one of these threads comes up.
Is that really a myth, even here on CC? I don’t think so.
I doubled in philosophy and finance/economics, and philosophy was the more challenging major. The writing was demanding, the classes were impossible to fake through, and my thought processes were displayed and challenged more rigorously than anything I’ve done since. And where I went to school, the major required courses in logical reasoning (think Cal’s Rhetoric courses) and formal / symbolic logic, the latter of which was heavily subscribed by math and CS students.
I did not say Philosophy was easier than finance/econ. I said Philosophy was not enough. Suppose you want to get a hair cut. Would you go to a barber? Or would you go to a philosophy major who has no additional training just because it is a harder major than studying how to cut hair?
The correct thing to track is how the median person in the profession is doing. Not the right wing of the distribution. There will always be some lawyers in society that will do well.
For 30+ years I’ve heard it said that salespeople won’t get laid off because they’re the ones bringing in the money. But almost every time I’ve been through a layoff, at least in tech, it’s been the sales and marketing people who got laid off before the tech workers.
Maybe the superstar salespeople won’t get laid off, but most people working sales aren’t superstars. I do think, in general, that salespeople are more easy to lay off than STEM workers because there’s a bigger pool of workers able to do sales than STEM work, so it’s easier to replace the former than the latter. It doesn’t seem that hard to get a retail sales position in a mobile phone or shoe store. Sure, some of those people will do well, but most of the people I know in those jobs have no intention of making a career out of sales. And I have to admit, I’m not really clear on your usage of “overhead” in this case. Why is it relevant in this situation?
It’s pretty simple: sales people get comped for bringing in revenue, not sitting around waiting for the next project. Sales people eat what they kill. Why would anyone start with them? Seems dumb, and certainly inconsistent with everything I’ve seen as corporate counsel. Also, sales people have relationships with customers and learn the company’s product and get better at selling it over time. And good salespeople don’t fall off fruit trees. They’re not as replaceable as you might think.
We don’t have to wonder about why your experience was whatever it was. Tech is laying off people now. Maybe someone who has bothered can tell us whether they cleaned house in sales before getting to the tech ranks.
I’m still interested in what informs you that your uncle was a unicorn insofar as he made a lot of money in sales. It’s almost like you and I live in completely different economic systems.
Retail sales of the sort you describe here are a different animal altogether. Verizon store and other retail storefront sales positions are not the sales professionals about which I thought you and I were discussing. Did you really think so?
My H works in a big tech company that had large layoffs recently, and he said they did lay off a lot of people in sales. One of the layoffs was mixed tech and sales, another layoff was said to have been mostly sales. Just one data point, though. They might have over hired in sales recently.
Like the > $4 million / yr tech jobs? The average associate attorney in Seattle with 0 to 1 years of experience makes close to $130,000 / yr. Elite firm lawyers do considerably better, and of course in the biggest markets like NY, SF and LA, the upper end law firm associate salaries are multiples higher. There is a trend of fewer people wanting to attend law school, but it isn’t because there isn’t enough work or opportunity or compensation. Not in my view anyway. And it almost certainly has nothing to do with the looming threat of AI.
I didn’t say you did.
Your comparison here is a good example of the false equivalence fallacy. Cutting hair is a fairly narrow vocational task that relies almost entirely on experience. Many jobs require less in the way of discrete vocational training and benefit more from people with intellectual acuity and flexibility, or strong writing and verbal communication skills, or all of the foregoing. Both are jobs, yes; but they are highly incomparable.
Sure, if you’re hiring someone to design a bridge or write a program, philosophy studies, with nothing more specific by way of technical training, won’t get you there. Things like that go without saying, and I don’t see anyone making that claim anywhere.
I think most people accept that your career path, particularly right out of school, is a lot or a little more murky for the philosophy or history kid as compared to the accounting or engineering kid. We’ve beaten that to death. I don’t know how we got from that point to this new hot topic of the humanities being useless, which has been supported by sweeping and strong opinions of entire fields of study by people who clearly don’t know very much about them.
Everyone is susceptible to the cuts when they’re being made. I want to know if it’s generally the case that tech companies tend to start the fat trimming process by cutting the people brining in the money.
There isn’t a simple rule like cut the sales people first or cut the tech people first. Instead it depends on the specific company – things like their past hiring and how the company’s needs have evolved over time. Maybe they want to focus more/less on R&D, or more/less on sales to new markets.
In typical circumstances they aren’t going to fully eliminate either group and instead of going to layoff a portion of employees and choose which specific employees to eliminate based on things like their performance reviews, how important they are to the company’s future success, how well duplicated their skills/knowledge is, how much it costs to keep them, and personal history with the specific employee.
When I talk about sales positions, I’m talking about everything from high-level, corporate sales to low-level retail sales. I don’t see why we should be characterizing the former as the norm, when they’re in fact the exception.
There’re different kinds of “sales” people. There’re “sales” people who bring clients, because their clients trust, or are inclined to trust, them for their “judgements” on the products/services they sell. Those are the kind of “sales” people who “eat what they kill” as @cquin85 described them. They’re probably among the last to be fired because few products/services sell themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, there’re “sales” people who are in sales because those are the best jobs they can qualify and be hired for in a particular industry. They don’t bring clients, or have the in-depth knowledge and people skills to bring in new clients. Their jobs aren’t very secure when the company is looking to cut cost.
That’s it. My husband is in a type of “sales” working in the financial services industry - he is “selling” his expertise in his particular niche financial market. It is extremely lucrative - he makes much, much more than most people in tech fields. Sales is a broad term that includes people at your local Verizon store or car dealership, but also brokers/financial planners/technical sales people etc. To say this is a job of last resort is a bit insulting considering the sales folks I know - most of whom are very accomplished.
Certainly in the 2 industries I am most familiar with, law and finance, the most highly compensated and least likely to be cut professionals are the “rainmakers” - the people who have the relationship with fee generating clients that is personal. Those are in fact sales jobs. Now there is a high level of general technical competency, but they rarely are the “engine room”. They almost always have high EQ, but they are also very good at identifying what the client wants and the various issues to resolve to get them there. They have the ability to consider multiple factors with the various associated costs and probability weighted outcomes and potential consequences. The client “trusts” them because they feel confident that their advisor has covered all the bases they need to consider and have presented the best option(s) to choose from. This type of nonlinear critical thinking is at the heart of any good humanities education.
As to the recent layoffs in tech/media, it is no surprise that in this round many relate to sales as many of the companies who saw a surge in use during Covid admitted that they over estimated sales growth and over hired because they extrapolated from Covid growth trends which were not sustainable in a world where people are not stuck at home.
I think that the ability to write well is an important skill: cohesive, grammatically and syntactically proficient writing is easy to understand. Correct spelling, punctuation, and subject-verb agreement save time for the reader, as they improve clarity.
I took College English and Advanced Grammar and Composition in high school – our two most advanced English offerings – and began stretching my writer’s legs.
In college, I majored in Journalism (extremely writing-intensive) and wrote heavily in a number of elective courses in History, Literature, and Sociology. Our Criminology exams were blue-book exams. Most papers and written exams were graded partly for grammar, spelling, and cohesion, and those critiques brought further improvement.
I also wrote some papers in grad school (MBA), and group collaborations with Hum/Soft Science graduates from schools like the U of Michigan and Vanderbilt cast additional light.
Effective writing is important, and Humanities and (some) soft-science courses do a pretty good job of sharpening that particular skill. And even some business courses nurture it.
Nobody did that and it’s not relevant. In a lengthy thread concerning the utility of studying English or philosophy relative to technical degrees that lead to careers in software engineering, accounting or finance, it would stretch the limits of relevance to invoke any consideration of retail sales positions that are occupied by legions of people without any post-secondary education whatsoever. What on earth would that have to do with anything being discussed in this thread? Should we also consider the data of what happens during an economic downturn to the sales people at the Lulu Lemon stores?
To be clear, I have no opinion of what happens to the Verizon store sales person when it hits the fan, and for purposes of this conversation in this thread, I don’t care.
Absolutely, it is. It’s also a lot more difficult to become a good writer than it seems many people appreciate.
The thing about good writing is that it teaches you not only how to present your thoughts, but also how to organize them. This in turn helps you to think more clearly and critically. For example, I had a pretty settled view on the issue of affirmative action when I was an undergraduate. However, a series of writing assignments in an English class forced me to think much more critically and objectively about the issue than I had previously worked out through my own intellectual meanderings on the topic.
It is also quite amazing how rare it is to find good writing today. I blame the internet and fewer gate keepers and filters that stand between bad writers and access to a broad audience. Just poke around on Google regarding any sports topic of interest, and you will find pages of headlines that pull you in only to reveal terrible writing that is awkward, unorganized and confusing on subjects that are fairly straight forward.
I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as an overpaid salesperson. Makes sense to me.