In 2005? And Google hires aren't really the right point of comparison – that's the very top of the tech market, which you're comparing to typical starting lawyers. New hires at top law firms did and still do make significantly more than that. A better point of comparison is the middle of each market, which is where lawyers were getting paid multiple x developers. By suppressing the top of the market, these companies were pushing the pay scale down across the entire industry, not just at the top. That's precisely what I think it's so shitty.
This is incorrect actually. Pay for lawyers forms a bimodal distribution, where graduates from the top ten law schools tend to occupy most of the high end of the distribution while everyone else tends to fall in the lower end.
From my understanding the pay for newly minted law schools grads for 'big law' (i.e. Associate positions for big firms) are all approx. 160k (this includes bonus). There is one firm, as I understand it, that pays more (wachtell) which pays 160 base + 160 bonus, but on a yearly basis the number of spots for that firm is in the single digits, I think.
Yeah, it's becoming less and less of a good tradeoff for the $200k+ cost of attendance and 3 years of opportunity cost.
One funny thing about making the engineer-to-lawyer comparison regarding this salary fixing issue is that law actually has a much more obvious salary fixing problem, since almost every biglaw firm pays 160k and firms don't tend to compete for entry-level hires with compensation.
