If you've had a boss over forty-five in the last decade, you've probably heard him lament a loss of work ethic among people from twenty-two to thirty-five. They say things like "The kids have no loyalty these days," or "They don't put in their dues." Partners whine about working more because the associates won't slave weekends, managers gripe about job jumpers bolting for the next better offer a headhunter pitches and doctors moan about interns refusing to stay up for days on end. And they all complain about investing thousands of dollars into "bright young minds" who quit to spend more time with their families or take off into some wild entrepreneurial venture after an early midlife crisis. They call us "get rich quick artists" behind our backs.
They're right. We are get rich quick artists. We're the Get Rich Quick Generation. And more than that, we're the Get Rich Quick Doing Something You Like Generation. You think I'm writing a book for free? They gave me a nice check, and the thinking is, this will sell, and somebody will give me more, to write about other things. It's a calculated risk. Like a lot of jobs, law pays according to what I'd call a "pain for dollars ratio." The amount of annoyance, repetition or tedium in a profession results in a congruent income increase. The amount of enjoyment and true creativity one experiences in his work corresponds with a decrease in income. The only escape from it seems to be acquiescence - aging into the job and getting better at it, so the time and intellectual investment required to do the work decreases, making it more tolerable, providing the illusion of forward progression and happiness. The only problem is, as the money and the ease of the toil increase, time passes and your options decrease. Taking a chance on getting lucky - trying to find a job you love or something that might create enough capital in one shot to vault you out of the work force - rots into a fantasy.
The old guard love to see our generation fail in entrepreneurial endeavors because it reinforces the certainty and pragmatism that underpin their measured, conservative decisions. In the late nineties, I remember reading dozens of quotes in the legal trade rags from angry gray-hairs ripping the gold rush mentality of young associates who were jumping ship to take a chance at getting obscenely wealthy working for dot coms. At the same time, an exchange of salary information between lawyers on the internet drove first year associate salaries at top flight firms into six figure territory in every metropolis, even Philadelphia. For a "company man," one of those partners who'd put in years of grueling hours, that must have been a sharp slap in the mouth. The kids weren't just jumping ship; firms had to pay them premium dollars for the sliver of time they had the little bastards.
And worse than all of that, I think every partner or manager in every type of business understood that this was just the beginning of a long, ugly trend, at least for them. There'd been a seismic shift in the leverage dynamic, and nobody could figure out when it happened, why it happened - what caused the fucking thing. Suddenly the kids just started thinking differently. Management still had a general sense of control; money would always rule employees in the short term. But in the longer view, these new generations were demanding something else - something the business model couldn't offer.
Now, closing in on a decade later, first year associate salaries at the best firms have climbed above $140,000.00 in most markets, $160,000.00 in others. The decent small and mid-sized shops have been forced to offer six figure starting salaries to compete and everybody from clerks to public defenders to judges have enjoyed ripple effect raises. Economically speaking it's never been better to be an associate and still, even with all those pluses, the only thing eclipsing salary inflation remains, you guessed it - attrition. I guess the bloated paychecks are supposed to work like a billboard, attracting top associates to the firms and talented minds to the industry. But that's only one perspective. From a different angle it looks like hazardous duty pay - the hallmark of something absent any other attraction.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 8:31 AM