Month: September 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

Thanks for all the e-mails about America's professional elite and how they're hired. One frequently offered remark: the economic slowdown means that things aren't as lavish as they once were. Below the fold, a selection of other reader responses.

A reader writes:

I'm currently employed by one of these "elite" organizations–a corporate law firm ranked among the top 10 most prestigious in the country, year after year.  I came in at the height of the boom in 2007, when the recruiting was more lavish than ever. Most of what you speculate is correct.  As a "summer associate," I ate 3-5 meals a week at the most expensive restaurants in New York, for twelve weeks (!)  Our per-person budget for these was (and is) $60, but we frequently went over and were reimbursed anyway.  I ate at Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Gramercy Tavern, Gotham, Daniel, the Four Seasons…the list goes on.

We also played a ball game at then-Shea stadium, had a dinner dance at the Museum of Natural History, and shot "experience New York" movies which we edited and then watched at a movie theater on the east side that we rented out for the evening.  It's also the only time I've ever had Johnny Walker Blue Label. By the end of the summer, I felt like a glutton.  But it wasn't like I tried to act lavishly–it was just what happened. The only part of your analysis that I don't fit into is the Ivy League-only hiring.  While that's by and large the case, the top law firms do hire a select few students from outside the very top (say, top 15 law schools), who do extremely well academically.  That was me, and a few of my friends.

Other than that, are the recruiting practices at these places disgusting?  Yes.  And it's also completely unnecessary, especially in this economy, where even the best and brightest are praying for jobs.

Another writes:

In college, I interviewed for BCG, Mercer, and others of the strategy consulting firms: the expense account laden four seasons Boston stay for my interview with BCG come to mind and one comment sticks with me and it is, in some respect true, "Don't hesitate to order room service at $40 instead of $15 buffet downstairs, if it offers you the peace of mind and calmness that you need to come in and ace the interview. We are being billed out at $200+ per hour, spending the extra $30 on a limo or an extra $400 on a flight is worth it if the hours or effort saved and the comfort gained lets you work more gainfully and usefully and deliver value to our clients or internal clients".

This is a balance, but to some degree, there is some benefit to valuing comfort at a client's dollar since a client would be annoyed to learn that they are paying $200/hr for you to sit in transit in Chicago Midway Airport!

Says another:

I am a graduate of the City University of NY and Harvard Law School.  Coming from a city university system, I didn't have the same sense of entitlement when I got to Harvard that some of my classmates did.  That all changed very quickly.  By the start of my second year in law school, recruiting was in full swing.  Firms came to Cambridge to wine and dine us, and to tell us how wonderful they all were.  After all, they must be wonderful if they won't even look at an HLS student with less than straight "A"s.  Even with my middle of the road grades, I scored numerous call-back interviews in my chosen city, NY.  Harvard gave us a week off from school to allow us to fly out to our chosen cities and interview.  Many of my classmates took the opportunity to fly to multiple cities on the law firms' dimes.  I flew to NY and stayed for almost a week in a 5 star hotel, even though my parents lived in the NY suburbs.  Every day, a different firm took me out for a lunch interview at a fancy restaurant.

When I finally chose the firm at which I would spend my summer, I picked a big (but not huge) Wall St. firm that had something of a niche practice.  At a time when large law firms were growing and merging to become mega-firms, my firm made a conscious decision to continue to print money in their niche practice areas, rather than risking losing everything in an expansion.  So we didn't have the fly-out dinners you describe.  But all the Harvard students were taken to a special meal at Nobu, and many other fancy dinners and lunches in NY were held.  There were also myriad events like parties in the Central Park Boathouse and the obligatory day spent at the gargantuan estate of a corporate partner (the "this-could-one-day-be-yours" trip).  I was even flown to Washington by that same partner to attend the dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.

It was difficult not to feel entitled after going through such a process, and it messed me up for years.  I realized that the lifestyle of working 16 hour days for life was not for me,but it was difficult to give up the perks.  I finally extricated myself from that work and that world, but now, as I practice at a small boutique law firm in NYC, and sometimes struggle to pay my mortgage, I can't help but think what might have been had I stayed at BigLaw.  The entitlement is corrosive and takes a long time to wipe off.

My wife graduated from a 4th tier law school and has had a completely different experience.  Six years after graduating she has yet to find full time employment and has never been wined or dined by anyone.  Yet her work ethic is at least as good as those BigLaw lawyers and she would be a tremendous asset to any firm that would have her.  But, as you correctly point out, law is a conservative game, and no one ever got fired for hiring the guy (or gal) from Harvard.  If someone took a chance on hiring my wife and she didn't work out, you can bet heads would roll.

Says another reader:

Though I didn't come to law school to work for a big law firm, the $40k+ in debt I've accrued in just my first year has made me think twice about entering the public sector, so I took part in our school's interview last week.  Over the course of the week, I had 15 20-minute interviews with partners from offices of nearly all of the top international law firms.  On the basis of these short interviews — which barely give you enough time to say anything about yourself — firms decide on who to call back to the home office for follow up, in-depth interviews with multiple partners and associates.

Big law firms recruit students for summer positions for the summer following the second year of law school, for which they are paid wages equivalent to those they would receive as a new associate.  Currently, that is around $3100 a week — typically for 10 weeks — and that doesn't include the kind of perks you mentioned that might be thrown in to sweeten the deal as far as comped meals and trips.  Of course, typically a summer associate position is a trial run for the full associate position after graduation, with starting salaries pegged industry-wide at around $165k a year.

It is a competitive, stressful, and ridiculous process.  Competition begins with grades, of course, and with first year GPAs being the easiest way to make snap judgments about candidates, any student has really been competing for this job against classmates on the curve the whole previous year.  And, with firms hiring less this year than in years past (though more than in the last two years, apparently), the competition has just gotten more fierce.  There's an enormous amount of stress in pushing yourself through so many interviews where you have only 20 minutes to make any sort of impression on a person who will see as many as 20 other candidates that day.  The ridiculousness of the process is how firms make these snap judgments on GPA and first impressions in 20-minute interviews to close or open the door to that elite law life.  Of course, anyone going to a school like UCLA just outside the T14, might pull back and comment on the ridiculousness of making a snap judgment purely on rankings in an issue of a magazine — particularly one nobody seems to read anymore except for the rankings.

Then again, elite law firms require a certain kind of high-achieving person, perhaps one motivated by a need to outcompete his or peers, or one with the willingness to put aside all other considerations in order to succeed professionally, or one inordinately obsessed by dreams of lucre.  Some of the best students in my classes are borderline sociopaths, and maybe they'll make the best partners.

A lawyer writes

As someone who works at one of the elite national law firms you're describing and is involved in the hiring process, I thought I would weigh in on this discussion.  I disagree with the suggestion that the hiring process is about anything other than luring the best talent. While it's certainly true that summer associates are spoiled with food, drink, and entertainment during their summer stints with firms (though far less so now than they used to be, due to the state of the economy), the ONLY motivation behind this expenditure of money is to compete with other firms.  If you don't offer a summer program comparable to your peer firms, the concern is that the talent will go elsewhere.  Law firms depend on a steady pipeline of new talent.  They can't survive without it.  Believe me when I say that firms would like nothing better than to avoid spending money on this stuff, but they feel they have no choice.  It's not about getting people used to lives of privilege.  If it were, the wining and dining wouldn't be limited to summer associates but would include all associates.  But it doesn't. It stops as soon as you start work full time. It's solely about wooing people. 

Says a management consultant:

We don't hire predominantly at the Ivy leagues to be able to tout the resumes of our teams, but rather because it's far more efficient to interview 200 Harvard students and make offers to 50+ of them than to interview 200 state university students to find the 3 worth giving offers to.

Yet another reader says:

…attorneys who "sacrifice" to work for the government, at least if they work for the federal government, have punched a golden ticket for themselves and they know it. Sure they get paid half of what many of their peers make now, but they don't have to work 60 hour weeks, get better legal training, and will be snapped up by law firms and placed straight into partnership after about ten years. What's better than sending your problem with the SEC to a bunch of Harvard grads? Sending your problem to a bunch of former attorneys for the SEC. My friends that work for the DoJ are incredibly honest, so while I see your point regarding the temptation, I don't see it in practice. I do, however, see the resentment and difficulty watching your friends take trips to Europe while you're in a hotel in Topeka reminding yourself that you chose this.

San Anselmo, California, 4.12 pm

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I read with interest your series about maternity leave. I've been looking at the data and the anecdotes posted, but I think there is something  more related to deeply cultural expectations and less with the law going on here.

I lived in Germany for 4 years, working for a German research institution as a biology researcher. In that time period we adopted an infant. Germany does indeed offer 12 months paid parental leave after the birth or adoption of a child (14 months for single parents). Another 156 weeks of unpaid parental leave is also allowed. But notice the term "parental." The same leave is offered to both mothers and fathers. Both parents could take the paid leave, they share the total of 156 weeks of unpaid parental leave. The only difference I see is that mothers get another 6 months before the birth in addition.

I am one father in a same-sex couple. Since my husband was not able to take leave (he worked for a US company), I took a month before the placement of our infant girl and another 3 months after of paid parental leave.  It was a godsend and helped me keep my career going and raise a family. Ostensibly, either or both parents could take the paid parental leave, but overwhelmingly it seems to be mothers. This seems to be a cultural stricture and problem and not one with the law.

Along these lines, Nathan Hegedus looks at paternity leave in Sweden:

Over the past 15 years, the streets of Stockholm have filled up with men pushing strollers. In 1995, dads took only 6 percent of Sweden's allotted 480 days of parental leave per child. Then the Swedish government set aside 30 leave days for fathers only. In 2002 the state doubled the "daddy only" days to 60 and later added an "equality bonus" for couples that split their leave. Now more than 80 percent of fathers take some leave, adding up to almost a quarter of all leave days. So in the middle of, say, a Monday afternoon in March, the daddies and their strollers come at you both singly and in waves, the men usually either striding fast and stone-faced or pushing the stroller nonchalantly with one hand, cell phone glued to their ear.

by Patrick Appel

Jay Cost contends that the Democrats lost electoral support because they passed health care reform. Chait counters:

It's obviously true that the Democrats lost a lot of support "during the health care debate." The health care debate took about a year. My argument is that, during a period in which unemployment was rising and the Democrats controlled the entire government, Democrats would have bled support regardless of what they were debating. If they declined to carry out their campaign promises, they would have lost support.

Bernstein mostly sides with Chait.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A male reader writes:

I'm a full time pharmacist in a smallish community hospital.  What people think about my job, and the media misinterprets, is that I spend all day counting pills.  Look at any news story about a pharmaceutical product, or a pharmacy, or a drug recall, and there is a stock loop of footage of someone counting tablets.  The media never shows a pharmacist counseling a patient, conferring with a physician, giving an immunization or any of the hundreds of other things that we do to keep our patients healthy.

And a female writer concurs:

I am a pharmacy student, and will graduate in 2012.  I am part of the increasingly small proportion of pharmacy students who entered pharmacy school without a B.S. or B.A., as many pharmacy schools are beginning to require said degrees.  Whenever I tell people that it will take me 7 years total to become a pharmacist and that it is a doctorate degree, their immediate response is generally, "Why do you need to go to school for that long?  All you have to do is take pills from a big bottle and put them into a little bottle."  Unfortunately, much of the general public has this view of pharmacists, and fail to take advantage of all the services they have to offer.  Every day pharmacists catch mistakes and make clarifications on prescriptions that patients bring in.  They also do everything in their power to make sure that you're paying the lowest price possible at that location.  (For the most part, pharmacists do not determine the prices of medications, and at big box stores they often even operate in the negative, so no, you're not contributing to the pharmacist's yacht; you're contributing to the drug company's deficit for developing the drug.)  Yes, the computer system flags for drug interactions and duplicate therapies, but it takes clinical expertise and education to determine whether or not the interaction is significant enough to warrant a phone call to the doctor and have the prescription changed. 

In the hospital setting, pharmacists are being called upon to complete medication reconciliation upon admission.  That is, they draw from many sources, ranging from a bag of bottles brought in by a family member to a medication list complied some time in the past, and they help determine what medications patients should continue to receive while in the hospital.  In a similar fashion, pharmacists also perform discharge planning and counseling to help the patient understand any new medications that may have been added or discontinued as part of the hospital stay.  (The healthcare reform that just passed allotted a lot of money for those two items, as they prevent expensive hospital re-admissions.)  Some pharmacists who build solid relationships with doctors even obtain prescribing rights in their area of expertise.  For example, in a diabetes clinic the doctor is responsible for making the diagnosis, but might hand the pharmacist the responsibility of developing a personalized treatment plan and choosing all of the patient's medications.  This practice is not yet very common, but it shows the direction in which advocates of the profession hope to head.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The best thing you'll read about President Obama's speech on Iraq is here, and I'd like to associate myself with everything in this excerpt:

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war zone. The proclaimed end of Operation Iraqi Freedom has little or nothing to do with the military and political situation in Iraq, which is why Iraqis were barely aware when the last U.S. combat brigade crossed into Kuwait a few days ago. And for most of us, too—except, perhaps, those with real skin in the game, the million and a half Iraq war veterans and their families—there’s hardly any reality or substance to the moment.

It’s hard to have an honest emotional response or even know what one feels. After seven years of war, the occasion deserves some weight of feeling, but many Americans stopped paying attention a long time ago. And that’s exactly why the President made his announcement: because Americans want the war to be over, have wanted it for years. Tonight he told us what we wanted to hear. August 31, 2010, will go down in history as the day Americans could start not thinking about the war without feeling guilty.

This is not entirely ignoble, by the way.

George Packer goes on to explain why it isn't entirely ignoble. Read it all. I'll just remark on why it is partly ignoble: because even as President Obama spoke, some Marines were preparing to return to Iraq, having been recalled there, despite the fact that their tours were supposed to be over. They'll risk serious injury and death, a fate likely to befall dozens if not hundreds more Americans before we exit that country entirely, and as Mr. Packer observes, the effect of the speech is to give everyone permission to stop thinking about all the men and women who remain fighting.

Should the United States embark on another foolish war of choice, it'll be due partly to the willingness of our elected leaders across two administrations to hide from us the costs of war, and the complicity of the press in their efforts.

by Chris Bodenner

This clip is simply too much. It shows Glenn Beck talking about how he wore a bulletproof vest to his rally and how Alveda King – a "marked woman for standing on that step with me" – bravely chose not to. Can anyone point me to a single reported death threat against Beck? All I could find was one via Twitter, and that was six months ago, and it quickly disappeared. Google News has nothing.

I know Beck is a melodramatic showman, but the fact that he thought he might be assassinated like a civil rights leader on the National Mall is such a perfect illustration of what Hitchens calls "white fright". To rehash:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one.

by Patrick Appel

Over the weekend, Ambidner wrote that national political parties are "withered." Hans Noel counters:

[T]his parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, it extrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such cases happen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders are incapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all the evidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an “intra-party squabble” really is. Today’s outsider is tomorrow’s insider.

Bernstein expands on those points.

by Zoe Pollock

Nick Baumann over at Mother Jones rightly points out that our nod to the Buzzfeed mashup of the richest rappers and their worst lyrics probably drew a good amount of inspiration from this amazing site, Snacks and Shit. Chris Macho and Chris D'Elia have been keeping tabs on the worst lyrics since February 2009. Thank you guys for my new favorite.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Costly signaling makes sense as a reason many people give for buying diamonds, although I'm not sure it really works as a defense given all the options of costly things.  More importantly, though, it seems to put the emphasis rather strangely on "signaling," a message which might be partially for your mate (one hopes she knows that message already) but is really targeting anyone else that might see and/or desire her. As such it's little more than designing and using the most ornate branding iron you can.

One alternative to the ring-as-signal model would be making sure your engagement is as memorable as possible. Make it into a story that you will both love to tell, forever. I'm not a fan of the Jumbo-tron marriage proposal – it always seems more egotistical than cute – but if that's your deal, have at. My idea is that you choose a unique time, place, or circumstance, meaningful to you both, of which the ring becomes a symbol and reminder of that moment, be it grand, intimate, sexy, terrifying, or all of the above. Do that and the ring could be made of baling wire; the metal and rock won't matter.

Although, let's be realistic, it'd better be most beautiful baling wire ring you can afford.  All the in-laws are watching.

Another reader, echoing many others, goes after the diamond cartels:

Even conceding that signaling is an useful and important way to spend your money, the signaling done with diamonds is based entirely on a lie. The lie is that diamonds are valuable because they are rare and unique. They are neither. The scarcity of diamond gemstones is completely manufactured by the De Beers cartel controlling the supply.

I'm well aware of this. The Atlantic published the definitive article on the worthlessness of diamonds back in 1982. Another reader:

As a gay man, when it came time to propose to my (now) husband, a diamond solitaire wasn't going to cut it.  First of all, I'm in the camp that shiny rocks pulled from the ground by abused, underpaid Africans is no way to signal one's love for another.  Besides, a diamond ring would look downright silly on his hand.  (He's a quintessential bear.)

So here's what I did instead:  I bought him a beautiful Omega watch and hid it in my luggage as we went off on a Caribbean cruise.  On our second day out, anchored off a lovely cay, I arranged for breakfast to be served on our stateroom's veranda.  I'd made a CD of songs that I felt fit a romantic occasion ("Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile)" "Sweet Happy Life"  "The Best Is Yet To Come" and several others) and had it playing as we sipped our coffee and looked out over the blue, blue sea to a palm-studded isle.  I said a few romantic things about our life together so far, and then told him that I wanted to spend "every second, every minute, every hour and every day of the rest of my life" with him.  Then I pulled the watch from its hiding place and said, "And so you remember that, I'd like you to wear this" and handed him the watch.  He cried, I cried…and we were married six months later, during that brief period when it was legal for us to marry in California.  He's worn the watch every day since.

Unlike the shiny rock, the watch is not only handsome, it's functional, as well.  And buying it didn't enrich the villains at DeBeers.

Another reader opted for travel:

We eloped, so I never had an engagement ring. We always said “we’ll get a diamond ring for our 10th anniversary”. As the landmark anniversary approached, we just couldn’t justify the cost (and guilt) of a diamond ring. We both agreed to use money on travel instead. We’ve been to Europe and Asia a couple of times now, and we’re planning a visit to South America. We’ve built life long memories from these trips. We enjoy the whole process together: the planning, the trip itself, and telling stories about the trip. I don’t miss the ring, and I thank my husband every day for making the world a smaller place for me!

Another reader:

While not wrapped and tied with a gossamer bow, my now husband gifted me with the support (financial and emotional) to quit my full-time job and study for the bar exam almost 3 full years before we were married. By the time he got around to actually proposing (with a vintage family ring, natch) I was already fully convinced of his devotion and commitment to me and our relationship.  People who view expensive diamond rings as THE symbol of true devotion and commitment are the same people who care more about the wedding than the marriage.

Another reader finds all wedding expenses unnecessary;

I don't understand this idea that some kind of expensive gift is required to get engaged, or even married.  I have been married twice, the first to the woman who had my kids, the second to the woman who helped me raise them.  In both cases, I proposed after we had made love and then within days we got a marriage license, blood test, couple rings (a few hundred total), simple civil ceremony (about five minutes), simple reception ($100 apiece), and then went to sleep.  I never have been able to understand why people would spend thousands of dollars on an engagement ring, or thousands (or tens of thousands) on a wedding.  I'm not trying to say that everyone is like me, but surely it's possible to marry and have kids and have a more or less normal life without big rings or big weddings.

Another reader focuses on social signaling:

Diamond engagement rings are best understood not as a signal from one partner to the other, but from both partners to society at large.

I know two brothers who solved the problem of the overpriced diamond in different ways. One took his grandmother's stone, which was respectably large but rendered nearly worthless by a subtle flaw, and gave it to his future wife. The other gave a ring set with a brilliant and valuable sapphire. Both women were delighted – the one because of the diamond's sentimental significance, the other because of the distinctiveness of the sapphire (and the sacrifice its value represented).

And both rings get noticed. The diamond tends to draw admiring glances, whispered 'ooh's, and the occasional, "Is that real?" The sapphire attracts a different sort of attention. "How interesting," people say, "is that your engagement ring? What kind of stone is that?"

A ring is an inherently public display. It's not like placing a picture of your lover in a locket. And an engagement ring is a public announcement of attachment, and to some inevitable extent, of wealth and resources. For a spouse content with the private knowledge that the hunk of blue glass on her ring is actually a sapphire (or for one who moves exclusively within the rarefied circles familiar with valuable gemstones) such a stone can serve the same functions as a diamond. But the chief virtue of the overpriced carbon crystal is its ready legibility. There are myriad gifts that can signal sacrifice and commitment from one partner to the other, but it is the diamond ring that most efficiently broadcasts that signal to society at large.