This is more purely anecdotal stuff. I see a lot of variation in the "productivity" of lawyers and law students. Some of it is related to experience. Other parts of it have to with what for lack of a better word I have to call native talent or smarts or something like that. I am regarded as astoundingly productive, and I am very fast, but it took me six months to write my first six opinions, which would now be less than a month's work for me while I did other things too. When I started on the district court, I had the advantage of a year's experience. (Do people actually understand, by the way, that most federal judicial opinions are written by recent law graduates? There are three judges on the 7th Cir. who write their own stuff.) My co-clerk on the 7th Cir. had a much shorter learning curve than I did. He was fast and producing good stuff much more quickly than I. My first co-clerk here,a nd experience former journalist, could never get the hang of it at all. His successor was quite good, but didn't learn as fast as _her_ successor. This is not an environment where there is pressure, or a lot of pressure, or long hours, so that is less of a factor. But I will tell you this: if I were looking for a lawyer, I would interview her and think hard about how smart she was. There are a lot of real losers out there. It's just not true that everyone does an equally or even a minimally satisfactory job. I see their work on my desk every day.
--jks
>Vast difference in 'productivity' are stock-in-trade in discussions
>amongst programmers - the story goes that some workers are vastly
>more productive (as in producing more working code) than others. The
>same might be the case in other 'knowledge-based' fields.
>
>Now, I have seen a couple of amazing examples of this - where someone
>codes something into existence in what seems like an impossibly short
>amount of time (see the Dilbert strips with Zimbu the monkey programming
>using his tail for a good illustration of how this is perceived) - but in
>general I think the emphasis on differences in personal productivity a)
>ignore experience (which counts a hell of a lot in programming) b) ignores
>social factors, like the ability to code till 3am because of no other
>commitments.
>
>Also, the worship of productivity is in my mind at least a factor in
>presenting the ideal programmer as a truly 'One Dimensional Man' - in
>the context of the Internet, and 'free software', programmers encounter
>each other purely as a set of text and an email address - this erasure
>of the social functions to maintain an ideal which is individualised
>(and as kelly could abundantly point out, gendered, racialised,
>'classed' (if that's the right word), etc.) In turn, this feeds into a
>kind of identification with the job which is exploited by managers,
>what I've called in the past '2nd order Taylorism'.
>
>No doubt this could all do with some more research.
>
>Peter
>--
>Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com>
>NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
>"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
>shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the
>chain
>and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
>OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517
>502B
_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com