Re: "exciting as careers in professions like the law"
"the lawyers I know are hard-working, clever people who can wrap their minds around the many nuanced approaches that the law has developed to very complex problems"
Never met a lawyer like that. All the lawyers I know are pretty cookie-cutter types that push paper, fill our forms, follow patterns and scripts and that's about it. In most ways they resemble bored help desk operators, except that instead of Google or some internal wiki they have some overworked middle-aged woman running around in the back fetching an unending stream of paperwork, doing research and ordering around younger women to do even more research.
These lawyers find creative approaches to absolutely fuck all. Their purpose in life is to tell everyone how screwed they are and that there is absolutely nothing that they can do to help themselves. The law wasn't designed to work in their favour and it never will.
They can - and do - bill unbelievable fuckpiles for their work. They get away with it because the law mandates that all sorts of interactions with government, other companies, etc require a lawyer to be involved.
Like accountants, they have no requirement to innovate or even think, because they have engineered a system that requires everyone to use their "services" regardless of need.
Now, admittedly, the overwhelming majority of my interaction with lawyers is civil issues, not criminal. Perhaps these "hard-working, clever people" end up in criminal law over here. I don't know.
I do know that in Canada the lawyers I've had the misfortune of dealing with are overpaid and underworked. They care so little about their jobs that even when you are physically in a room with them they aren't really there.
Unlike systems administrators this isn't because they're dead inside. It's because the life they live outside the confines of their ridiculously expensive offices is so much more exciting than whatever you're bothering them with that they'd rather relive it in their own memories than deal with whatever issue you've got to be dealt with.
I want some of those hard-working, clever lawyers. Maybe if we had some the little guy would win once in a while on this miserable continent. Maybe if that happened once in a while it would stop being such a corrupt, awful place.