None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.

DaedalusII 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers

finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days

you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks

tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess

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lou1306 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.

	▲	Der_Einzige 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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neuropacabra 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.

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sigmoid10 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.

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sumitkumar 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.

Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.

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PaulHoule 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.

	▲	plaidthunder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill. It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death. If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.

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chongli 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t have to go back that far. Read To Kill a Mockingbird for an example of a really nice lawyer.

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ang_cire 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, it is a work of fiction.

	▲	chongli an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A work of fiction which has been revealed to be semi-autobiographical.