We work for vendors and enterprises (ie, normal companies). Vendors bring us in to beat stuff up before they ship it. Enterprises bring us in to reverse things and beat them up before they get deployed.

Yes, many companies aren't that proactive. But the industry is slowly getting dragged into security; key verticals like financial services and health care are starting to require documentation of penetration testing for anything that gets deployed, and Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, and IBM all have religion about software security process.

I can most definitely vouch for that.

In a literal example, why attend university and pay to do work? The answer is, there is value in learning something. Presumably, that is what this individual wants to do.

Before the crash I-Banking bonuses for first year Analysts at Big 4 firms were on the order of $80-100K each year. Assume you bank all of that each year and to be conservative, that it was 80K each year, you now have 320K. This will pay for all three years of Yale Law ($142.5K) and leave you enough to live on all through Law School. Presumably less selective schools cost less, so that's an upper limit.

As a 1L your internship oportunities are pretty limited, and I'm guessing that interning at a lower market firm doesn't really help that much for the internships you really want in 2L and mid-market firms won't trust you if you lie and say you're really enthusiastic about working for them because of blah.

Interns aren't all that productive because they have no experience with the law as it's practiced. First year associates aren't that hot, so internships are basically a hiring expense and it doesn't really pay until they're productive in second or third year.

An interesting internship, like with a startup could really help if you want to get into a firm in that space like Wilson Sonsini. Outside of that it could be positively harmful as a sign of outside interests and a life, not conducive to running up 2,000 billable hours a year. Most firms probably can't afford to be that selective though because most lawyers quit corporate law and go in-house counsel or something less soul crushing when they pay off their Law School loans and maybe build up a nest egg.

jwb119 probably isn't going to Law School for the money afterwards so much of that probably doesn't apply, but the how he can afford to make this offer does.

the only thing you are overestimating is how much of that bonus is take home. NYC taxes and even a modest % into your 401k means you are looking at somewhere around 40% of your bonus number actually winding up in your bank account.

what i'm really looking to get out of this whole thing is an interesting project to throw myself into.

Typical AoI assigns all rights to the company, so a developer can not even take a script not related to the core business with him when he moves. The company itself ends up not using the script but not letting the developer use it either - it's a huge waste.

A better arrangement would be to give equal ownership rights to both employee and employer for all work except work that is company's competitive advantage. Determining the latter is super tricky, but if you can come up with workable definition you will make a huge impact to both concept of employment and the software industry (not unlike the open-source idea).