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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ...

There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable industry they'll rack up high compensation as a matter of course, even in the most highly competitive, merit-based environment. That's why archaic and even medieval institutions such as guilds only make things worse by hobbling the industry.

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…do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage? And has been for almost a century?

I could not think of any industry less “hobbled” than Hollywood. They have a sign worshipping itself sprawling across some of the most expensive hillside real estate in the country.

Regardless, as another commentator pointed out— VFX artists are the largest group of non-union workers in Hollywood. They’re also the most overworked and lowest paid— I’m talking about near minimum wage working on a movie with as a high a budget as Marvel. Oftentimes entry-level assistants to assistants to cameramen make more than them.

Know your worth, and charge for it.

> …do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage?

AIUI if you run the numbers, the content industry is worth a lot and Hollywood is a big chunk of that, but the tech sector still wins handily.

VFX is a highly visible industry, that people want to be in even with the cost of low pay or bad work conditions. It's quite comparable to videogame development, which is one of the worst sectors to be in "tech".

How can you say that the union is privileged and in the next sentence say it's lose-lose? Privilege means the union won something.

Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable. Hollywood is not a industry that tech should look to for guidance.

[1] - https://businessreview.berkeley.edu/award-shows-a-thing-of-t...

[2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

> The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable.

Hollywood puts out maybe 2-4 "blockbuster" high-marketing-budget movies that are decent or better per year, sure, but the US film industry overall, and the smaller-splash side of Hollywood, produces probably 3-4x that many (and that's just the US—there are usually a bunch of decent-or-better foreign productions per year, too)

Do you know how much more there is to Hollywood than… wide release studio movies. Those are the most corporate of creative jobs. I won’t write a thinkpiece here, but if your only exposure to Hollywood is big box office movies that are released in every city in the US, you’re seeing just one slice of that industry. It’s like if you said tech as industry was SOLELY defined by FAANG, which also had a terrible year.

Nonetheless, Netflix is as much claimed by Hollywood as it is Tech. Apple too is thought as Hollywood-adjacent, as aside from Apple TV they’re also historically responsible for Pixar. Important to realize that working in tech does not mean every successful company is purely a tech company.

The last decade has been referred to in Hollywood as the "content explosion" because of how much more content (and money from it) is being produced. The decline of certain media is not evidence of a decline in industry, the opposite is true.

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