Hacker News Reader

Comment by javier123454321 | Hacker News Reader

It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.

View on HN

I would guess a big part of this is because the art _itself_ is a form of compensation: Artists have a passion for the end result in a way that organizations (e.g., corporations, collectives, movements, etc.) harness and take advantage of in lieu of financial compensation.

This is usually framed in terms of greedy corporations cynically exploiting young workers, but having interviewed for a Sony studio myself a few years ago (and ultimately going back to my native robotics field for almost exactly double the pay), I think there is something tangible about the compensation that is working on something normal people encounter, especially in the leisure spaces of their lives.

It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).

> friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value

in most cases it don't unless this game become really legendary which often not the case. So young person easily can spent 10y in attempt to do that but as result non of those games will be remembered in 2y after release.

I've always said that being an engineer is a classic choose two out of three options situation. You can:

- be well compensated - work on something interesting - work on something ethical

Obviously there's the rare unicorn out there where you get all three, but those are the exception, not the rule.

The sneaky thing you don't realize when you’re 20 is that you come to be interested in what you work on. So if you just try and do what you do well, it will become interesting!

right and it's also additional hidden kind of exploitation happen with that. That artistic passion coming from desire to do better "art" and grow as "artist" (what ever creative field person is chasing) and also to connect with peoples of similar goals.

But in reality that environment helping only to grow in technical aspects of the job ( maybe also learning some market forces) but it leads to severe degradation in artistic practice of which person original desire cultivate even not realizing that just because is no business need for anything like that. Bus sines can be fine by just coping that everyone else doing or implementing some one else vision.

Reminds me of this [1] article, quoting Seinfeld, "In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me."

I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.

[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...

Yeah im not saying it's a bad thing necessarily.

To a lesser extent the same has been said about Apple's low pay relative to peer (far less profitable) companies -- the mere honor of working at Apple is an implied part of the compensation package.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com