What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since programmers' egos simply will not allow them to let go of the delusion, we'll be stomped into the ground while the owners laugh at us. In fact, it's already happening (see the recent wage-fixing "scandal").
Enjoy the ride, fellow egomaniacs!
This is essential. The only reason the worker sees any of the massive amounts of money that are thrown at these projects is because of collective bargaining.
It's an important lesson we should learn given the massive profits our industry sees.
If you're a 10x engineer why don't you demand 10x pay?
I've had friends beaten, others threatened. They've consistently threatened other friends with forced membership.
No thanks.
As for topic generally, unions are like communism (also close ideologically): they may look nice on the paper, but in real world, usually the worst possible solution.
I've only meet career-first scumbags in unions. Generally we in IT tend to stay away from politics and just do our job, which is exactly what unions are about. Plus, who is really trembling for his super-hard-to-get position? If I'll get fired/decide to leave, and I'll just pick from those recruiters spamming my inbox/linkedin periodically. Now if you didn't catch up with trends of last 20 years, you may need to worry a bit...
And the so called "wage-fixing" was an attempt to slow down the wage arms race that is killing cities like SF with ridiculous rent. It's not sustainable, and it will pop.
When the unions go on strike, they block public roads, denying cars and trucks to go to work, and force shops to close down. Don't believe me, see for yourself how a union lady forces a shop to close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVpn2-zOrs (french with dutch subtitles, sorry about that, but you will get the point). In the end the shop lady closed her shop.
Railroads, public transportation and postal offices have an average of 18 strike days a year.
Times have changed, if you don't like your job, quit and work for someone else. Don't like that? Quit and start your own (one-man) company.
And about your original question: unionization screws your economy so there are no jobs left. You lose your bargaining position because companies will look abroad to find workers willing to work.
When my dad went to work on his first day, he was there 15 minutes early, so he started to work when he arrived. A man came up to him and told him "It's not 9 o'clock yet, we don't start working before that". Everyone was standing behind their desks, doing nothing, just standing there, waiting for 9 o'clock. Want to screw your economy? Reduce productivity? Then go ahead and form unions.
About my dad, he worked his entire life at the same company, but because he had a different mindset than all of the other blue collar workers, he became a well-paid white collar worker, including company car etc, without ever being a manager.
What unions really do is put employees and employers as 'us vs them'. We do the least amount of work so you can pay us the least amount of money. Why not look at it as helping each other? A win-win? And if it's not a win-win anymore, find someone else.
This maxim may have been true 20, 30 years ago, but with an ever-increasing pool of STEM applicants, advances in automation and the juggernaut that is globalization, the pendulum is swinging.
>> We always have the option for taking our ball and going home (start our own company).
No, we don't. Such a simplistic decision like this has never existed in tech other than in grossly inaccurate Hollywood film plots. Starting a tech company comes with an enormous amount of risk and challenges. These risks aren't easily absorbed by most individuals. A person's company may succeed in the end after hard-fought battles, but in all likelihood, most will fail.
On a related note, unions have been so important for workers in the west, yet there's a lot of developing countries where people just don't realize their importance.
They may still be forced to pay the agency fees, though.
[1] http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/videogame-composer-blasts-m...
But they realize there's a benefit to having a standard basis for all deals, and standards of work environments, and things producers aren't allowed to do, and things they have to pay extra for.
And there's the flip side too. The tradespeople in the IATSE unions know they are well-paid for their work. They know they're lucky to have gained access to the jobs they have. And so they hold their work to a very high standard. They take an extreme amount of pride in those standards, and they're almost always worth what they cost.
That is to say, there's a way to turn that pride and ego into an asset, and to make it work for a union rather than against it.
When planning a movie, the producers work out what staff are needed, get out the rate card and calculate a wages budget. SOURCE: I have been assistant producer on a feature film.
Most of the staff are fungible. Only the heads of department make much of a difference to the quality of your movie (anyone else that doesn't come up to snuff simply doesn't get called back the next day).
In many industries (especially those that dominated the 19th and 20th centuries) labour is abundant because workers are fungible: business owners can keep wages down by threatening to replace workers. This doesn't happen in software engineering because software engineers aren't easy to replace: relevant experience matters and learning curve is steep.
Unlike the capital-intensive industries of the past, software engineering is very light on capital: the initial investment required to start a company is within reach of almost all software engineers.
Thus, in software engineering labour is short and capital abundant and so labour's negotiating position is strong and capital's position is weak. This is one reason why software companies are so generous in benefits and why there are no unions. It has nothing to do with anybody's ego.
"Why was this process so smooth? The team had never worked together before, and the scenes they were shooting that day required many different complex tasks to happen in harmony: lighting, makeup, hair, costumes, sets, props, acting. "
If the subject actually interests anyone, I strongly recommend the work of Ted Goranson, who has devoted decades to studying this issue:
The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Virtual-Enterprise-Cases-Metrics...
He offers a comparison of modern entrepreneurs and the old sea faring culture, in a small pamphlet called "Whale of a Tale.":
http://www.amazon.co.uk/whale-tale-historical-perspective-Pe...
It is tragic that this pamphlet is now out of print. It was only 25 pages, and did a brilliant job showing how the old laws and cultures of the seafaring nations became the basis for the modern understanding of entrepreneurs.
In his pamphlet, Goranson did a great job of arguing that whaling ships were the worlds first Virtual Agile Enterprises. Very insightful reading.
The whaling ships offered a model for modern Hollywood, and tech startup, culture: lots of skilled professionals, who had never worked together before, coming together and working together smoothly.
As films became more effects-heavy, the process has become even more rigid. As someone said of a Star Wars film, "Three years of pre-production, six months of principal photography, three years of post-production". Some directors, especially ones who came from the stage, have problems with this. For a new stage production, actors are a debugging tool. The director and actors go into an empty theater with a bare stage and work through the script to see how it plays out. Scenes and musical numbers may be added, deleted, or rearranged during this process. There have been film directors who worked that way, including some of the greats.
That process doesn't scale to modern blockbusters. Film planning today looks more like classical cartoon planning - it starts with storyboards, and gradually details are filled in. Nowadays, there's often a "pre-visualization" of the entire production[1], a videogame-quality cartoon with every shot that will be in the final product. That's done before actual production is green-lighted. The link below, from a Paris film school, shows previz and production scenes from some well-known movies side by side. Iron Man looks just like its previz shots, just with higher image quality. Even the camera angles match.
This is not "agile".
A lifetime of full-time employment is indeed a very recent invention in the history of humanity, and as the article says, it's going out of fashion already.
But we must not forget that this "fluke" helped bring prosperity and stability to an unprecedented number of people in the developed world over the last 100 years, and especially in the middle of the 20th century. The middle class would not have existed without it. Even the freedom and equality that a lot of us take for granted today might not have existed without it, since a strong middle class is often said to be a critical prerequisite for democracy (at least until they grow older and get addicted to Fox News).
Short-term, project-based employment is good when there are always enough projects to choose from. Both IT and Hollywood are having good times now, so a lot of people can afford to live project-to-project. But what happens when the projects dry up?
Full-time employees of large corporations and government agencies can get through economic downturns with relatively little impact on their paycheck as long as they manage to stay employed. Even if they are laid off, they can often rely on unemployment benefits for a while. But if you're a freelancer and the projects suddenly stop coming, what do you do? Not many countries have the equivalent of unemployment insurance for freelancers, and no amount of unionization will help you survive for long in a world without projects.
Unfortunately, there is no turning back. The world has steadily been moving away from the lifetime full-time employment model for the last 20-30 years, leading to a catastrophic increase in the number of young people with zero economic stability. The fluke is coming to an end, and we're headed back to the time when farmers feasted in the fall and starved in the spring -- only this time we have much more overall wealth and better technology.
In the brave new world of temporary jobs, should every man fend for himself by setting aside a rainy day fund, the financial equivalent of a Tesla home battery to smooth out intermittent income? Will something like basic income save us?
Not sure what country you're speaking about here but in the UK at least you can get unemployment benefits for as long as necessary providing you can show you are actively seeking and able to work (i.e. applying for jobs, attending interviews). Your past work history doesn't factor into it.
Past history doesn't matter, but what about the kind of work you want to do in the future?
The criteria you listed seem to be optimized for people who are looking for full-time employment. Would you qualify if you were an independent contractor who is temporarily out of clients?
According to Wikipedia [1], the UK JSA often requires beneficiaries to call or visit a specific number of companies each week, and not refuse a reasonable job offer. How does that work for an independent contractor who wants to continue being independent? Do you have to prove that you tried to sell your services to a specific number of potential clients each week? Or do you give up and just get a traditional job? If it's the latter, then the system is deliberately putting independent contractors at a disadvantage.
I'm not saying this is necessarily bad -- after all, beggars can't be choosers -- but it does dampen the original article's enthusiasm about project-based employment being the norm of the future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobseeker%27s_Allowance#Jobsee...
Because it was planned in pre-production. When you decide to shoot a film, the first thing that happens is the script gets 'broken down' into a database with every single production element involved in every scene. I mean everything - if a character has a handbag over her shoulder and later pulls a tube of lipstick out of it, the lipstick and the handbag get their own pages in the breakdown, they're linked with each other, someone is assigned the responsibility to procure, pay, maintain custody of it, and so on...and on and on and on. Your typical feature film has maybe 100 scenes, and even a no-budget film will probably generate an average of 10 things per scene. On a big-budget film as described in the article, it could be 10x that.
This process takes 1-2 weeks minimum, and forms the basis of the budget and the schedule. Then you add in constraints for this and that (Famous Actress is only available for one week, so all her scenes will have be shot between these two dates; we'll have X hours and minutes of daylight available on any given date; union rules mean that if we shoot longer than 16 hours in a single day we start paying everyone their full day rate for each additional hour (yes that's really true, but it hardly ever happens). So at the end of this you have a realistic estimate of time and cost for the production itself. You end up with a document called the 'Day Out of Days' which itemizes every single scene and possibly every single camera setup in the film, and what particular things/people will be required for them.
Then you set about raising the money, and when you have all that in place you go into pre-rpoduction, securing locations, building props, getting signatures on contracts and so on. Things falling through at this stage can cause big delays (on reason that I'm reading HN today rather than shooting) but most contracts go into effect on the first day of principal photography so the financial costs are limited.
During production, everyone on the cast and crew gets a copy of the schedule for the following day the evening before, telling them where they'll be working, what they'll be doing, what stuff has to be there etc. etc. This usually undergoes substantial revisions at the end of every shooting day depending on whether production is ahead of or behind schedule, what random things have changed and so on. You work for 12+ hours a day, and everything you do is scheduled down to 15 minute increments. Then you drink a beer and either go home or sit in a production meeting for 1-2 hours and work out the potential problems for the following day.
Think of it as a cross between military logistics of setting up a forward operating base (minus the risk of being shot at) and planning a wedding. It's great, it's really rewarding, but like these events it is a ton of hard work and you probably go to bed mentally and physically exhausted every night. On your days off you probably hang out with the same people you are already working with and eat more food, watch a couple of movies, hold more production meetings, and then get up and start working again.
Remember that they've been making films in Hollywood for over a century (the first short to be made there was in 1910 and the first feature in 1914) and it's a very incestuous industry, so you have a smallish number of people floating back and forth between multiple film productions and sharing their techniques with each other, and the fundamentals of film production haven't really changed all that much.
One upside of this is that you can very quickly tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not - scripts are formatted in a certain very particular way, there's a lot of set jargon and so on. As far as software goes, there's plenty of room for innovation (which I'd be happy to discuss) but you have to be 100% backward compatible with existing practices. Nobody wants to waste time learning something that fall short and result in them getting yelled at, fired, and talked about negatively, so people are pretty conservative.
Of course, Hollywood isn't the only industry like that. Most are, in my observation. One of the biggest challenges in B2B software is overcoming the incumbent, no matter how bad they are.
To be fair, I haven't seen a competitor to MM that blew me away, and MM has improved jussssssst enough to keep people from running away. The ipad version of Scheduling is certainly a step in the right direction.
It's an interesting situation, where it looks like there's space for a competitor, but there really isn't.
There's a semi-open (or is it fully open source? I forget, honestly) project called CeLtx that's cloud/browser-based and does a subscription SaaS. That's pretty up to date in terms of both functionality, networking and UX but I'm not that crazy about subscription models, it's like $1-200 a year which is fair, BUT you have to remember that a films are often made in the middle of nowhere and a cloud-based product is no good if you don't have reliable internet access. You're going to have to print out shooting schedules and call sheets on paper anyway because people want to be able to stick them in their pocket, scribble notes on them etc. If you can only access it on a device them you have to keep your phone or something charged all the time, ensure it doesn't break, and you'll get yelled at if your phone goes off in the middle of a take or interferes with the sound department's radio microphones. Time is money so a lot of productions ban cellphone use on the film set itself.
These in turn tie in (to some degree) with script editing tools like Final Draft (the market leader, though not my preference) for automatically breaking down a script. However, there's a limit to how much you can automate that sort of thing because there are so many things that wouldn't have to be spelled out in a script but which rely on a human reader's ability to make inferences - for example if you have a scene set in a restaurant then you have to plan for people in the background having their own meals and drinks (real bottles, fake beer and wine because you don't want them getting drunk), waiters need the appropriate outfits and accessories and so on. Of course you could automate such things for very common settings but then you'd spend just as much time correcting the computer's wrong guesses.
Incidentally that's always a dead giveaway of inexperienced filmmakers - the main characters always playing off each other in isolation, because the script doesn't say anything in particular about people in the background so nobody bothers to hire any. You need a lot of background people to make most locations seem real unless the story specifically calls for people to be isolated at that time. My hobby when I watch a boring TV show is to count the number of people doing background work - you never see them clearly but as soon as they're not then you start wondering 'why is this police station/ office/ street completely deserted?' If it's thinly populated and nobody seems to be doing anything in particular, that means the people sitting around in the background are members of the film crew.
I guess you could also use this software for other purposes, but it's heavily geared to film production needs, eg we use standard budgeting codes and suchlike.
It's not inexperience in that case. It could be the particular kind of experience the filmmakers have. It seems pretty heavy on former Buffy people, and that show was masterful in its use of a low budget. I do wonder if that experience kind of over-molded them all. Even Whedon is just now coming to terms with what he can do with an actual budget. Anyway, just musing.
To be honest, I think the author got stars in his eyes a little bit. You could call it the Hollywood model, and movies are fun to work on, but you could observe the same sort of short-term, multi-faceted teamwork on any construction project.
All those temp workers are unionized. The union does not guarantee them a job, but it does guarantee them a certain salary and benefits when they do find a job. It's a closed shop, so if they do hire a non-union member for a job, they become a union member.
"It helps that, despite the work’s fleeting nature, Hollywood is strongly unionized, which keeps wages high. According to the rate card of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 728, which represents union film-lighting crews in Los Angeles, even entry-level electricians on a major film set make more than $35 an hour — i.e., more than 40 percent higher than the national average for electricians — and make that wage over 12-hour days."
It helps that, despite the work’s fleeting nature, Hollywood is strongly unionized, which keeps wages high.
I wonder how the unions interact with the automation also mentioned in the article, such as robotic cameras. I'd expect some push-back from the grips' union against automation, at least while they still have some leverage with the studios.
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/even-films-set-in-californ...
Hollywood is using every tool to avoid and work around unions.