this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who'd transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, "because the hours and pay are so much better." It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
Seems like any career that is commonly seen as a passion comes with an additional level of exploitation. Game developers and animators get a raw deal.
It's also, imo, because it's a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, "I have a masters but can't find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?"
And each time I explain that what they're doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers' salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.
Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)
Travel nurses are often used as scabs or to avoid hiring a full-time unionized employee.
All those professions are badly in need of strong unions for sure.
Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master's because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market -- is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn't go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
The Missouri state government is a crucial piece of the puzzle there.
He's on the Kansas side, which for all its own foibles is at least not Missouri.