[undoware]

I have a friend who is a composer for film.

She has made some of the most exquisite thought products I've ever experienced (a strange way to talk about music, but I'm trying to cleave to the OP.) She works 90 hours a week, has been well-regarded in her industry for 10+ years.

I've seen her drop everything, on any night of the week, to hit the deadline for wrap, dozens of times in the last year alone.

She has $400CAD to her name, has no car, and rents. If she weren't in a housing co-op, she'd need to move out of the city -- and as it already stands, she lives in the roughest neighbourhood in town.

The moral of this story is that enjoyable, well-regarded work where you feel a deep connection to the end-product almost inevitably becomes part of its own compensation package.

There will be people who will code for free, for 'exposure', and there will be a lot of them, not too long from now at all, because coding is a delight, and is becoming more delightful every day (cf CoPilot).

I think a lot about how the romanticization of coding as a profession parallels the romanticization of the music industry in the 80s and 90s. People work cheap for hallowed dreams. Pride goeth before the fall.

[pcthrowaway]

I suspect this is enough info about your friend to identify them (assuming they live in one of the population hubs of their country).

If you switch to they/them pronouns and drop the reference to the specific currency their assets are in, it'd provide a good cloak of fuzz to prevent them from being identified by the description.

I don't know your friend but I think most people would prefer to avoid being called out as being nearly one step away from homelessness (even though I suspect I live in the same city, and the same is true of many hard-working people here)

[undoware]

Yikes. Good points. And a good time to admit that the person described is an amalgam of what I heard from (at least) two artist friends, in somewhat different industries, about things that happened in the early days of the pandemic. No actual creatives were harmed in the making of this post :)

In the future, I'll try to avoid exaggerating, and additionally, think more adversarially.

All the same: it's very, very hard to be a creative right now, if your creativity is anything other than coding. My fellow coders need to realize that the circumstances that have led to our overpay are indeed temporary, because of the way job titles function as positional goods, and become themselves fought over.

The other field I've seen this occur in are postgrad humanities, where the adjunctification of academe has been accomplished by inflating the status of the work. (And I speak as someone who dropped out of a PhD in the humanities.)

If you're expected to be honored just to be in the room, you can expect to earn only an honorarium.

And that's the future I see for our industry as well, eventually.

There must be some sort of general principle of growth and decay involved.