An interesting thing on the vfx industry and how the artists are often poorly paid with no benefits working huge hours and how the companies basically make no money despite being a vital part of multimillion dollar films.
While I appreciate the VFX cause this film is advocating, given how I can identify with most of the business practices from my own job, I am curious how many other people in other careers suffer very similar problems.
Submitted by Bigger Rob on Sun, 2017-02-26 09:52
As a general rule of thumb, the less someone wants to do the job, the better it pays. It gets even more disjointed if there is a relatively low global headcount requirement, and loads of ways to train up or it (university, self-taught, hobby (e.g. computer game development)
VFX is seen as "cool", and you get a lot of people who do it as a hobby. You can see plenty of amateurs/unpaid peeps putting demos up on Youtube.
Conversely, very few people do demos of their leet accountancy skillz (or some street VLOOKUP Excel moves), however they get a decent wage. It was the same with my degree...we were all advised that, on average, approximately 300 biology degree-level jobs a year come up in the UK. That is less than Bangor Uni's yearly intake, so the competition for these jobs is insanely high, and so the pay is pretty low (example job would be forestry management). The number of well-paying jobs can probably be counted on one hand. People do it because they love the job, not for the money.
Submitted by babychaos on Sun, 2017-02-26 19:31
I'm with Pete on this. To give another example from my narrow field:
In software development it's pretty easy to hire front end developers between 18-22 and they will work ridiculous hours for agencies. It's easy because anyone can code something in Javascript and follow React tutorials and build reactive websites with material design. The barrier to entry is low. Agencies in particular are fuckers because they know young people are hungry and they will screw them for 20K. It's all fast and throwaway. It's fun. It's all the sexy tech. Good luck getting paid more than 25K after 3 years.
There is a seismic change between that mentality and the big money full stack jobs and it's because full stack means that you spend more time untangling shit.
Backend developers are astoundingly hard to find. It's not fun or sexy to build a JSON Api (unless you're weird). It's a lot of effort for very little obvious business value. The client never sees your work. The business won't rave about it. If you're full stack (front and back oooer) then it's worse. The client will rave about the colour of the button but fail to realise that the code to make the button work from the shit description you received took 3 months because you magically made the system do something far outside of its original design.
Backend developers often become managers or go into product design. Some become purely architects and spend their time arguing in meetings. None of that is particularly fun. It also means that finding very senior old far backend developers is nigh on impossible and we get paid for it well!
When leaving University, if you have penchant for backend languages such as C++ or C#, you'll probably head toward coding games, which is just like VFX. It's ridiculous burnout territory far worse than I've ever seen. I've done long hours for a few weeks but they do it for a year. I think they love it at first and if they are in a games house that does well then it's great. However, if it doesn't then they burn out of code entirely. I know ex-Gremlin employee that went into teaching, one that worked with Rockstar is now a train driver and another I was at Uni with burnt out with Codemasters and ended up being an accountant.
Boring + Hard = good pay.
Submitted by brainwipe on Sun, 2017-02-26 22:40
Done a quick bit of looking up to see if I could find out how many jobs, and how many entrants there were in the VFX market. Even the rough numbers I've found show a bit of a Supply/Demand gap.
Finding out the number of degree-level training courses was harder/impossible. I did find a list of "Top 100 VFX universities", and Bournemouth Uni was second. A bit of digging suggests their yearly intake is 80, with just under 300 applicants. Average wage on leaving is £20K, which is remarkably similar to the numbers Rob is giving for his (not entirely un-related) example.
So, just from the top 100 universities globally, you could have well over 8,000 graduates looking for one of the 5,300 jobs...that's assuming the people who already have them fancy trying something else...
Submitted by babychaos on Mon, 2017-02-27 13:27
yeah look at testing boring as fuck but very well paid
there is also a sliding scale element depending on the industry as well. In programming for instance boring back end work for some outfit that does web stuff well paid but not exceptional boring back end work for financial institutions very very well paid (also incredibly stressful and likely to move to germany very soon).
For VFX I would guess doing contract vfx for things like commercials or small companies promo videos or indie films would be the low end and hollywood the high end you would expect some of those millions to trickle down somewhat that's how it works in other industries where you want the best. Doesn't sound like it does though.
Comments
While I appreciate the VFX cause this film is advocating, given how I can identify with most of the business practices from my own job, I am curious how many other people in other careers suffer very similar problems.
As a general rule of thumb, the less someone wants to do the job, the better it pays. It gets even more disjointed if there is a relatively low global headcount requirement, and loads of ways to train up or it (university, self-taught, hobby (e.g. computer game development)
VFX is seen as "cool", and you get a lot of people who do it as a hobby. You can see plenty of amateurs/unpaid peeps putting demos up on Youtube.
Conversely, very few people do demos of their leet accountancy skillz (or some street VLOOKUP Excel moves), however they get a decent wage. It was the same with my degree...we were all advised that, on average, approximately 300 biology degree-level jobs a year come up in the UK. That is less than Bangor Uni's yearly intake, so the competition for these jobs is insanely high, and so the pay is pretty low (example job would be forestry management). The number of well-paying jobs can probably be counted on one hand. People do it because they love the job, not for the money.
I'm with Pete on this. To give another example from my narrow field:
In software development it's pretty easy to hire front end developers between 18-22 and they will work ridiculous hours for agencies. It's easy because anyone can code something in Javascript and follow React tutorials and build reactive websites with material design. The barrier to entry is low. Agencies in particular are fuckers because they know young people are hungry and they will screw them for 20K. It's all fast and throwaway. It's fun. It's all the sexy tech. Good luck getting paid more than 25K after 3 years.
There is a seismic change between that mentality and the big money full stack jobs and it's because full stack means that you spend more time untangling shit.
Backend developers are astoundingly hard to find. It's not fun or sexy to build a JSON Api (unless you're weird). It's a lot of effort for very little obvious business value. The client never sees your work. The business won't rave about it. If you're full stack (front and back oooer) then it's worse. The client will rave about the colour of the button but fail to realise that the code to make the button work from the shit description you received took 3 months because you magically made the system do something far outside of its original design.
Backend developers often become managers or go into product design. Some become purely architects and spend their time arguing in meetings. None of that is particularly fun. It also means that finding very senior old far backend developers is nigh on impossible and we get paid for it well!
When leaving University, if you have penchant for backend languages such as C++ or C#, you'll probably head toward coding games, which is just like VFX. It's ridiculous burnout territory far worse than I've ever seen. I've done long hours for a few weeks but they do it for a year. I think they love it at first and if they are in a games house that does well then it's great. However, if it doesn't then they burn out of code entirely. I know ex-Gremlin employee that went into teaching, one that worked with Rockstar is now a train driver and another I was at Uni with burnt out with Codemasters and ended up being an accountant.
Boring + Hard = good pay.
Done a quick bit of looking up to see if I could find out how many jobs, and how many entrants there were in the VFX market. Even the rough numbers I've found show a bit of a Supply/Demand gap.
The only number I've found in terms of number of jobs is here, with ~5,300 globally.
Finding out the number of degree-level training courses was harder/impossible. I did find a list of "Top 100 VFX universities", and Bournemouth Uni was second. A bit of digging suggests their yearly intake is 80, with just under 300 applicants. Average wage on leaving is £20K, which is remarkably similar to the numbers Rob is giving for his (not entirely un-related) example.
So, just from the top 100 universities globally, you could have well over 8,000 graduates looking for one of the 5,300 jobs...that's assuming the people who already have them fancy trying something else...
yeah look at testing boring as fuck but very well paid
there is also a sliding scale element depending on the industry as well. In programming for instance boring back end work for some outfit that does web stuff well paid but not exceptional boring back end work for financial institutions very very well paid (also incredibly stressful and likely to move to germany very soon).
For VFX I would guess doing contract vfx for things like commercials or small companies promo videos or indie films would be the low end and hollywood the high end you would expect some of those millions to trickle down somewhat that's how it works in other industries where you want the best. Doesn't sound like it does though.