[0xRusty]

Or creative industries where 20% of the people do 80% of the heavy lifiting work. As a vfx and cg supervisor at a large vfx company myself I work extremely long hours, picking up the slack for the 80%'ers who can barely simulate a piece of cloth or match a plate's key light direction. Why on earth would I choose to unionize and equalize my pay and benefits to those that are objectively poor at their job in an industry where successful results to tasks are so subjectively measured.

[rperez333]

You are likely deluding yourself about your skill level; I’ve had the habit of tracking my peer's productivity (on Shotgrid) to stay above their metrics, and even if I could say objectively to be the faster in my dept., that is irrelevant. VFX needs different kinds of people, and I can’t count how many times “less” productive artists came up with very beautiful and ingenious solutions that I haven’t thought about it.

Also, we don’t stay long hours because we failed to put a light on the correct place. as the article points out, the issue is the director/production has no financial penalties for their lack of planning and indecisiveness. This is just the Parkinson's law of triviality [0] that happens in most businesses, but since VFX studios don’t put a hard cap on the number of revisions, artists end up absorbing that. One of my recent crunches was due to production going through 43 versions of a magic wand effect. IMO, by version 15, we already had multiple and more interesting looks than what was approved for final. [0] https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

[BeFlatXIII]

> so subjectively measured

There's your answer. Equalize pay and benefits because there's no telling whether those in charge of assigning pay have any good sense at all for quality. It's the argument of salary vs. hourly vs. per-item all over again.

[agileAlligator]

> because there's no telling whether those in charge of assigning pay have any good sense at all for quality

They'll pay what they think you are worth, and you are free to leave if you think they aren't paying you enough. It's not like there are only two software companies in the entire world and you gotta work for one of them.