[gamblor956]

The average (mean) pay is inflated by the pay that goes to the top writers making several millions annually. The median pay is far less than $260k; the WGA estimate it is now around $70k. I know plenty of writers that were making comfortable upper-middle-class lives 10 years ago that now make less than $100k/year despite working more, on multiple shows each year.

EDIT: One of my friends was a writer on a FOX broadcast show a few years ago. With the writer's room salary and residuals from one broadcast episode script, she and her husband were able to buy a house in LA near El Segundo. She's a showrunner now for a streaming show, but makes less now than she did as a staff writer. For a tech analogy: imagine if you made it to CTO and made less than you did as a junior programmer even though the company was making even more off of your work than it did before.

Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.

Yes, this is how everyone outside of tech thinks about tech people these days... Remember that you said this the next time you're out of work and looking for sympathy and people are talking crap about you.

[prepend]

The minimum wga wage is about $7k/week [0] so if someone is making $70k/year that means they are working only 10 weeks per year. So there’s lots of free time there.

[0] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-min...

[gamblor956]

No, you're misreading the article.

The rate for a writer-producer is $7.4k/week. That is for a writer that also does producing duties.

Most writers are not also employed in production capacities. Staff writers make a lot less, and seasons are a lot shorter than they used to be, so there is a lot more downtime between gigs (since few writers have the clout to work on multiple shows at the same time).