Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avidruntime 37 days ago
I work in the television industry, so does my spouse. We both have gotten offers by recruiters from services like this. While this author's experience is hard to relate to in many ways, their description of the economic situation is not far off. There is enormous pain right now in the television industry, particularly for the below the line workers. This stems from a myriad of factors in confluence. A very incomplete list: (1) the ongoing mergers of media companies and the downstream effects this has on decision makers on the buyer/network side of things, (2) the destabilization of television economics due to the long term effects of internet video (streamers and independent content creators alike), (3) a cultural mood shift within the consumer consensus of quality and the downstream effects on a consumer's willingness to participate as a consumer at all. Thats a lot of huge pieces on the board moving in ways that were hard to imagine in the not so distant past.

My point in outlining this is to scratch the surface and paint a picture on the systemic damage to this ecosystem and as a result you have people who have been working in a collaborative video workforce who no longer are able to find work. I've seen probably 75% of my colleagues and peers move on to other pastures, parlaying their skills into other careers, often starting in fields where your entry level positions are typically held by people 10, maybe 20 years younger. And of course, some have it easier than others. The AI training gigs come at an extremely opportune time (for them) and typically offer very tantalizing wages (in the form of an AI generated message from a LinkedIn recruiter who only replies with a link to the company's registration page). And if you're months without work and you use some of that unwanted free time to think introspectively about the offer, its easy to walk away with a sense that, eventually, the right talent will meet the right training method and produce the software package that actually kills your employable skillset. Its a horrible feeling. Its a scary feeling. Its a feeling of being on the wrong side of a window that is in the process of closing.

So while you may find it easy to lose sympathy for this particular writer, I would implore you not to lose sympathy for the broader class within and to not lose sight of where this article sits in context to the bigger story. Without a shadow of a doubt, her experience is the norm within the industry right now. I think it is worthy of recognition because what is happening will come for many other fields/areas of expertise in the future. What you describe as one person's bumbling misadventure rhymes quite a bit with other people's struggle to make ends meet in a rapidly evolving/devolving market.

1 comments

The TV industry has always been a beast to work in. Is it worse now? Or just a different kind of bad?