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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Warning: unpopular opinion here.
From the article:
So, I am an engineer/scientist. Products that I have developed/contributed to development are used by billions of people. Most likely you, the reader of this comment are using it right now, because some of the products I worked on are telecom products, that are widely used to transfer information.
The amount of secondary payouts I receive is EXACTLY ZERO.
My honest question is, why those writers should be any different? They should be paid when they make their products, according to the contract they signed. But why many think they entitled to something more?
And no, I do not think that argument "but it is difficult work, it is not constant" works here. There are lots of difficult, non-constant, seasonal, whatever jobs there that pay even less.
Crab in a bucket mentality.
"I don't receive residuals, so why should these writers? The executives are entitled to all the profit."
Not very smart for an engineer
You don't have to be smart to be an engineer. Just resourceful.
Yep. My team is composed of brilliant engineers who lack common sense, and average engineers who might not have a deep level of mastery who keep them in check. It's a working system.
I work in machining. The amount of drawing I've received from engineers that could not be machined makes me question the intelligence required to become an engineer.
I'm an engineer that makes those drawings and I can't dispute this at all.
If all us engineers got paid every time our code was used, the Internet as it exists would be absurdly expensive. Really, it couldn't exist. Thank god engineers don't have the same "I need to be paid every time something I created is used by anybody" mentality. You're building on the work of millions of people before you, you owe it to others to contribute (and make a living in the process).
Of course, the industries are different in important ways. But you should be able to explain the differences, not just wave them away with "ur just jelly lol"
IMHO, copyright and IP law is ridiculously protective. People should get a few years to benefit from their creations, then they should be public domain. This lifetime-plus-70-years bullshit is stupid. Companies are exploiting those stupid laws to milk us on every platform for decades with each media artifact, and artists and writers just want to get a cut of the action. IMHO, it's the wrong fight, and I can't really support them in it: "give writers a share of the rent you milk from us" is not a cause I wanna get behind.
But the sales and marketing morons deserve to be paid for everything, of course!
No, they shouldn't be profiting from rent on IP any more than anybody else does. The government should make some major changes to intellectual property law to stop that.
Anyway...do sales & marketing people get paid an unreasonable amount? Are they rolling in cash while writers suffer? Seems to me that most the marketing people I've met in my life were just getting along like everybody else. They don't seem like the right people to be angry at.
You worked in a shitty industry, I'm in the valley and the marketing guys make top bank, I was a Sr principal at one of the biggies and they blow me out of the water.
Sales is often on a different level, commission is incredible.
Where do you think the money is going?
I was reading a book on this recently and it had a good reason for why some departments get all the money and some don't. Imagine you have a market that is saturated with products, you decided you can and want to buy, but can't choose. In that case, sales/marketing is what brings in the most money, so they have the most power and get paid accordingly.
Now imagine the post-war booming economy where every car made gets sold and cars are fairly established as a product. Sales and engineering performance are not that important, but financial departments grew immensely, because the competition was on optimizing, cost-cutting, investment and consolidation.
Last example: new industry, still figuring out the best methods, newest products and killer apps: engineering has the most power.
Given the economy we're in right now, where money is tight, new products outside the AI hype/boom are going to be companies fighting to sell you their product, so marketing is winning right now, but it may change.
Easier answer: social skills + their whole job is ass-kissing, they get very good at it.
Imagine how good engineers could be if they didn't have to waste all their time doing actual work.
Yes, that same book also talked about how success and pay is only 5% performance and the rest is self promotion and sucking up...that helps put a lot of life in perspective
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walt-Disney-Company-Marketing-Executive-Salaries-E717_D_KO20,39.htm
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walt-Disney-Company-Writer-Salaries-E717_D_KO20,26.htm
Disney pays higher than average. Writers can get paid a hell of a lot less. And it's often only a part-time job that lasts only a few weeks or months a year.
So yeah, I'd say the marketing executives get paid an unreasonable amount compared to the writers who actually make a huge contribution to creating the product.
Copyright law is ridiculously protective. You can thank Disney, the corporation, for that. The original law said 30 years. That was enough for the creator to make a career being creative. Micky would look a whole lot different by this point.
Why shouldn't we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?
I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.
Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.
Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.
I guess it depends right? If a show or movie or other piece of art continues to bring income in, where does that money go? Particularly when the team that created it have effected disbanded and therefore aren't technically on the same payroll that income is arriving on. I would argue it should not solely go to the owners of that production house.
Residuals makes sense in a way that doesn't really apply to engineering because typically engineers will remain at a company and their continued employment is how they continue to gain income from their work.
You could maybe say an actual equivalent would be engineers getting shares in their company, which would function the same as residuals. I think that is a more apt comparison.
I think the shares in a company thing is a good comparison, because I went to university at a place that churns out a lot of grads who found or work for startups. It's a minefield because often the reason early employees get paid in partly in shares is because they couldn't afford to pay them the "true amount" upfront.