This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don't have to pay people to do that, so the pay for people to do it professionally would naturally be low in a free market system.

Do you know another profession like that? Software development. People spend countless hours working on open source software for free just because they like it. The open source community saves businesses billions in labor costs every year. Would anyone suggest we get rid of the open source community so developers could be better compensated? We are just lucky enough that the global demand for general software development is much higher than the demand for video game development or theater/TV/movies that it can offset these other factors.

I asked a journalist I knew whether he minded the fact that people like myself publish articles/blogs for free in publications that also have paid staff/freelancers. His response was basically "That ship sailed long ago." But there are definitely people who feel more strongly that people having "fun" are taking food off their family's plate.

Seems to me that if you want to "be special/be paid/be known" in your art form, you need to pick the ones that are enjoyable to you AND have a significant moat, or barrier to entry. e.g. making complex pieces of music, assuming you're not stitching together prefabs from Splice, is actually much harder than pulling your phone out. Same thing with shooting, color grading, and cutting a great video, that's MUCH harder than shooting a frame and applying a filter. Same with doing a beautiful sketch or painting, that takes years of practice.

Photo cameras used to be moats a long time ago, when they were bulky, expensive, a novelty, and the development of film was not as straightforward. But now, it's gotten 100% democratized.

Of course, go back pre-35mm and that was even more the case but--as you say--even just a phone takes precent decent pictures for at least certain types of shots if you even halfway know what you're doing. I have tons of equipment and even I just default to my iPhone a lot of the time for casual "memory" type shots.

Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.

I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.

To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But I'm probably not going to take you up on a minimum wage offer unless it were something I was going to do anyway.

If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?

In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free.

Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.

I'll take a work for hire option, thanks, without the attitude that it's an art and they're above that.

I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.

Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.

For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.

I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know.

How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.

The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts a lower bound on other photo shoots as well, since there is never going to be a shortage of weddings.

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]

I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.

This of course would have to have banks be more open about how they operate, so it probably won't happen.

This is to say, it's not really the type of software that is the issue, but rather lack of openness about the problem domain.

AMQP (messaging) came out of JPMC and other financial institutions

Financial institutions are also involved in blockchain projects

Another random example: https://developer.capitalone.com/open-source/

As someone for whom the day job involves working on projects for investment banks and other regulated industries, I'd say this is not the first problem that needs to be solved.

> if banks were to describe their problems in a sufficiently well defined way

THIS is often the problem. They often don't know exactly what they want. Well, many people in the company think know what is needed/wanted but most of them don't agree with each other (and if they do they probably don't agree on priorities) beyond the rules set by the regulators (which are usually deliberately "non prescriptive", which is to say "vague"). They often have long lists of what they don't want, but no proper specification of what they do want.

The larger organisations are often so siloed that the left hand doesn't know which foot the right hand is pointing a gun at and no one really knows which elbow they are collectivly sat on. When a project to clean things up starts it is usually populated by people seconded from elsewhere who either still have that job to do so can't commit themselves to the matter in the concentrated way required to deal with it properly, or are not close enough to the problem to have a full understanding of the nitty-gritty details and the interactions between those details. And sometimes those details are very difficult to find until they bite you due to the amount of legacy systems these groups have dotted around, especially in cases where organisations have formed from many mergers & acquisitions over the years.

They don't want to openly share this state because it would be a public embarrassment. Of course, it is hardly a well-kept secret: they all know what state each other are in, as do those of us slowly trying to fix it and the consultants (internal and external to the organisations) making piles out of part-way fixing it (often by reinventing the problem space in new and expensively interesting ways!). But still they don't want it to be any more an open secret than can be avoided.

I assume large organisations in other industries are similarly afflicted. It is human nature (we often don't individually know exactly what we want) magnified by scale.

"It can't be that hard, can it?" you would be forgiven for asking.

"Oh, but it can", I assure you!

As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread: things are improving, particularly in specific areas where new ideas are forcing, or at least allowing, more radical rethinks. But overall it'll be a complete mess for some time to come.

There are very good open source databases, content management systems, web servers, full text corpus search systems, operating systems, and 100s of other "kind of boring" things that a 20 year old version of me would assume people would need to be paid to create. (Some of those are a crossover where a substantial portion of the development was originally paid, of course, but many others are not.)

If a bank found someone who was eager to develop its software for free, it would have a pretty good reason to question their motives.

In that case, banking software would be very useful for the community and people will help.

The fact that something is boring has nothing to do with it. There are few things as boring as developing operating systems like Hurd or developing Wayland and dealing all day with bugs and bugs and more bugs.

Of course, people is not going to create banking software if the only ones who benefit are private companies that give nothing in return.

There must be a good reason. Something that provides the sense of deep meaning for your work. Working for free so a private company could profit out of your work does not.

Interestingly this holds up even though I'm now coding up my own ideas - even though I'm calling the shots on what I work on, they're still constrained by what there's potentially a market for, and so it's still not really passion coding. If I were completely free of constraints, I'd do stuff that's more useless, more prestigious, more beautiful, with fewer corner cases and fewer dependencies on outside software. That's economically unviable (and kinda solipsistic, too), so I don't.

I gave them a quote without thinking too much (“$100/h, maybe a bit less if it’s something really interesting”[0]) and they were shocked, saying something like “I didn’t think you made that much money from these games!”. Well, if I did I wouldn’t be taking on contract work to begin with but you’re not getting the same rate as my own projects :)

[0] these days it would be more like $150/h.

Some people create or contribute as part of their job. If the job requires new software, the company doesn't want to sell the software, and the developer thinks others could use it, then why not open source?

For the record, I don't think this means we should abandon open source software. I simply thought it was a good analogy to illustrate why OP's argument was flawed and that we shouldn't be blaming people for taking these "terrible jobs".

I imagine your are trying to allude to the glazier's fallacy [1]. However that is only a fallacy from the perspective of the entire economy. An extra dollar spent on a glazier is going to benefit the glazier. The problem for the economy at large is that the dollar might have otherwise been spent on the tailor, baker, etc.

To take this back to software development, the glazier fallacy is why I am not against open source software. The overall economy is made more efficient from it. However that doesn't change the fact that the increase in efficiency comes from not having to pay more money to software developers. That isn't great if you view the situation purely from the perspective of a (selfish) software developer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Creating open source solutions to common problems doesn't eliminate work, it frees people up to work on new problems.

I propose to you a law that will increase the wages of all software developers: demand that no code can be written in a computer fabricated after 2010. *

* Hint: Bastiat.

We could at least stop giving young people terrible advice like, "you can do anything, live your dream!"

"Get a practical job to pay the bills, and do your dream as a side gig," is a pretty reasonable compromise.

Most people are have a low tolerance for risk and it's a problem when they get into a field that requires being a risk taker. That tolerance for risk is a strong unconscious bias, so they go into hyper-competitive fields and wind up being the 99% who go nowhere.

Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway.

> It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs.

No, it's like saying not getting into prostitution or gangs is a good way to avoid those problems in your life.

As a result they walk out of school with debt, find it difficult to find a position (because e.g. some high school level positions in the US have very few vacancies), and end up taking whatever they can get or if they cannot get anything in teaching take some other low-wage job after following their passion led them to a short-term dead-end.

there are plenty of stable, well paying jobs for all sorts of different skill sets in the entertainment industry. becoming a key grip or an audio engineer isn't a high risk career trajectory. the bigger problem with creative fields is that most of the advice kids are getting is misinformation coming from people who have to idea what the industry actually entails. the quality of art education in the us is fucking abysmal. imagine if you had english teachers who only cared about slam poetry and discouraged students from learning functional writing skills or a music teacher who never taught meter. i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist. anything even remotely representative or commercial was frowned upon.

>Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway.

maybe but when you're only ever told not to do something it doesn't exactly give you a strong footing to take smart risks and further sets up passionate but under informed kids to be exploited because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

Wow, never realized the schooling situation was that bad in the arts.

> because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

That's a great point, though valuing one's work is bloody hard at any stage of life.

"Well.. Tina's going to get a great job whatever she does, and however little effor she puts into it, but it's because her mom's a doctor and they have a lot of money. It doesn't matter if she owns an iPhone X and doesn't do homework. You need to, and it doesn't matter if you really love cooking because chefs make like $10 an hour and you need to pay rent so you need to go into investment banking even though you hate math and Excel."

Then we'll wonder why teenage suicides are sky high... oh gee i wonder why...

Ultimately the reason that we view some jobs as more fun than others derives to some extent from the natural human tendency to build a sense of identity by pretending our work is more interesting than everyone else's; the caricature of the soulless office worker is intentionally, not unintentionally, dehumanizing, because it's necessary to reinforce the narrator's pride in their own work. People in visible professions inevitably present their professions as being admirable while trying to present themselves as admirable. The age of mass media creates the illusion that whatever is being talked about is in fact more interesting than what isn't being talked about. Which actually makes the world a better place, Fallout or Tide? Which generates more fame for its creators? The only complete solution requires the nomenklatura to relinquish--or be deprived of--their privileged position in the collective unconscious. (Woe on the invisible.)

Not that that's particularly easy. The kids aren't stupid. Everyone knows that being, say, an artist, doesn't just pay off in terms of money, but in the way people interact with you. The people chasing these rewards aren't unpaid; in fact, they go to great lengths to ensure they do get paid, in precisely the way they seek to be. The lionization of indolents makes people seek indolence--and why shouldn't they?

Years ago, I had the occasion to drive across the country with a traveler in my passenger seat. We spent dozens of hours discussing philosophy, law, farm work, and how to determine which cigarettes in an ashtray are still safe to smoke. When we passed through Denver, hundreds of miles from either our origin or destination, he recognized some of his friends walking on the sidewalk of an overpass; we met up and enjoyed chips and soft drugs by a creek under the bridge. My erstwhile friend is still hopping trains and sleeping outside to this day. As they say, "be careful what you wish for--you might just get it".

You can probably make as much as a software consultant if you play your cards right, get a nice house in the countryside and retire at 30.

Also they can follow their passion because many see their career as a sidelight until they marry and become mothers.. Men don't have this backstop or alternate way to follow their "passion", for men, low income = no marriage.

I don't want to nitpick but a lot of the strategy surrounding ending human trafficking involves cutting off demand, which means trying to stop johns from buying prostitutes. This sort of `cut off the demand` strategy isn't entirely unheard of.

Simply, young people take less drugs and also have less teenage pregnancies then young people in the past used to.

Game development companies might become more like a collective where the developers who are all on universal income pool together and treated as equals. One can dream.

Well, what you do is you subsume all of human discourse into a new, faster, online form which can use the powerful mechanisms of variable schedule of reward and monetized viral growth. Moderate and supercharge all of that with AI and Deep Learning. Make sure that you infiltrate all of the big tech companies with underpaid (thus easily radicalized) ideologues who would gladly violate company policies and laws for their cause, or at least exercise bias in the way they enforce them. Use this pool of radicalized confederates wielding this vast technological power encompassing and accelerating all of the industrialized world's most relevant discourse. Use it to control all thought and all discourse.

If people dissent, then use the power over all information online to enable your ideologue radicals to construct propaganda narratives to push your favored view of reality. Use the technological power to construct a hermetically sealed filter/search bubble for everyone willing to subscribe -- then make it addictive to them on top of it! At the same time, find, marginalize, and silence all of the dissenters. De-platform and un-person a few to make an example of them. Control all of the narratives, and if contradictions and inconvenient facts leak out, then craft narratives to explain those away. If pesky dissenters still persist, notice that toxic wacko fringes are unparalleled at drawing attention and generating vicious circles of outrage driven virality. Amplify and weaponize their messages. Start tarring the dissenters. Use unfair guilt by association. The more outrageous, unfair, and toxic the tarring, the better, as it will generate yet more toxic outrage.

Control all of the new digital media. Make it cool for young people to nullify "Free Speech." Make it cool and hip for them to say, "..then f##k your "Free Speech!" Control all of the speech. Control all of the ideas. Make it "uncool" or even socially unacceptable to have any kind of dissenting thought to the pushed narratives.

It's a scary sounding plan, with the potential for tremendous destruction of societal cohesion and culture. I don't think it will work in the end, however.