So I’m an animator and I’d like to work on my craft. I’d also like a comfortable living, nothing outrageous by American standards. I’m not interested in the “job” of animator (unless something really wild came along), because these jobs don’t sound very appealing. It is very competitive, a “dream job” that attracts lots of young artists willing to work to death for a chance to break in to the business, but with relatively low pay and low jongterm job security.

I have a day job doing computerish things and I produce films in my spare time. I envy the industry people for:

- the creative community - the opportunity to make complex projects - access to production funds, assistants, software, etc. - the distribution and marketing apparatus to get the work seen

The internet solves some of these problems but not all. Generally speaking, YouTube is a terrible deal for animators. Patreon is great but you can’t bootstrap a new thing without having built an audience elsewhere. I’m still searching for a good ecosystem for indie stuff.

I trained as an animator and really, if you want to be able to pick up any of these things, move to Los Angeles. Find classes, visit figure drawing sessions, find people who are in the industry or on its periphery. The internet spreads it out but you are still much more likely to luck into things like “hey my buddy is looking for help on a project” and “I’m gonna go visit my friend who works at WB, wanna come along?”.

You may get some of this by joining animation forums. Join in stuff like “reanimation” projects or other weird passion projects. Don’t expect it to be paid for a depressingly long time.

And personally? I use my animator training to draw comics and do commissions, it’s fucking grueling work. Even if you can get a union gig.

I'm a musician with a day job. This is a widely familiar approach to a music "career." I've learned to satisfy myself with playing for a live audience and not trying to do any kind of recording or publishing. There are things that a "day jobber" misses out on, such as more elaborate projects that require rehearsals that are held during the day, or anything involving travel. On the other hand I have the freedom to play fairly esoteric music that is not commercially viable.

I’m an animator and the complex jobs == production hell. Every facet of the industry is a race to the bottom, just a matter of how insulated you are from it. Luckily I’m in medical animation where things move a little more slowly

> I’m in medical anus room

Can you elaborate?

OP corrected to medical animation, thanks. I was legitimately confused.

It’s only Monday and it’s already my favorite typo of the week.

Is it true that for TV shows a lot of the actual animation team is outsourced to countries with low income?

Watch the credits (which is hard for modern TV, but not so hard for movies). When you see hundreds of people listed under animation and 99% of them have names associated with one culture and that culture's home region is low income, chances are it was outsourced to that region.

It depends on the production. I think this was especially true on US/CA productions while everything was predominantly hand drawn in the 80s/90s. You'd have key-frame animators that laid out the actions, and in betweening would be outsourced. I'm sure it is still done now, especially for TV where the budget is tighter. It's a tricky business, I empathize with owners that want to make the situation better but need to compete on bids, and employees (if that) having difficulty making rent on the frames they can get approved. Like with code, you have to love it to stick with it.

I have no idea what it's like for anime. This is subjective - but I think the quality is usually much higher. I'm not sure how it is done.

If it can be outsourced, it will be outsourced. It an absolute race to the bottom shitshow

For pretty long now. I've been interning in a larger German animation studio in 2003 and while the directors and key animators were sitting on site, I distinctly remember being stunned by the logisitics of the weekly arriving Betamax tapes from Vietnam. All inbetween painting was outsourced back then already.

I’ll also add that many things which seem boring from an abstracted and removed perspective can be quite fascinating when you get into the weeds.

I’d say this is because “reality has a surprising amount of detail”[1]. There’s a ton of intricate detail in a field like tax accounting. Even if it seems boring, once you’re immersed in it, you realize all the intellectual challenges.

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

SysAdmins fit this bill, but I know them as having a pretty terrible social position — no one cares about you until something goes wrong, and then they’re pissed at you. Fix it, and go back to your dungeon.

I've worked in IT support for many years and this generally comes with the territory. Although some users/customers value your contributions and are very grateful, the majority unfortunately view IT as dial-tone service; only interacting with IT when something "doesn't work for them." As an IT professional, patience is highly-valuable skill.

In addition to just really liking the IT people at some of the places where I've worked, I've found that the people who are hostile are really shooting themselves in the foot when they do need help. Making friends across all departments goes a really long way, and there are cool people in most every walk of life.

doesn't sound bad tbh. who cares if some random person at work is pissed at you? most colleagues are not friends, they're just professional acquaintances

Renaming my extension to "Dungeon" :)

Yes, the term for what you're describing is "glamor industries." From experience, they are absolute hell to work in.

> Cool sounding jobs are competitive

Cool sounding jobs (e.g. actor) have an over-supply of labor because people are attracted to it on the basis of either passion or prestige instead of expected earnings. This drives down wages unless there's a regulatory body that artificially constrains supply (e.g. the case with surgeons).

There's an under-supply of tradespeople because it's gritty work, not very high prestige, and rarely lines up with anyone's passions. This drives up wages. It's also a very difficult thing to scale due to geographic and other constraints, so it doesn't have a winner-take-all dynamic. The result is many a large number of tradespeople that each get compensated very well.

This is so right on. If you care about the remuneration, then you'd best do something highly valued. If you care about doing something you "love" instead, that's manifestly not highly valued, then don't complain about the money.

Highly valued is subjective to humans but not the economics of employment, which I think is worth noting because being a doctor in the middle of nowhere is highly valued by the people you help but not monetarily. Versus online advertising which makes disgusting amounts of money and yet most people hate to see it.

This is spot on. An additional factor worth mentioning is the target segment for plumbing and software engineering is huge.

Specifically to software engineering and CRUD type of web apps we are just getting started. Wherever I look around I see a business process that could potentially be automated. Much of the clerical work is still repeatable manual work parts of which could be automated.

I like that you mentioned plumbing alongside software engineering because they are similar to each other in more than one way. People think software is build it shut it, but no. Similar to plumbing it also needs routine maintenance work (preventative as well as reactive).

"Cool sounding jobs are competitive"

Also! The problem with Animators is projects being canceled. Animation takes forever. A project getting cut a year in is normal. That takes a huge toll on you mentally. THEN, you have the art experience problem. Do your art skills scale with time? I bet not.

> Do your art skills scale with time? I bet not.

I’m not an artist in any way, but I would think it does?

The more you do something (anything), the better you get at it. Why would art be different?

Diminishing returns. Example try doing Golf, tennis, etc. IMHO you wont be any better at it in 10 years vs 20 years. Most likely you will be worse. This is why 16 year olds win Wimbledon. Experience matters in the beginning, but if you took your animations from year 10 to year 20 - you wouldn't see a difference. EG. Try looking at Rembrandts over time. Do they get better? No.

OTOH there are huge differences in a lawyer with 10 vs 20 years experience. Because experience matters.

Learning to do new things is fun.

Doing them the same over and over becomes a tedious chore.

That’s got to be part of the reason for churn in software libraries and frameworks.

I'm not really sure what you're saying applies. Animators in the US make good salaries and a good living in contrast. Japan has an unusually exploitative structure and culture where animators can produce huge amounts of value, but see only the tiniest fraction of it. It's a highly specialized job that takes a huge amount of training and work to get good at. Almost all these animators have university degrees and spent significant amount of time in apprentice roles to even be able to start working.

> People are happy to see you, happy when you do your job

Never had a bad manager huh?

Maybe your manager is mean, but maybe customers, coworkers, or partner businesses are happy. I don't mean it's all roses, but usually someone somewhere is happy even for fairly simple tasks.

But not necessarily for, say, a starving actor. Nobody really appreciates that you delivered a one-line part as an extra in a B movie. Anyone you work with is likely to either be jealous that you got a line, or feels you owe them for the priviledge of allowing you to say the line. And the viewers don't notice or care.

OK, it's just that you mentioned "software engineer" in the list and they rarely speak to the "customer".

Does software engineering sound boring ?

Yes. Sometimes, when my spouse is really having trouble sleeping, she asks me to tell her about something I'm working on. About 30 seconds in, dead asleep.

When I have trouble sleeping I stay up to read HackerNews to find out what others are working on :P

the opposite for me: reading HN before bed just make me feel like a lazy slob and makes me feel motivated and demotivated at the same time

Yes and it's 7AM. Hackernews is interesting

Sure, people don’t get excited and ask me more when I say I work on mortgage software.

If I said I’m a game developer you can bet that’d be way less “boring” sounding.

Mortgage software actually sounds interesting and complex.

Game developer working for someone else sounds boring.

There is no way that being a game developer does not sound interesting and complex. I say this as someone that doesn’t even play many games! But it’s something almost everyone has a point of reference for and has (hopefully?) enjoyed at some point in the past.

I would say it depends. Never say never.

Personally mortgage software sounds complex but boring to me.

Game developer sounded interesting and complex before I knew more about it. Now it's more boring as in after knowing the death march culture I don't want to know more. I guess your parent meant that too by 'boring'. If you work for yourself or with like minded indie developers that sounds more interesting to me.

It can definitely be complex.

Having also worked on mortgage software, there are ways to "sell" it -- the people your software helps are getting homes when they might not otherwise have been able. That's pretty exciting for them.

Working by yourself (or with friends) you get to make the engine and that's where the fun is. You can write really unique stuff that may or may not work.

Working for a big studio is like creating a movie with directors and for some that feels like fun but working on mortgage software is about data normalization which can offer it's own high.

Not to the average person. Even CS freshmen seem to think game design means playing early prototypes of Grand Theft Auto 6.

Yes, it's boring as hell. But I value stability more than a stimulating job.

A vast majority of software engineering jobs do.

It doesn't have to be boring to you. But I will admit that as a college student, when I had a summer internship in a government computer facility, I came away with the impression that while I enjoyed programming when I could do it on my own terms, an actual programming job would be boring.

But instead of boring, you could substitute unpleasant or unglamorous, and the point still stands pretty well. For instance, fixing a toilet is usually not particularly hard, but something that most people are repulsed by.

It doesn't just sound boring, it is boring.

I think it depends. The problem solving aspect of software engineering is definitely exciting to me.

> boring

In 1983 I spent a few months working on a crud app. Finished it and never worked on another.

What have you done since?

Electronics and firmware. I'd be better off financially if database stuff didn't make my eyes bleed.

What about SQL makes your eyes bleed?

Everything. It certainly isn’t as sexy as CSS and JavaScript. It doesn’t have the arcane mystical aura of Haskell and Brainfuck. Nor the fanatic intensity associated with Rust and C. Nor the stupid simplistic charm of Go and Ruby. “Select a from b where x join blah blah”. What about that isn’t boring? It’s like ordering around a servant who has to do the real planning and stuff.