A less nefarious reason behind companies increasing profit margins, is that with more uncertainty -- i.e. potential supply chain disruptions in the future -- companies feel the need to make more from what they are able to get to the end consumer/customer.
Generally speaking, there's a lot more that can go wrong than go right in terms of getting stuff to people especially from overseas. (True anywhere in the world.) And the specter of uncertainty basically elevates the default cost of doing business for everything.
Unsurprising to see TV writing overtake film writing in the last decade plus; TV writings lends itself much more to streaming shows (which are considered TV even if they never appear on cable / "normal" television).
Interesting that adjusted for inflation however, writing pays roughly what it does in the mid 1990s per the article.
That's a little surprising.
It's also probably a more competitive industry however, and the median pay (which is what's measured) doesn't account for the best writers probably doing better than ever. And then maybe more part time people trying to break into the field but not getting much.
If there's a pretty large middle ground buoyed by union pay scales and contracts, then both ends (high/low) will not really be accounted for in the statistics.
One thing mentioned--but largely passed over--in the article is the following:
Average writer earnings in 2021: $260,000.
Average earnings do not account for the sizable number of WGA members who, in any given year, earn nothing from writing. The WGA has not released a median annual figure since 2014, when it was $140,000 (in 2021 dollars, for the sake of consistency).
I'm not actually surprised. So writing is actually a pretty good gig (even if you're not a showrunner/executive producer) if you have a real gig. But the median WGA member is probably waiting tables or has some other job. And that's WGA members. The typical writer submitting scripts to studios on spec is earning almost nothing.
ADDED: And this is in the context of writing, perhaps other than some corporate content job, being an increasingly terrible way to earn a living on average.
Anytime I read a single statistic without the accompanying distribution in deciles, or at least quintiles, I assume there is an agenda or the publisher is trying to hide something.
Seriously? Isn't that an overly cynical worldview? I agree that having distribution information is strictly better than only the median, but in most cases only the median/mean is mentioned for the sake of brevity. People reading a article about writer pay don't want 10 numbers thrown at them for a single statistic.
It is just my experience over 20 years of reading. A 2x10 or 2x5 table is not going to make an article too long.
But all too often, the word “average” will be used without even clarifying if it is mean or median, and I have seen too many cases where it just so happens to support whatever argument the publisher is making.
See even the example ghaff quoted. The union went out of its way to remove information about the earnings distribution because they did not want people to know how the median was moving.
> A table with 2x10 table with the data is not going to make an article too long
It is if you're going to do it for every statistic. eg. in a story about gen Z skipping college, you could have statistics about tuition rate, student loan amount, time to graduate, graduation rate, earnings after graduation, etc. Add to that, all of the statistics but separated by various demographic factors (eg. geography, age, race), and you can easily have dozens of tables. That's fine if you're writing a 20 page graduate dissertation, but for a daily article on npr.org or whatever that's just overkill.
Not to mention, in many cases the reason why it's being omitted from news stories isn't because of some nefarious motives by the author, it's because the source material only mentions medians. eg. most of the BLS news releases only has medians/averages: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm, so any news stories based off them are inevitably going to not have decile level data like you demand, through no nefarious motivation on the part of the writer.
> That's fine if you're writing a 20 page graduate dissertation, but for a daily article on npr.org or whatever that's just overkill.
If the publisher is taking on a complicated topic, then it does need all of that information, at least via a link. Otherwise, we have the never ending clickbait of bullshit “articles” with one nebulous average intending to lead people to think something notable has happened, when it really has not.
There is so much propaganda floating around because people accept massaged averages as truth, I cannot imagine it is a benefit to society. Also, in this context, we happen to have wonderful machines and networking that allow us to share data at basically zero marginal cost.
> Not to mention, in many cases the reason why it's being omitted from news stories isn't because of some nefarious motives by the author, it's because the source material only mentions medians.
Yes, it goes without saying that the blame them moves up to the entity that has the data, but chooses not to release it.
In this case, the distribution (for which it's not clear the numbers are public) is pretty important. A storyline that showrunners of hit shows make bank while the typical scriptwriter sending a spec script in to a studio makes zilch is basically "water is wet." Judging whether writers in film/TV in general have a real gripe with compensation (given that median salaries seem pretty decent) needs some more granularity.
In all fairness, I'm not sure a population that includes everyone who has ever written a script and sent it to a studio is a useful study point for most purposes. (I think we know the answer. Very few make it in any reasonable way.) But a distribution of those who have made some income above a reasonable threshold over the past 5 years is probably useful if we want to understand the situation for people legitimately working in the profession.
Right, but it is not in the writer’s union to let everyone understand the true situation, presumably because it would hamper their negotiating position.
Not that the union has any obligation to release the data, but just an example for why I assume I am not getting a clear picture when I am not provided the distribution, when it would be trivial to do so.
Shopify still a valuable business! It's a success story in a volatile space. So if they want to maximize their growth during good times, it's almost inevitable they'll have to walk back some of the earlier steps they made during fallow times.
So I would put Shopify in a different league altogether than RIM or Nortel... these latest moves in fact may help them avoid the fate of the others.
From what I've seen, they're nowhere near becoming a stodgy old slow-to-change corporation. The people I met last week at RailsConf all seem energetic and innovative, and I second the idea that ecommerce is a tough & crowded market and the fact that they've risen to the top says a lot about the company focus and culture.
I sell online (but on marketplaces, not my own website) so try to follow the space. Shopify is known as the company you go to for quickly setting up an ecommerce storefront. Yes, there are competitors, but Shopify seems to be the brand name in the space. Unlike Apple vis-a-vis Blackberry, there doesn't seem to be great risk of someone coming in with revolutionary technology and immense market reach that upsets the field overnight; we're coming up to 30 years after the release of Netscape, after all.
Unfortunate, but these layoffs are not surprising given economic conditions.
It's a sizable number of affected roles, so hopefully this is a one-and-done for now. (A drip, drip, drip over a year and a half is the worst IMO with respect to morale and uncertainty for the remaining folks. And then you end up losing some of the people you want to keep because they view their employment environment as unstable...)
Smart! This was a bet that I think made sense in theory for Shopify, but in practice became too hard to manage and execute given their M.O.
Would imagine Shopify is taking a loss in offloading, but will prevent future hemorrhaging of cash from a business decision that clearly did not pay off like anticipated.
Unlike some people, I don't think this experiment was necessarily a bad one for Shopify. I would have to know inside info as to whether it made sense at the time to do, but barring that I would give the benefit of the doubt to Shopify to try, if the reward was high enough if they pulled it off...
Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts from the medallion owners -- a much greater hallmark of an employee/employer relationship -- and were mafia backed and run quite crookedly. Many taxi drivers to this day have much worse working conditions and pay rates.
On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.
Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)
In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.
Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
A lot was also in a gray area. In fact France ending up (I think very unfairly, but ofc I worked at Uber) passing laws specifically against Uber to make it retroactively illegal. Which basically was a tacit admission that is was OK by the rules initially. Obviously the idea of being able to "hail" a ride -- specific to you -- in near real-time was not really considered around the world when a lot of taxi rules and regulations were done.
So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing.
We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back.
But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.
On the other end you have Uber who passed all the costs onto the driver, subsidized drives through unlimited investor money to crush any potential competition etc.
Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport and surge pricing. That's how the delete Uber hashtag arose and it just continued with wave after wave of negative stories for the next few months.
The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.
(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)
Nope that was nearly a month after -- toward the end of February as I recall. #DeleteUber started when Uber turned off surge to an airport from a taxi strike. It was headline news already by the end of January: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/delete-uber.html
And people somehow thought that getting rid of surge temporarily was a bad thing, or using that message to take advantage of the situation. (I don't know exactly what the rationale was, because it still doesn't make sense to me after all these years...)
Yeah I think that's in part because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around Uber was on the policy implications, and the effect on consumer behavior etcetera.
There were a ton of technical challenges in scaling.
Uber was also one of the earliest corporate deployers of Node back in 2010 and ended up having one of the largest in the world arguably (have no idea to what extent they've replaced in the last few years).
Uber's open source projects have led to spinout companies that have raised a lot of money successfully like Chronosphere and Tecton.ai .
Halloween and then New Year's were huge traffic challenges and the Uber app (both driver and rider) really pushed the bounds of what was possible in the 2010s with respect to a two-side real-time marketplace for ridesharing and food delivery.
Inaccurate overall IMO; a caricature of what actually went on. But accurate in terms of capturing the sentiment that a lot of Uber skeptics had during the height of Uber mania, say 2015-2019. So the series is more a reflection of that than a faithful accounting of Uber's rise.
Generally speaking, there's a lot more that can go wrong than go right in terms of getting stuff to people especially from overseas. (True anywhere in the world.) And the specter of uncertainty basically elevates the default cost of doing business for everything.