Sunday, March 23, 2008

Paul Graham has another insightful essay entitled You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss. It's about the difference he's observed between programmers who work for Google and Microsoft, and programmers who work for their own startups. He compares them to lions in the wild versus lions in the zoo. The lions in the zoo seem "both more worried and happier."

I think that's why I like show people.

The ones who don't seem happier are executives. They have big salaries and regular paychecks, and here in Canada, they're not in constant danger of being fired. (Though, I suspect, they also don't have absurdly lucrative "golden parachute" clauses.) But they have to work within a structure and a specific mandate. My network executive friends may like my show, but they already have one in the same territory, or it's not in their mandate, or they can't sell it to their boss.

And they're always in meetings. Ack.

I don't know anyone who's left a network job who didn't seem happier afterwards.

My producer and writer friends are worried all the time. They don't know where their next paycheck is coming from. They don't know if the industry will collapse due to moralistic Conservative government intervention. They have no idea what they'd do for a living if people stopped hiring them, or paying them.

But their frustrations are the frustrations of lions in the wild. They are always stalking the next antelope, or trying to keep the hyenas off of one they've already caught.

They all seem so alive.

Labels: blog fu, this writing life

9:15 AM

3 Comments:

I have a different perspective. I see most (all) Canadian executives as the antelopes. A herd mentality and they scatter every time talent gets near them.

By  DJ, at 10:24 AM  

You mentioned that "My producer and writer friends are worried all the time. They don't know where their next paycheck is coming from. They don't know if the industry will collapse due to moralistic Conservative government intervention. They have no idea what they'd do for a living if people stopped hiring them, or paying them. "

Does this mean that you do not worry at all or that you do not worry "all the time"? Please let me know how different you feel you are from them...just curious.

By  Inquisitive, at 5:38 PM  

I don't worry that much because I'm not a worrier.

Also because I try to live frugally and save most of the money I earn.

And right now I'm lucky to be in demand, so I have several projects backed up in the pipeline.

And I'm pretty sure that if people stopped hiring me, I could teach screenwriting...

By  Alex Epstein, at 6:03 PM  

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