i'm glad the earnestness comes across haha!!! i worry sometimes about being too jaded/cynical at this point, and like, hey a bit of experience is a good thing—certainly i look back at my old stuff sometimes and wince a little at how callow some of it feels, relative to things i'd say today—but i don't want to lose the earnestness altogether! that part's a virtue babey!
re: the bigname webcomicers: yeah, i feel like this is a tension in pretty much... all creative fields, and professional fields to a certain extent? off the top of my head:
* i have a engineer-colleague who's absolutely world-class in $niche_software_specialty. not many people need the thing in his niche, but if you do, and you hire him, he will simply Solve Your Problem.
he also happened to work with a VERY charismatic product-manager-type, early in his career, and they were good buddies, like, "vacation at product manager's summer home together" kinda tier, right.
product-manager-type is now, like, a big-company director/VP-level type of guy. and while product manager guy was advancing in his career, he was able to rising-tide-lifts-all-boats bring the engineer along. just kept hiring this guy to solve his problems.
but the engineer, right, he does not want to be a director or VP or manager type, he just wants to engineer shit mostly-independently. and a lot of these large companies aren't really structured to let a random VP unilaterally declare "i want to hire this guy specifically", like, that guy's so far removed from random engineers, it makes sense that the line managers or even people in between the line manager and the VP get a much bigger say in that sort of thing.
so engineer guy interview's at product guy's latest gig, but kind of halfheartedly, because he doesn't really want to switch jobs and he's far enough along in his career he finds the "code this shit on a whiteboard" shit kind of trivial/demeaning. which is fine, but he doesn't get the job, and now the product guy feels weird about it, and also product guy hangs around in weird VP-level social circles these days... i don't think they're not friends anymore but i just don't think there's a straightforward "here's the correct thing to do 100% of the time" way to navigate those tensions? and this is a best-case scenario where e.g. engineer didn't really want the job, likes his current job fine, so there's no hard feelings, but imagine if he had wanted the job and had bad feelings toward product guy for not spending a ton of political capital to insist he get hired anyway, etc... this stuff can get way trickier.
anyway i get the impression that's one way relationships in creative fields can get weird (if you happen to have a lot of popularity/success and your good buddy isn't, is everyone involved able to manage any potential resentments/jealousies/etc, not everyone can), and i think that sort of thing is easier to navigate if e.g. the "non-competitive just-for-fun shared common space" is, e.g., a fandom with like 20 people in it, because then sure you can have a mixture of Highly Skilled Professionals chatting as equals with Young Amateur Who Can Barely Hold A Pencil, because all 20 of you are in the same "damn we just want more Love For Our Blorbos" meeting around, but if there's tens of thousands of people, and the "big name fans" are getting inundated with DMs from randos and simply don't have time to have that many friends even if they wanted to (and that's even ignoring the whole potential of "some of these people are intrusive/weird/aggro/etc"), like... i can see why the "big name fan" in this case would try to hold the door open to some extent, because they probably like having that "amateur playground" place too, and don't want to feel like they have to shut out all potential of "organically meeting a cool person you vibe with over a shared hobby"... but if those numbers just get Higher Than A Normal Person Can Deal With then yeah they're gonna close things off more.
THIS IS PROBABLY ALL STUFF YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH SORRY I SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED NEAR LARGE TEXTBOXES lol
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Date: 2024-10-11 08:20 pm (UTC)re: the bigname webcomicers: yeah, i feel like this is a tension in pretty much... all creative fields, and professional fields to a certain extent? off the top of my head:
* i have a engineer-colleague who's absolutely world-class in $niche_software_specialty. not many people need the thing in his niche, but if you do, and you hire him, he will simply Solve Your Problem.
he also happened to work with a VERY charismatic product-manager-type, early in his career, and they were good buddies, like, "vacation at product manager's summer home together" kinda tier, right.
product-manager-type is now, like, a big-company director/VP-level type of guy. and while product manager guy was advancing in his career, he was able to rising-tide-lifts-all-boats bring the engineer along. just kept hiring this guy to solve his problems.
but the engineer, right, he does not want to be a director or VP or manager type, he just wants to engineer shit mostly-independently. and a lot of these large companies aren't really structured to let a random VP unilaterally declare "i want to hire this guy specifically", like, that guy's so far removed from random engineers, it makes sense that the line managers or even people in between the line manager and the VP get a much bigger say in that sort of thing.
so engineer guy interview's at product guy's latest gig, but kind of halfheartedly, because he doesn't really want to switch jobs and he's far enough along in his career he finds the "code this shit on a whiteboard" shit kind of trivial/demeaning. which is fine, but he doesn't get the job, and now the product guy feels weird about it, and also product guy hangs around in weird VP-level social circles these days... i don't think they're not friends anymore but i just don't think there's a straightforward "here's the correct thing to do 100% of the time" way to navigate those tensions? and this is a best-case scenario where e.g. engineer didn't really want the job, likes his current job fine, so there's no hard feelings, but imagine if he had wanted the job and had bad feelings toward product guy for not spending a ton of political capital to insist he get hired anyway, etc... this stuff can get way trickier.
anyway i get the impression that's one way relationships in creative fields can get weird (if you happen to have a lot of popularity/success and your good buddy isn't, is everyone involved able to manage any potential resentments/jealousies/etc, not everyone can), and i think that sort of thing is easier to navigate if e.g. the "non-competitive just-for-fun shared common space" is, e.g., a fandom with like 20 people in it, because then sure you can have a mixture of Highly Skilled Professionals chatting as equals with Young Amateur Who Can Barely Hold A Pencil, because all 20 of you are in the same "damn we just want more Love For Our Blorbos" meeting around, but if there's tens of thousands of people, and the "big name fans" are getting inundated with DMs from randos and simply don't have time to have that many friends even if they wanted to (and that's even ignoring the whole potential of "some of these people are intrusive/weird/aggro/etc"), like... i can see why the "big name fan" in this case would try to hold the door open to some extent, because they probably like having that "amateur playground" place too, and don't want to feel like they have to shut out all potential of "organically meeting a cool person you vibe with over a shared hobby"... but if those numbers just get Higher Than A Normal Person Can Deal With then yeah they're gonna close things off more.
THIS IS PROBABLY ALL STUFF YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH SORRY I SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED NEAR LARGE TEXTBOXES lol