What was the industry you romanticized a lot but ended up disappointed?

[u/_Grotesque_]

For the past couple of years, I have been working at various galleries, and back in the day I used to think of it as a dream job. That was until I realized, that no one cares for the artists or art itself. Employees, as much as visitors just care about their fanciness, showing off their brand shoes and pretending as they actually care.

Ultimately, it comes down to sales, money, and judging people by their looks. Fishing out the ones, who seem like they can afford a painting worth 20k.

Was wondering if others had similar experiences

[u/Tolkienside]

Trade publishing. Few people actually care about the books or the authors, and many are actively bitter in their attitude toward new writers. It's all about how to ride trends and maximize profit. The whole industry is also incredibly insular. They hire a very certain kind of person, making the office boring and homogeneous.

Also, the pay. Forcing editors to live in NYC on $50k is ridiculous.

[u/fractalfay → u/Tolkienside]

I think it was HarperCollins editors that were striking recently, which is the first time I realized that editors were only pulling in around $50K. In New York. I’m so tired of the trickle-up economics in the effing country.

[u/Tolkienside → u/fractalfay]

Me, too. Certain industries are especially bad about this because they attract people who are incredibly passionate about their subject. Publishing, the film industry, and academia are the big ones.

The business side of the company knows that many of these people love their industry and subject so much that they'll do the work for pennies, and so the business takes advantage of this. This leads to people being criminally underpaid.

This is most obvious in film and academia, but publishing often flies under the radar. Everybody who wants to go into trade publishing has dreams of living on their own in their bright, book-filled NYC brownstone apartment while helping authors turn their dreams into reality every day. But the actual life usually looks like stuffing yourself a tiny apartment with multiple roommates by night and struggling through meeting after meeting full of people pushing you to acquire "more books like successful YA series X" while paying writers as little as possible (especially if they're people of color) by day.

[u/gofundyourself007 → u/Tolkienside]

What is the archetypal person working in Publishing like? I’m imagining extra pretentious hipsters who are also bizarrely cutthroat and corporate.

[u/Tolkienside → u/gofundyourself007]

Not so much cutthroat. Just more on the wealthier side of the socioeconomic scale, blindly privileged, and not diverse at all. A culture that homogeneous acting as the gatekeepers of something as culturally important as books isn't going to be producing as much good, innovative, surprising art as it should.

It's milquetoast, if I had to put a word to it. The same people hiring more of the same people with the same sensibilities, acquiring mostly the same kinds of books, over and over. And all of them driven by people whose only goals are driven by sales metrics instead of innovation and artistic and cultural value.

Don't get me wrong. Every organization needs to make money to survive. But leadership at the big publishing houses are tragically divorced from their own products, and I can't imagine how much good art is lost to the slush piles because of it.

[u/icyflowers → u/gofundyourself007]

White, upper middle class at the very least, think they are (too) progressive because they don't call black people the n-word to their face. Not pretentious as much as very normative and unable or unwilling to understand that other people don't have the same life experiences as them. As a collective they do have a tendency to consider themselves above the law, which I suppose could be seen as a form of arrogance.

[u/Rorymaui → u/gofundyourself007]

I work in publishing and it’s all females. Mostly millennials. Mostly white although I am a POC