Prestige Economy

[lisarea]

Why You Should Never Have Taken That Prestigious Internship - PolicyMic

All the links so far are good, too. (Her piece about MOOCs, for example, which is related.) I'm not quite done reading all of them, though. Maybe there will be some stuff that sucks.

This is one of the most disturbing trends I've ever witnessed. Things were pretty bad when I got out of college, too. Unemployment was about what it is now, so it was sort of default that your first job would be underpaid and you'd have to job hop to get out of the pay rut and start making a salary commensurate with your experience. But at least they paid more than a fast food job, and I certainly don't remember seeing this kind of bald exploitation in job ads:

The Daily Dot - Penny Arcade's brutally honest job posting spurs Internet backlash

The backlash part is good, though. That's one thing that definitely needs to happen if we're going to retain any possibility of upward class mobility beyond the middle middle class in the US. That, and real, actual painful penalties for illegal internships and other worker exploitation--the kind of thing that companies can't just absorb as a cost of doing business.

(Also, I advocate shaming the fuck out of anyone who takes that Penny Arcade job.)

[The Man]

On a more serious note though, this kind of ties in with my thrad about the video game industry's horrible labour record from a few weeks ago. I'm not surprised Penny Arcade are part of the problem, because they are terrible.

[lisarea]

Gah, thank you. I actually meant to link that, but I couldn't remember where it was.

There are probably a few other threads that are relevant, too, because it's such a wide-ranging and pervasive problem.

[Ari]

What a bunch of douche nozzles. This is going to end hilariously though and cost them a ton of money.
They are looking for a single person to do 4 very important jobs for their mostly web based company, "Web Development, Software Development, Sys Admin, and the (dreaded) GENERAL IT." and they've already admitted they don't give a fuck about this person who will hold in their hands the smooth workings of the entire company. Enjoy your server crash on product roll out!
(and that's if they are lucky, I give 1-20 odds their systems will be abused in a quasi-legal manner due to underpaid sysadmin getting their full salary out of PA in digital blood).

[lisarea]

I hope so, but I dunno. There are a lot of industries getting away with this stuff these days, so it's possible that there are qualified and marginally competent goobers out there who will take the job just because they think it's cool or to put some experience on their resume.

Sometimes, people without the relevant job experience to know better will interpret 'cool jobs' in this weird romantic way, and not realize how grinding the work really is and how little they're really making. But really, some dumb kid with no real adult responsibilities living with their parents might not notice or care for a while.

Speaking of a lot of industries, I've been headmining for other related stories I've seen recently. (Some of which might be poasted somewhere else here already, so )

The Exploited Laborers of the Liberal Media | VICE United States

The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate : NPR

On Graduate School and 'Love' - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Ari]

Many industries are getting away with it partly because they have the money to waste cleaning up the messes they never advertise. This method only appears sustainable due to corporations absorbing the cost of failure, but as the death of journalism has shown, it doesn't last forever and management never thinks it's their fault.

I know of a very large media company that tried to get into the facebook/flash gaming market but ultimately cancelled 2-3 game attempts, one of which was 'ready to ship' due to them being complete crap and unplayable. Their unplayability came from a combination of confused management with $ sign eyes and developers that were only willing to put in the minimal effort for their minimal paycheck and gave about as much fuck about their product as the company gave about them.

[Dragar]

I don't see anything wrong the Penny Arcade advert. They're being pretty clear: they want someone who's good, but won't pay. Presumably they think they may get good applicants because of their prestige of the role. Maybe they're right. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot by not offering a better deal. That's not how you attract good people to your company (in my non-managerial opinion). But at least they're being honest.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Dragar

I don't see anything wrong the Penny Arcade advert. They're being pretty clear: they want someone who's good, but won't pay. Presumably they think they may get good applicants because of their prestige of the role. Maybe they're right. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot by not offering a better deal. That's not how you attract good people to your company (in my non-managerial opinion). But at least they're being honest.

I kind of thought the same thing. The position doesn't read all that differently from anythign else in the field I've seen. A lot of the backlash (going only by the bits reproduced in the OP's article) appears to actually be spillover backlash from the ongoing Dickwolves saga.

ETA: Didn't we talk about the Dickwolves shit here at one point? I can't find it anywhere.

[Ensign Steve]

I'm going to be obnoxious but I want to go on record and say I was well-paid this summer, it was probably the only time in my life I've been paid what I'm worth. No medical or vacation, but it was only 3 months anyway. I was even able to pay down some if the debt I've been racking up as a full-time student.

One time last year my women's studies professor asked for my opinion about my other employer and that "caring work" article in the Jezebel (sorry I'm not trying to be cryptic but I'm on my phone and it's too much work to pull the links) and I said that I feel like way more exploited by the graduate school than by anyone else.

I don't know, maybe it's different because it's engineering, but a lot of my people have to decide between internships and research because they need the money (as in internships pay but research does not).

I don't remember if I had a point.

[Ensign Steve]

Oh yeah! I remember. How do anybody but the independently wealthy get graduate degrees?

[Ensign Steve]

Oh! It's like this. So I feel the prestige economy has always been around, but in the form of a prestigious degree. It's definitely a huge barrier to people who can't afford it.

The other industry that comes to mind is Hollywood, where people are desperate to break in, but that's why everything is unionized.

So what's the dif between those examples? I'm seriously, let's compare and contrast.

[erimir]

Depends on the school. I'm a research assistant, my tuition is paid, I get health insurance and a stipend that pays more than I was making last year at my shit job.

If I didn't have that stipend though, I'd be in a pretty not good way.

Also, since he said the goal of being so brutally honest was to cut down on the number of applications, wouldn't an appropriate response be to inundate them with similarly "brutally honest" applications?

Things like "Job skills: Quickly closing tabs so as to appear to be working" and "Following directions literally even when I know they'll lead to failure because if I'm going to have no autonomy, might as well go all the way and not waste precious brainpower on helping you make money"

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by Adam

I kind of thought the same thing. The position doesn't read all that differently from anythign else in the field I've seen. A lot of the backlash (going only by the bits reproduced in the OP's article) appears to actually be spillover backlash from the ongoing Dickwolves saga.

ETA: Didn't we talk about the Dickwolves shit here at one point? I can't find it anywhere.

Yeah, I suspect that's why they were targeted in that case. That sort of thing is actually pretty common.

I disagree that it's OK, though. I haven't seen anything about what the pay is for that position, but you can actually pay salaried employees less than minimum wage fairly easily, just by requiring them to work long hours.

Unless I'm missing something: The minimum salary for exempted employees is $455 a week, minimum wage is $7.25 for the first 40 hours, then time and a half after; so for the minimum exempted salary, employees would be making less than minimum wage after about 55 hours a week.

So if they were doing that, they're creating a 'prestigious' position that requires a pretty extensive skillset and a lot of experience, but that pays less than you'd make working the same hours at McDonald's. And the more hours you work, the greater your living expenses, because you end up having to pay for conveniences. It's just not a workable solution for a self-sufficient adult, and a labor market--especially a professional labor market--that relies on employees having another source of income is obscene and bad for everyone. And I think that should be illegal, and you guys should be in prison for thinking it is OK!

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by erimir

Depends on the school. I'm a research assistant, my tuition is paid, I get health insurance and a stipend that pays more than I was making last year at my shit job.

Bingo! I have nothing to compare it to, but people at my school say we are grossly underpaid. My tuition is paid, I pay far out the ass for my portion of my health insurance, and my stipend pays about half that of my last shit job. Hooray!(?)

- Joke answer

AND NO I DO NOT THINK IT IS OKAY!

[Adam]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I disagree that it's OK, though.

Well, I think it's less "OK" and more "not unusually heinous".

I also think there's a distinction between "prestige" positions, where people are encouraged to work for little or no pay in exchange for intangible career boosters like resume fodder or professional connections, and, I dunno, is there a term, for them?,"fun" positions, where workplace amenities and/or the experience of working in an enthusiast industry partially replace salary as compensation. I think the PA position is pretty clearly an example of the latter.

[AynMisesLibertarian]

leftists hate MOOC because MOOCS are a way toward a efficient free-market based education and a kick in the assess of all useless neomarxists professors who do nothing except indoctrinate the future generation with Statism bullshit

You know,you can do that in a class but not in a open course, and why should I not do that???

Because I want to be free to learn anything in any place at any time instead to be forced by school schedule?

Because forcing professor doing always the same lesson years after years is cost ineffective?

Because I want to be able to press the taste "stop" if I need to go WC or listen to what the professor said another time or I need to work at morning ?

Because I want to be able to learn about thing outside my specialization? What If I want to follow a computer science class?

[Adam]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

to press the taste "stop"

I'm glad your contextless rant about MOOCs at least yielded this bizarre gem.

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

Because I want to be free to learn anything in any place at any time instead to be forced by school schedule?

Aw, poor thing. Did they reject your college application again?

[lisarea]

SO ANYWAYS, sketchy employment practices are pretty standard, but that's the problem. About half of internships are unpaid, and of those, the vast majority are probably illegal. That's just standard industry practice, and it's apparently getting worse, to the point that it's the default now. Not all that long ago, when I used to work with interns regularly, they'd mostly be either people with degrees in unrelated disciplines, and I think sometimes people from two year programs, who were actually benefiting to some extent from the introductory industry training. College graduates from related fields got entry level jobs, not internships.

That was at a pretty big company with all kinds of comprehensive employment policies and stuff, so maybe it wasn't industry standard so much, but I never, at any company, saw the kind of exploitative internships that are apparently the norm now, where people get paid nothing or close to it for doing menial tasks are expected to learn by osmosis or something.

As far as people choosing to take low pay for either prestige or fun, that's on them, but they're straight assholes for dragging the market down; and they deserve it when future prospective employers aren't willing to double or triple their offers back up to industry standard when they decide to get a grownup job. It's one thing if you're working on your own projects for 'passion' or 'love' reasons, or if you're doing actual charitable nonprofit work or something, but if you're taking shit pay for a regular job for a for-profit company where you are not significantly invested in those profits, you have demonstrated to future employers that your skills are worth shit pay. Good luck convincing your next employer to bump you up into industry standard pay if you've just been doing the same thing for some small fraction of that.

[Ari]

Omg Harlan Ellison is Lisarea's sock!

Harlan Ellison -- Pay the Writer - YouTube

[lisarea]

LOL I feel slightly less personally insulted by people trying to convince me to work for free for "exposure," knowing it also happens to Harlan Ellison.

[Stephen Maturin]

KICK IN THE ASSESS

[livius drusus]

[Stormlight]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

Because I want to be able to press the taste "stop" if I need to go WC

[But]