I am an amateur juggler. Occasionally I get asked by strangers for help finding some performers for a gig. Generally, it is at the last minute, and for a group that does not want to pay the rates that the professionals have quoted them.<\/p>\n
I generally don’t like receiving these requests. The reasons are complex, but one reason stands out.<\/p>\n
Another related reason is that, while I enjoy juggling for fun, that doesn’t mean I enjoy being a booking agent for fun. There are people who will do this service for you, and they will take a percentage for their time. If you are not paying me big money for this unattractive task, I am not really interested.\n<\/p><\/div>\n
The main reason I prefer not to fill bookings with amateur friends is that many of my other friends are professional jugglers. I don’t to be involved in providing the public with potentially sub-standard entertainers that will both undercut the income source of professional jugglers and pollute the mindspace of the punters. (“Oh, we got some jugglers a couple of years ago, and they were terrible! So this year, we are getting a singer.”)<\/p>\n
I am an amateur photographer.<\/p>\n
Once, I was giving away some copies of my prints to the people who were photographed. I received a snarky comment from a professional photographer – she bleated that, unlike me, she couldn’t afford to give away copies of her prints for free. <\/p>\n
The comment surprised me at the time, because she was a professional portrait photographer, who produced fantastic studio images that I could only dream about. I was just taking snaps of friends and acquaintances. <\/p>\n
I don’t see myself as a threat to her livelihood, but from the tone of her voice, she did.<\/p>\n
I am a software professional. Like professional jugglers and photographers (and painters, fire-fighters, interpreters, cabinet-makers, writers, ambulance-drivers, musicians, army grunts, sports-players, anglers, police officers, gardeners, actors, … the list goes on surprisingly long), there are people who do my job for fun and make their work product available for free. <\/p>\n
Why don’t I find this threatening to my livelihood?<\/p>\n
There are open-source projects in the broad area of my current work, and some people predict that they may well earn themselves a significant marketshare over time. I feel no snarkiness towards the freeware authors; I don’t lament that they don’t stick to their day job. I don’t label them as scabs who hurt the industry. I see them as legitimate competition that my company needs to significantly outperform if we deserve to keep our marketshare.<\/p>\n
I can see there’s an inconsistency in my thinking here, but I am not sure how to resolve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have an inconsistency in my thinking about how I see the relationship between professionals and amateurs in various fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,21,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circus-skills","category-observation","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}