Salary Confessions: A Gen Z Creative Exec's Stark Warning for Gen X
An $80k-a-year indie studio worker, whose peers share all pay data, reveals the consequences of his age group's seething resentments hidden at work
Elaine Low reports on the TV business from L.A. She recently wrote about the new art of the virtual pitch and entertainment industry workers who’ve decided to leave L.A. after the wildfires. For her Salary Confessions series, she spoke with an “overqualified and underemployed” executive producer and a development executive whose career is “on life support.” As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive dispatches from Elaine, Lesley Goldberg and Manori Ravindran on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty's The Wakeup and Richard Rushfield, subscribe here.
Happy Tuesday from Los Angeles, readers, where the near-80 degree weather threatens to puncture the facade of whatever we call “winter” out here. I’m back with another edition of Salary Confessions, our recurring series that is — depending on how you look at it — either gauche financial voyeurism or a necessary lens on the dialogue about the sustainability of working in Hollywood. It’s probably a little bit of both, to be honest. I’d encourage all of you to share your own experience at the link here. (Along similar lines, if you’re a 20-something who wants to share your experience working through and after the pandemic, I want to hear from you. Tell me about it in this Google Form.)
This week’s salary submission was an eye-opener — not because a 20-something who makes 80 grand a year is unheard of, but because the way this 80-grand-a-year 20-something talks about money marks a departure from the generations that came before.
He is exceedingly candid. He does not hem and haw when I probe for details. When I ask him how he manages his finances, he exclaims that he loves this conversation. He has just gotten a raise, he tells me, from $65,000. The year before that, he made $45,000, and his first year in L.A., he earned $30,000. He has gone from eating ramen and making homemade smoothies (that he calculates cost $2 each) to being able to pick up takeout lunch when he needs it.
And crucially, he tells me right off the bat that his parents are well off. They paid for enough of his college tuition so that he graduated with no debt, which has allowed him to sock away a good chunk of his earnings in a retirement account and a rainy-day emergency fund while his peers are still plugging away at their student loans.
“I was in an enormous head-start position of privilege,” today’s Salary Confessions diarist acknowledges gamely. “Compared to my friends [it’s] a pretty night-and-day difference. So I just want to be careful to color the rest of what I’m going to say about $80,000 or even $65,000, as it is completely different — if you’re making an $800 debt payment every month — on a massive, fundamental level. Eighty-thousand in L.A., on no debt, is an incredible life.”
This level of transparency is unique to Gen Z, whose members are far more open to sharing personal salary info with their colleagues and friends. Some even broadcast it on TikTok, in an act that the Washington Post has called “radical pay transparency.”
The creative exec and his peers get into it. “In some cases, it’ll be about budgeting and dealing with that, and things like that,” he says of conversations with other 20-somethings. “A lot of times it’s, ‘What do you make at work? What do I make at work for the same job, including at the same company, so that we can advocate for ourselves better?’”
This is happening with Gen Zs across industries. And you better believe it’s going to have a real impact on how the next generation shapes the entertainment business.
With today’s Series Business, I’ll give you insights into:
Gen Z’s radical salary transparency and how they deploy it to get an edge in pay negotiations: “We might even know what [Gen X bosses] make”
How Hollywood’s tech interlopers have made hierarchies more opaque: “L5? L6? does anyone understand the Amazon ranking system?”
Young workers’ calcifying resentment and disdain toward senior execs
How Gen Z skepticism and spite at work can tank productivity
Hollywood’s leadership crisis as execs need to study leadership, not just industry history and “self-aggrandizing” bios like Bob Iger’s
The glut of the mid-level exec in Hollywood and why many should be fired
This exec’s prescription for a healthier industry: more agile creative teams, more leadership “vis-a-vis people, not maximizing shareholder value”