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For those who don’t freelance---

 

Could you have a listing as to whether you work in a city as well? There's usually 10%-20% salary difference between the two. So have a "do you work in a city" check, and then a blank to write down which city. In addition have a where do you live question.

 

It would also be interesting to see a monthly rent question and % salary taxed along with the survey so you can relate salary to the cost of living. Some places seem great until you realize how much it costs to live there.

 

I'd also have a standard currency conversion: to Euros. So you can quickly relate salary between different countries.

 

If you have all these questions organized by region you can quickly see which places are, in a monetary sense, desirable to work, which despite all efforts to be PC and nice is what everyone really wants to know.

 

 

;)

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I think this is going to be important for us (the regulars here) to help spread the word about this survey in order to get as broad a range as is possible to participate.

 

The unfortunate thing is there will still be a percentage of those who will not participate under any circumstances, and that same percentage are probably the ones who make the most money. Oh well :rolleyes:

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I can't understand why people wouldn’t participate, it's only going to help them in the long run unless you’re grossly overpaid and then it might not be a very good thing.

 

Whom is grossly overpaid? I'm not. Are you? I know of about three people who earn a lot more than I do doing the job I do (more or less) and they all paint their renderings. Earn a lot in arch-vis? Good for you! Bring up the average. Anyway, those people don't do CG and don't read this forum.

 

I would be more worried about people UNDERcharging. Imagine your boss finds out the average salary for arch-vis should be $25K. Yikes! Now explain why you should be grossly overpaid.

 

Thanks Jeff for putting this together. We need stuff like this.

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I agree with Ernest on this one.

 

10 years ago in the VFX industry artists made $120k a year easy, with maybe 1 or 2 years experience. That was when people needed overpriced SGI and overpriced software like Alias to do anything. Now that the market is flooded with people that pick up Maya on their home computers that are faster than the ones we use at work. They will gladly be paid $35k a year, and eat ramen noodles while living in LA or SF, just to get a chance in the industry. Now the average salary has gone way down.

 

However, Inferno Artists can make between $180k to $300k a year. That is because they work on prorietary hardware that costs $1M. So access to the software (and learning it) is the hard part.

 

The old french saying is: "In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is king."

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Jeff, if you get enough respondents on the survey how will you report the findings? I see the other survey will be in a magazine.

 

I may report those findings in 3Dworld as well if I get enough in time, but unlike the other survey the survey results will be available on CGA when I get enough respondants.

 

Some might critisize for making the prelim results available in 3DWorld, but I felt it important to support companies who are supporting our industry. They are making an exclusive arch viz supplement, which I think is fantastic, so helping make that a success was important to me.

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I think this is going to be important for us (the regulars here) to help spread the word about this survey in order to get as broad a range as is possible to participate.

 

The unfortunate thing is there will still be a percentage of those who will not participate under any circumstances, and that same percentage are probably the ones who make the most money. Oh well :rolleyes:

 

Yes you are dead on. It will be critical for people to spread the word on this survey if it is to be accurate. Ideally I'd have people calling studios to answer these questions or have them take the survey, but realistically that is not an option, so I'll be lookign to everyone here to help spread the word. Same applies to the current running survey.

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Just as an aside, 810 people have taken the Architectural Visualization industry survey so far (6 days). The one we did in 2004 had that many in 2 months. Keep em coming!

 

The great part is that the survey is quite long about 80-100 questions for the average user, so I'm glad to see people are takign the time to complete it. Some interesting results so far. I'm much happier with the questions I've developed on this one than I was for the survey in 2004. Live an learn. :)

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Jeff, I have a comment about the Arch Viz survey that you've currently got running. I have CG Architect bookmarked in my web browser and it takes me directly to the forum part of the sight. I suspect that most of the people who come to this sight on a regular basis do the same thing. I wasn't aware until yesterday that the survey was being done because I never go to the home page of this site. Really the only reason I knew about it at all is because you specifically talked about it in this thread. Is there some way to put up a sticky in every forum category so that people can get the message?

 

Also in the Arch Viz survey there were certain questions that had multiple categories that you had to answer by checking a number from least to greatest. When doing that part of the survey if I checked #1 on the first question and the second questions answer was also #1 when I checked it the check mark in question one would disappear. It would not allow me to give the same numerical value to more than one question in that category.

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Is there some way to put up a sticky in every forum category so that people can get the message?.

 

Yes, I will be doing this.

 

Also in the Arch Viz survey there were certain questions that had multiple categories that you had to answer by checking a number from least to greatest. When doing that part of the survey if I checked #1 on the first question and the second questions answer was also #1 when I checked it the check mark in question one would disappear. It would not allow me to give the same numerical value to more than one question in that category.

 

That's right and it's working as it's supposed to. When you rank things you obviously can't rank something as #1 more than once which is why it only allows you to select one rank postition per answer.

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For one million dollars I wonder if Autodesk can make a product that doesn't crash. Doubt it!

 

Are you serious? First off... Autodesk actually does make the Inferno/Flame, etc... Before Autodesk bought Discreet and handed Max over to them, that is what Discreet was famous for.

 

Second, it not only crashes, it sometimes has massive hardware failures. Don't know if you have seen an inferno, but basically it is one of those huge purple SGI refrigerator looking things that sits in a server room, and next to it is massive raid of something like 64 drives all running on fiber.

 

To be honest all software and hardware failes... you can't avoid it.

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To be honest all software and hardware failes... you can't avoid it.

Yeah, but I bet After Effects crashes a whole lot less than Combustion does. And I bet C4D crashes less than Max. And Maya less than Max...for the time being. I'm sure it is just a cost/benefit thing with Autodesk regarding how many bugs it has & how crash prone it is. But you're right, there is no perfect piece of software involving graphics.

 

Sorry, way off-topic.

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Sorry...I wasn't talking about the Arch Viz survey; I was talking about the salary survey.

 

Yes those results will be published in a PDF online on CGA. I did nto have time to launch the survey over the weekend becuase I spent almost 30 hours launching the AVC competition. I get back home and into the office tommorrow, so my plan is to try to get it out this weekend.

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I should also mention that this survey will be quite a bit shorter, 10-20 questions. But it will not be released until I get at least 2000 participants. The current survey has just over 1000 for reference. Granted, I suspect a salary survey will be more attractive, so we should get more people taking it.

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