> I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically:
I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent).
I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.
I guess I'm saying that the celebrity nature of actors is a confounding factor. It's not that these actors are merely celebrities among the film industry, but your mom and dad and friends actually have heard of them and their presence in a film is going to influence whether or not people turn out to see the film. You can get the most famous programmers together to build a product, and no one is going to buy that product on the basis of those programmers' celebrity unless some segment of the software industry is the target audience for that product.
To be quite clear (and likely this was your point, in which case I agree), if the film/tv unions excluded actors, the effect would be pretty comparable. My friends and family aren't going to see a film because Joe The Sound Guy worked on it just like they aren't going to buy an app just because Collin The SRE worked on it (no matter how famous Joe and Collin are in their respective industries).
I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent).
I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.