... but no matter what I hear about movie unionisation, what I also hear and read (in tomes as definitive as Cinefex) is that special effect post-production is also going the same way as software. Animators are having to put in similar hours, on a contract basis, for relatively short PP times. Apparently, PP is now becoming "Burn Out City" for PP and FX artists.

The situation that Bonzi has described has happened to me one too many times in the last 23 years. Being rung on Christmas morning by my boss around 6AM with a hysterical request to log into a client's site and get it running again was about the absolute pits (this, after having given up three consecutive booked holidays prior).

It is to do with the preception that software, and it associated products (like SFX) are "vapour". "immaterial" and apparently formless - hence, it must cost nothing to produce.

Oh, boys, but this is where the b***** managers are wrong - it costs immense concentration, and thought. It costs physical effort and endurance. It costs in tiredness and sickness. It costs in RSI and eyestrain.

But it doesn't cost the managers, does it? They don't have to stay late and miss their families - in fact, I cannot recall a single manager ever hanging around later than their normal departure time, while the galley slaves continue with an undue (and unrewarded) sense of duty and loyalty to the company "paying" them, to stay back and work on and on to just get the job done so they can allow themselves to maintain some sense of pride in their work.

No, it's a problem in the culture of software management (it's rubbish) and planning (there isn't any), coupled to a culture (bacterial ) that tries to reduce as far as possible the primary cost of software development - salaries - to a bare minimum. How long are the poor sap engineers going to put up with this before someone snaps? Want an indicator? How about the hardware engineer who took hostages at gunpoint in the Philips company cantine with a dummy pistol, complaining about - get this - the way management had interfered in the choice of a processing algorithm in a DSP used in a Philips widescreen television performing optical distortion compensation? He got shot in the head by the Police, of course. The ultimate overtime payment, eh?

Thump, thump, thump, thump LASH "Deadlines! Deadlines!"

Slave on, boys. Rome is still a few million oar strokes away.