When Your Day Job Isn't Enough (wsj.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: A lot of people are pursuing creative side gigs while they hold down big office jobs. It used to be that many had to choose between their creative aspirations and their commitment to a corporate career, but in the era of the side hustle some manage to do both [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. [...] Doing both comes with trade-offs and tensions. Unlike the aspiring actor waiting tables to pay the bills, true dual professionals have to balance the demands of both their aspirations, and often face a moment of reckoning where they are forced to sacrifice a step forward in one career path for job stability and financial security in the other.

The two worlds of Theresa Vu -- also known as the rapper tvu -- often collide. As senior vice president of engineering at New York software firm AppNexus, Ms. Vu runs a team of coders who work on a digital advertising platform. As a vocalist with the band Magnetic North, she rhymes and drops beats, and helped propel the band's "Home: Word" album to No. 2 on the Japanese hip-hop chart.

Comments

When you're a aizuo

[Anonymous Coward]

Baizuo:

Chinese: báizu, literally "white left") is a derogatory Chinese neologism used to refer to Western leftist liberal elites. It refers to the left faction in the culture wars in Western politics,[original research?] implying support of multiculturalism, political correctness and positive discrimination. In more than 400 answers submitted by Zhihu users during 2015 to May 2017, the term is defined as referring to those who are hypocritically "obsessed with political correctness" in order to "satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority" motivated from an "ignorant and arrogant" Western-centric worldview who "pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours". A related term is shèngm (, , literally "holy mother", title for the mother of an emperor), a sarcastic reference to those whose political opinions are guided by emotions and a hypocritical show of selflessness and empathy, represented by celebrities such as J. K. Rowling and Emma Watson.

Damn. When the Chinese create a word to make fun of you, you're pretty damn pathetic.

who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

The important question is, can Ms. Vu make me a damn good sandwich?

Re:I often wonder what I'm doing...

[Kjella]

From your description, you're not working two jobs. You have a job, and you have a hobby that pays its own expenses. That's totally legit, and a choice, and it's great that you get to do that.

I think that's a rather unfair characterization of amateurs who doesn't make enough money to quit their day job but who's really trying to go pro. It's highly unlikely that anyone will hire a photographer at professional rates without a good portfolio, practically nobody jumps from not getting paid at all to a living wage. If he's just doing the gigs he wants with the income as a bonus that's a hobby. If he's genuinely trying to make a profit it's a business, even if it's not very successful yet. I mean most photographers don't get paid at all...