i would imagine if a lot of money, like millions, was on the line, people get really resourceful all of a sudden. of course, we're not talking Netflix passwords but usernames and passwords to brokerages, bank accounts, etc.
as an employer, it's not about us being unwilling to hire juniors. it's that juniors these days demand too much salary for their position. especially for a small startup like ours, we can't afford to match FAANG company salaries. if juniors want a chance, they should be ready to accept low salaries.
Every senior developer is still a junior developer depending on the domain at hand. If you want a lateral move into another job, imho it is ok to take a pay cut and become a junior again, e.g. webdev into C++ games. I don't see why people are scared of temporarily taking pay cuts but it has always been the nature of being a dev.
the answer is - you don't need a professional grade kit.
in the past, i used to have to pay more than $10 to take some physical photos designed specifically for passport dimensions. and then, ironically, i have to then scan it in to submit for a passport application.
now? i download a free app with all the right settings that gives me instructions on how to take a proper passport photo, and then applies some filters to brighten it up, remove some imperfections on my face, etc and it looks every bit as good as any passport photo i've ever had. and it cost me $0.00.
the delta in quality between "professional" shots with professional equipment, and smartphones with increasingly capable cameras and software is becoming so small for most everyday use purposes, that the professionals are going to find it very hard to justify their rates in the future.
I think OP was talking about professional portraits made by a photographer in a studio in a roughly hour long session. Photo shoots like that typically cost 100-200€ and the resulting portraits are not at all comparable to a 10€ passport photo.
Although this particular round fell somewhere inbetween "passport mughots at Snappy Snaps" and a full "subject all dolled up" session. IIRC the photo session was about 20 minutes and a week later I paid (IIRC) 25€ for each processed photo I eventually wanted to buy. She burned the selected high-res JPEGs on a CD while I waited.
I'd be happy to pay £120 to £150 for a fresh set these days, assuming they'd serve me for a decade again.
[Funnily enough, we ended up going to her studio for our official wedding photos a couple of years later.]
At the same time, the two photographers in my neighbourhood are doing better than ever. When it comes to memories (like newborn photos) surprisingly many people are willing to pay a premium.
Often the event being photographed has the participants fully involved, they don't have time to think about photos. Hence the need for a professional. DIY has limits, people are single-threaded. You need to hire professionals for extra threads.
My neighbourhood photographer charged me approximately the same for taking a passport photo and auto-submitting it via a quality-checking app as I'd have paid to use the quality-checking app myself...
She also recognised my name from the prints of my baby nieces she'd sold.
I see discussion that the OP was about headshots for a different frame of reference, but passport/visa photos are an interesting comparable. Every country has their own standard (dimensions, framing, glasses/no glasses, smiling/not, etc). Although they might not vary too much, it used to be easier for an international traveler to go to a "passport photo" shop (as I did, years ago), but now, as you point out, it's a problem that can be solved with a computer.
perhaps my understanding of LLM is quite shallow, but instead of the current method of using statistical methods, would it be possible to somehow train GPT how to reason by providing instructions on deductive reasoning? perhaps not semantic reasoning but syntactic at least?
one possible explanation is that the truly top lawyers could be a lot more creative in their interpretation of the law, and are capable of convincing a judge or jury that his/her unconventional argument is right in the eyes of the law, so they can achieve their desired outcome even when the odds are against their favor.
of course, the other factors that others have mentioned are probably also true regarding stuff like your network, your connections, etc.
if we go one layer deeper, perhaps we can attribute that to the fact that people just aren't willing to pay for stuff, which leads companies to have to figure out how to monetize their services. that road inevitably leads to ads as the simplest, easiest and most obvious solution.
I agree but I'd go a tad further: Why do Ads even work as a monetization strategy? Either we've collectively been convinced that paying for ads is valuable in some way, or that on some level they work at convincing people to spend. I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable.
Perhaps we need to ban ads targeting children for starters, like we did smoking. Unfortunately with "ads", there is no easy "here look at this cancer-ridden black lung that was directly caused by smoking"-equivalent.
