EXPOSED
The core of this job — hanging speakers, running cable, rigging mics on bodies, aiming projectors, chasing a buzzing ground loop twenty minutes before doors — is hands-on work in rooms that are never twice the same, and robotics is nowhere near it. What is eroding is the console-side and post-side work: auto-mixing, auto-tracking PTZ cameras, AI noise removal and dialogue isolation, automated captioning, and templated livestream switching are absorbing tasks that used to justify a second or third tech in the room. Score reflects the modal worker in corporate AV, houses of worship, schools, and venue crews rather than the elite touring or broadcast engineer tier.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. 13 rather than 17 because load-in, rigging, cable runs and lav placement on bodies stay stubbornly manual, but the tasks that filled the rest of the shift — riding gain on a Q-SYS or DiGiCo auto-mixer, following a presenter with a PTZ camera, cleaning HVAC rumble out of a recording, cutting captions for the Zoom archive — are now defaults in the firmware or a one-click plugin, so the head count the room justifies is shrinking even though the work in the room is not.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. 17 reflects that a normal week involves ladders and Genie lifts, truss and motor points overhead, pulling XLR and Cat6 through conduit and ceiling tile, and doing it in ballrooms, gyms, sanctuaries and outdoor tents whose ceiling height, power quality and RF environment you discover on arrival — the 3 points held back are the hours spent seated at a console or an editing timeline.
No licence, no signature requirement. 2 because nothing in the job requires a licence you can lose: OSHA fall-protection and ETCP rigging certification are employer or venue preferences, FCC coordination for wireless mics rides on the frequency holder not the tech, and when a truss point fails the general contractor and the venue absorb it, so no statute names you.
Some relationship component. 8 sits above anonymous work because the pastor, the meeting planner and the touring FOH engineer request the tech who already knows where the dimmer noise comes from and which input on the wall plate is dead, but the client bought the room and the gear — you are named on the crew sheet, not on the contract, and a replacement tech can be sent next Tuesday.
Meaningful discretion. 8 covers the calls that are genuinely yours and genuinely unscripted — reassigning wireless frequencies when the hotel next door fires up, deciding to run a redundant stream or reboot the encoder five minutes to air, cutting a channel that is feeding back with 400 people watching — but the consequence is a bad show or a lost recording, and the show file, plot and signal flow you are executing were mostly designed by someone else.
Has AI actually changed your work?