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In this article, the author focuses on trades that make up the worlds of art but which have so far been little studied: entertainment technicians. He retraces the development of two careers, that of a “reception technician” and that of a “performance company technician”, to examine the plurality of forms of involvement in technical work and their springs. To this end, it compares the conditions of entry and retention - or navigation - between the different technical professional sectors in French-speaking Switzerland, and analyses the tension between “art and profession” which structures this professional field. Through the study of the articulations of differentiated social times among technicians, this comparison shows that the disinterested “self-sacrifice” specific to artistic vocations does not allow us to characterize all technical careers.