Flowchart : Should you work for Free? | Hacker News Reader

Flowchart : Should you work for Free?

jhische.com

151 pointsr11t30 comments

I dislike the "non-profit or charity" section. There is a HUGE difference between a non-profit and a charity. For instance 62% of hospitals are non-profit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_hospital

If they don't rely on volunteers to survive, if they have revenue other than donations, then you should be paid.

Ask the person emailing you/calling you if they themselves are a volunteer.

I'm a volunteer. I get a $450/month stipend plus room and board. The non-profit I work for has revenue other than donations.

But we definitely rely on volunteers to survive, and that includes real volunteers, though most volunteers do at minimum get room and board. So yes, the non-profit picture is more complicated than the flow chart. But personally, I don't need a stipend to do what I'm doing. A warm room and good food in some of the most beautiful country on Earth is good enough for me.

Incidentally, if any Christian hacker types are interested in spending some time (3+ weeks) in the Cascades, I might have some "volunteer" work for you.

At which point does you stop being a volunteer, and start being underpaid?

I don't know. I've got all the necessities and plenty of luxuries, so I'm content. Money is a pretty poor way of describing my quality of life.

A lot of hospitals rely on volunteers, despite being multi-million-$ nonprofits. My mom volunteered for one in high school and said it was one of the more rewarding jobs she'd had. Aside from the various work-experience and work-ethic things, she also learned how to make the bed with hospital corners, which my sister and I benefited from all our childhoods...

I'm coming to this mostly from my mom's perspective. She's a medical illustrator which means that hospitals make up a substantial fraction of her revenue, but she's constantly getting calls from "non-profit" hospitals that expect to be able to use her work for free. It just strikes me as disingenuous for a highly paid professional to be calling another professional asking for their services, and expecting to not have to pay for them.

I'm skeptical of a non-profit that pays a lot of professional people for skilled work, deciding that it isn't going to pay certain types of professionals for skilled work.

It pays here to do some research. If you can find out who volunteers regularly at the non-profit, find out about the place from them.

For instance, my local hospital runs a volunteer League of Friends who perform regular fundraising drives for equipment such as neonatal equipment, scanners and so on. The League has an iron-clad reputation, and listing on your cv that you have done volunteer work for them actually counts as a mark of honour when applying for local jobs.

I like how every branch from "Is it for a legit business" ends with "NO".

Could have just short-circuited all the decision nodes after that, though that might have been less entertaining.

Unfortunately human logic does not work like that. A general principle is often not enough. Your thought process is astonishingly capable of being derailed by well-practiced salespeople.

To resist sales pitches, you need training. You can't just train your mind, you must also train your reflexes. You must condition yourself such that when you hear specific phrases your hand hangs up the phone all by itself.

Salespeople are human beings. But when they're selling, you're not talking to a human being, you're talking to an affected persona. That affected persona is no more human than my computer, and hardly any more intelligent, usually. Click.

That's one way of looking at it.

An alternative view point: By not using a general principle, a sales pitch could ambush you with a new scenario that isn't in your list of specifics. In that case, it's easier to learn to be dogmatic in saying 'Are you a legit business? Then no freebies for you!'

Actually, I think overall its better to teach some of the immoral ways even "legit businesses" partake in. Maybe some new freelancer won't second guess him/herself by knowing a few more of the opposition's tricks.

And humorous yeah :)

This flow chart seems to leave out quite a few "work for free initially" scenarios I've seen happen to friends, etc, that eventually led to companies being formed, productive connections, etc. While nobody should work for "nothing", there are far more subtleties to this than are expressed by this flowchart.

I'm sure there are more than a few HNers who can attest to this. Many here have worked on side projects with friends (or even strangers) with hardly any hope of profit or payback. It's not always exploitative.

If you do free work for a company that hasn't been formed yet you should be part of the startup and share the wealth/risks. Only getting compensated for your work if (and only if) they ever become successful is completely unreasonable.

Agreed. I pretty much got my start in programming by working for 'free' by programming stuff for the company in my free time (no not my 'free' time at work, my free time at home off the clock). If you have nothing to offer in terms of experience then it could be very beneficial.

You can work for free on your own to gain experience.

The only way working for a company for free makes any sense is if they are providing mentorship in the form of code reviews or teaching. Except those kind of positions are typically called internships and are paid positions as well.

Also I would argue that you'll learn about as much from doing it on your own as you will learn from the internship . . . you discover a lot of things about large project management from necessity not by example.

Any hope of a quick run down of these other examples? (Or at least a few of them?)

I have one. I was trying to get an internship with a local engineering firm. Well, I knew one of the engineers there and he managed to get me an interview. Unfortunately through traveling and not checking my phone I managed to miss the phone call. So I never interviewed. But the firm offered me an unpaid internship anyway. Well, I was interested in working there and knew missing the interview was my fault, so I took it. Although a couple weeks into the internship they started paying me.

How about any internship? You work for free in exchange for the opportunity to learn something and broaden your skills and experience.

What crazy world are you from where a coding internship is unpaid?

This is surprisingly good, actually.

Now I feel bad for charging my mom $$$...

This reminds me of when I see ads on Craigslist for a logo designer, with a budget of $20.

You could save us a lot of time by just putting a "NO" next to the "legitimate business" question. To be fair, though, your humor is very much enjoyed.

I _so_ loved having many different ways to end up a no for the 'legitimate business' track. It really drove home the 'No'. And you get multiple objections covered ("but its a startup...") And you get get separate reasons for the 'No' based on the tree too.

I am ordering high-res print of this. A friend of mine would definitely make use of it.

would be more readable in a tree form

The root is a cycle, so that wouldn't work.

So you could have the root be "Is it for", and the options being the different people, instead of just yes/no.

That said, it seems like the tree would be more likely to waste a bunch of whitespace. If the goal is actually to have a working flowchart, that might not be a problem, but I think in this case it's more of an "entertain and amuse" kind of production, so I actually prefer the compact arrangement.

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