Politically Incorrect: Spec Work | Hacker News Reader

Politically Incorrect: Spec Work

zachinglis.com

27 pointsPStamatiou30 comments

Nothing against spec work, but theres one thing I dont do, which is discounts. I'll either charge full price, or work for free, nothing in between.

If you charge full price you're sufficiently motivated to do the work, if you work for free, you'll do the work if you feel like it and the client its likely to have no expectations. However if you work for a discount, the client has the same expectations as if they paid full price and you have less motivation to get the work done, which can lead to trouble.

Your motivation for discounted work is that you want them to come back and continue to give you work, and you want them to recommend you to others.

Forest, trees, etc.

Problem is, the discounted work rate is what they'll expect every time they keep coming back.

Worse still, if you increase your price, they would not come back, which make the first discount even less useful.

That's not a problem with spec work. That's a problem with the company. If they are happy for your work, and not trying to short change you anyway, then they'll not complain.

And when they recommend you to others, they're sure to mention that you're "dirt cheap." The fact that you do really solid work will be cited as an extra added bonus.

I know a company that did this. They found a big client, and did a small project at breakeven. Result: the client was impressed, so now one of their biggest clients is paying breakeven rates; factor in the cost of flying an account person out to the client's headquarters, dropping everything when they change their minds about something, etc., and it's a big drag on growth.

Whenever I heard about this, I fantasized about being VP of marketing at basically any big company. Being on the other side of that transaction is surely a lot of fun.

As Thomas brings up regularly, high end consulting engagements frequently involve spec work. When I get brought in to work with a company, that rarely just happens. Generally, I do a sales pitch which is indistinguishable from the actual work, follow it with a written proposal which would otherwise be a deliverable, and only then get a contract and start the meter. Sometimes clients decide the free portion was all they needed.

This is, to steal another tptacek quote, "life in the big leagues." (P.S. Charge more.)

Question: Given that you presumably charge (significantly) more than those who have equal skill (I'm assuming SEO?) but don't do free pitches, how do you do all that client education (free pitch!) quickly? Also, wouldn't it be more effective to have a portfolio/case studies, and then you could charge more granularly?

Charging granularly is the opposite of what I want to do. It encourages people to think of what they're paying me per minute I'm talking instead of thinking of what 5% of the next quarter's sales is relative to my project rate. If you ever see a startup get acquired, the lawyer says "Whee, the term sheet results in you making millions" not "You paid a 25 year old $1 per character in this 100 page document."

I do like having things I can point to to demonstate value. This is one reason I always tell clients "It is probably in your business interests to blog about this engagement, as that means you get free links and attention for work you already paid for. Want me to write that post for you?" That said, decreasing cost of customer acquisition for consulting is not hugely important to me. (What I could really move the needle by getting better at is doing more engagements with previous happy customers. Working on it, slowly. It requires me doing push-sales rather than just pull-sales and I have historically had comfort issues with that.)

It's interesting how much more positive the reaction overall is to spec-work not in design, like Kaggle's machine-learning competitions. There's some negative sentiment towards Kaggle, but much less, and much of it boils down to, "meh, I don't consider it worth my time, but if others do, that's their decision". I'm guessing it's mostly a question of economics; ML consultants don't feel like spec work threatens to seriously affect their pay, while designers are more worried. Photographers seem to be at the far end, with photography forums full of all sorts of crazed ranting, some even claiming that people who CC-license photos and upload them to Wikimedia Commons are unethical.

For Kaggle there is always money given out. In the design world, the could be cases that simply money are not given out.

For machine learning, you have some quantitative metrics for performance measurement, whereas there is no measurement of such in creative areas.

Spec work is normal in consulting and law.

The anti-spec crusade is unique to graphic design.

Obviously, in every field, lots of practitioners will refuse to do work on spec! But only in graphic design is there a marketing effort to depict the practice as unethical.

"I think an often overlooked idea is that spec work is similar to internship. For little to no pay, you gain experience and a portfolio piece. I definitely don’t see anyone calling that exploitation. Yet being an intern lasts much longer."

Is it actually a common thing for design internships to be unpaid or minimum wage? Programmer internships, following internships in engineering disciplines, are usually pretty well paid, so this idea is foreign to me.

Interesting. Both programming and design internships I've seen personally have been severely lowered pay. Because mentoring is meant to subsidise that (Though I've seen little mentoring in those cases.)

In fact, I'm pretty sure that an internship where you create something that a company benefits from, and you are not paid for it is illegal (although by no means uncommon) under US labor laws.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html

Which references: http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pd...

I doubt its illegal because I have friends who interned at the department of labor (and other govt. jobs) doing all the jobs that would be commonly parsed out to full time employees.

You are assuming that it is always true that the government bureaucracy is always in complete compliance with the law. I believe this is an unwarranted assumption.

"I personally have done a few projects of spec work. Both my projects for Mozilla were spec work for example. I did them for free, in return for the projects being a portfolio piece."

Having the opportunity of doing some work for Mozilla is MILES AWAY from the majority of the sort of thing that is requested in your standard spec work. 99% of it will end up lost in a shared drive on some corporate network somewhere.

True, but any work counts. Having a logo crowdsourced by Moleskine would be a great honour. Something which the AntiSpec campaign is up in arms against.

Ok just to be clear, since the line is getting a bit hazy. Most designers aren't against doing true spec work (where a potential client asks you to do work for free, for the possibility of future payment and work). Almost every designer does it.

The concern most designers have is with crowd sourced spec work such as 99 designs which is a threat to a lot of freelance designers.

Exactly what I came here to post. There is a huge difference between smart spec work and the 99 designs marketplace spec work.

That said, I really don't see where the problem is in the design ecosystem right now. Talented designers are not having problems finding really well paying work, in fact there are probably more opportunities than there are designers. On the other end you have the 99 designs space. Here there are a few hundred "designers" rehashing the same concepts, over and over, for clients you'd NEVER want to work for on anything significant.

You pay for what you get.

Hit the nail on the head. Exactly a point I am trying to make :)

Since when are most designers against "true" spec work? Anytime I hear something like "the possibility of future payment and work", I run away as fast as I can. That's the kind of "spec" work the design community could do without.

Crowd-sourced spec work is another matter altogether. If a potential client points to those sites as a way of driving down your price, they're not the kind of clients you want to work with.

There's nothing wrong with taking on a high profile job for the exposure and doing it for free if you treat it like an extraneous circumstance and a business decision. But compared to people in other fields, designers are a little soft on what are acceptable payment terms, and are often taken advantage of as a result. Free = free and paid = paid, but "spec work" is a grey area that is on the whole bad for the community.

I disagree.

I think a lot of people are taking people's anti-spec to be very black and white, especially from the email and private communication i've received from this. :)

As an engineer, when I hear "spec" I think of specifications. I initially thought "spec work" was referring to specifying requirements for a client. ;)

I'm not a designer, but this doesn't fit what I understand as "spec work". What I think of is "do up a design for us, if we like it, we'll pay". This isn't the same as "do some free work that will be great publicity for you". The latter is another kind of thing. He's defending something that's entirely outside what's usually meant by "spec work".

this whole nospec movement really depresses me, because it seems like a sign that the blogging community is getting taken over by people who no longer really love their work.

to me, spec work is good because it's fun. there's no boss, there's no client, and there's no pressure. it's a chance to take some risks and make something crazy, if the 'client' doesn't like it you haven't lost anything.

I'm not an artist/designer, nor have I ever done spec work as a developer, but it seems to me a lot easier to decide to help a not-for-profit organization (Mozilla) aimed at general societal benefit for $0 than to do so for a for-profit company.

Of course. But if a for-profit company came to me, I would consider doing the same for them. I may take it. I may not. But my point is that it's not evil. It's a case-by-case thing and that if a designer wants to work for free, why are others getting up in arms about it. It DOESN'T affect them.

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