No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons | Hacker News Reader

No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons

danielsada.tech

136 pointsdshacker104 comments

I had a client fall behind on my consulting work by about $75K for a software product I was writing for them. I negotiated a revenue sharing agreement of 10% and we would call things even while I finished the application. I finished and was paid about $2M over ten years, with almost no work done for those years.

Then before Covid they needed more work done (customers and revenue were dropping because no updates to the application) so I negotiated part ownership of the company and have been working full-time on it since to try to increase revenue.

So yes, no pay, no work. But pay doesn’t have to be a paycheck. That said, I could be getting paid more right now if I was working in a more traditional role in a more traditional and larger company.

I'm surprised you could trust them on the rev share when they were so far behind on contracted payments.

You can get the P&L statement every year that they prepare for their taxes. Eventually I stopped asking for it because the payments were always correct. But also, they are trustworthy people and fell behind to a big one-time corporate expense that I understood.

You were lucky that you ran into the ideal case at every step (quality of people, trustworthiness, company performance, etc.), except for the initial invoice hiccup. Your experience is the very rare exception.

After being in your position repeatedly I learned that most cases are not this. Clients would just refuse to pay with reasoning that was sometimes legally solid even if clearly malicious. I ended up having to go to court again and again to get the invoices paid, which meant getting paid years late and with a haircut from unrecoverable court fees. Sometimes it wasn't even worth it to go to court just for a pyrrhic victory, or there was nothing left to go after.

I'm scratching my head now to remember a single case where the inability to pay was due to genuine impossibility followed by good will, rather than "because we can". They'd go to extreme lengths to not pay their debts, all the way to bankruptcy and usually reappearing a day later with a new name and a clean sheet.

> all the way to bankruptcy and usually reappearing a day later with a new name and a clean sheet.

"Phoenix" bankruptcies are a real problem among small businesses. It defrauds their creditors, and sometimes the public (taxman) as well. All the way up to things like Rangers (Sevco) football club.

The excellent book on the history of fraud, Lying for Money, has a chapter on this. It concludes that almost every middle class person could probably get away with a fake business bankruptcy at least once, because it's difficult to tell from the outside versus a real (extremely common) small business failure.

These discussions happen because it becomes unlikely that the payments will ever happen. It's about finding another way. After that, you can build in ways to verify - at least until you can trust again. Like access the accounting.

Common thing in bad relations is ignoring the situation of your debtors or creditors. It is always a business deal so the last thing you want to bring is hurt feelings. My second development deal was a 75k debt that fell through. It was a good business and a good developer they just did not have their expectations set correctly.

Revenue share is better than ownership of the company because you get a piece of net payments

Covid was 5 years ago, was this successful?

Is this alongside the revenue sharing with the shareholder option in case this is additional liquidity?

My first thought is that this relationship with the individuals involved is too intertwined for rationality, but the first 10 years were good

It's refreshing and pleasant when a client is willing to discuss things in good faith and find a reasonable solution. And it's sad that in my career it has ... never happened. I have approached clients, and clients have approached me on options for continuing projects - but the discussions have never reached a good outcome. These anecdotes to point out that yes, such options should always be on the table (if both sides can manage) but you can't rely that something like this will happen, until it happens.

I expect you value that client, and you should!

I thought you were about to have an epiphany but the only takeaway is that you just never met the right client.

It's possible, not sure how many clients you have had. But over the long run it should be less and less likely that it's always the darn client.

I don't know, I've had tons and tons of clients over the 20 years I have consulted. Off the top of my head, 80% have been fine, 10% run in to issues now and then, but there's a hardcore 10% that will stretch you and stretch you because they can (I'm talking about paying NET 60/90 when the contractual agreement is NET 30).

If you withhold services, you usually lose that client. To be honest, that's not always a bad outcome, because a bad or slow paying client is usually the noisiest, most demanding and most unreasonable one as well.

I've been in contract development business for 25 years and been through more than 100 client relationships. None of them ever had profit, and only a handful ever had revenue. So people should see this advice with a huge grain of salt. It may have worked for you, but for most people, nothing but immediate payment for work done will ever come through from any of their clients.

It's a good move. Cash flow is king in most businesses, so pretty universally, if you increase the risk or even just the timeline of cash payouts, you get more. It's an excellent negotiation dimension for anything involving money in my experience.

For my agency/consultancy, if a client wants a discount on the total investment, they can book a larger chunk of hours or pay upfront. More risk for them, less cash for us in total, but more reliable cash sooner, that's worth the discount. Cashback for quick payments is another common and simple example of this.

On the other end of the spectrum, if a client wants to delay payments to a later point in time to improve their short term cashflow, that will cost them more in the long run. Company shares, VSOP, revenue share agreements, success based fees and delayed payments with interest are some of the ways to implement this.

It all comes down to how you distribute the risks and rewards between both parties. Any good negotiation isn't haggling between two hard positions, but a shared venture to find a win win model. What you did there is renegotiate a deal that didn't work for one party to find one that worked for both.

I agree, you should take the risk into account when negotiating a deal. The value should balance the risk.

Nice. Of course you could have ended with zero too!

Well yes. With the possibility of high upside also comes a chance of a downside.

More often than not the people you are working for will just go bankrupt at some point if they can’t pay you. They will have loads of other bills they can’t pay, and probably if they engaged you knowing they can’t actually pay you then you need to understand that they are narcissistic and dishonest and treat them accordingly (ie don’t make additional deals with them)

Chances are your revenue sharing agreement might not hold up in court (ie veto/not approved by shareholders) or they might scam you by selling the IP for $1 to a shell P/L company and just reincorporating.

So yeah don’t jump for this option unless you think they’ll never pay you anyway… chances are if you keep the debt you can sell to a debt collector for 10% of its value (they’ll go after the director and usually succeed), or wait for liquidation and grab a bunch of their stuff. You might end up with choice pick on a few company cars or something like that you can sell.

Startups operating on unpaid invoices is a very common and real scam that you need to be aware of and avoid. I hear founders casually make comments such as “I’ll try xxx project on unpaid invoices and see if it works” all the time.

When my career was just beginning (maybe choosing to freelance on day 1 was the mistake), if a client was even a couple of grand behind on invoices then I would have been toast financially.

Early in your career, with no savings, working for free is just not an option.

I have never done freelance or consulting work where I didn't have at least 6 months of cash on hand.

> When my career was just beginning

Clearly "just have half a year's savings" wasn't an option here...

I get that, that's why you spend your time trying to find work, until you do have that nest egg. I spent my early 20's with multiple jobs (e.g., working as an LTE (Limited Term Employee) at the local University 30 hours a week and then working nights at a club 2.5 hours away Friday-Sunday - getting a couple hours of sleep Sunday night, driving back and going straight to my day job. I don't think I could do that now, but my LTE jobs were never that complicated (or high paying).

If you work for startups, especially boot-strapped startups, there will always be cash-flow constraints sooner or later.

Personally it came about a year into my first job. Fortunately my wife was working, and we had minimal expenses, so we could ride it out.

In lieu of salary, the founders made me a partner. We sank or swam together. And when cash came in we paid ourselves.

Make no mistake, deciding to stay was a very risky strategy. But a few years later things took off, we got back-paid all that missing salary, and we've gotten stronger since.

I was lucky. I didn't need the immediate cash, and could take a risk. The most likely outcome was we went under. But the upside turned out to be very strong.

My first client in video games was the same. They rarely paid their contractors on time (the payment was months late), or it wasn't the entire agreed sum. We kept sending in late payment notices to their finance guy, and they fired us all for being troublemakers. I believe I had a notice period of two weeks, but they fired me with one day's notice.

Suing them was out of the question. For me, as for others, it would have been international. The company was in Italy, and the contractors were all over Europe. We'd probably each spend over 10k euros on the proceedings and representation in Italian courts. And the company wasn't overdue by much more than that. Besides, even if we won and the court ruled our legal expenses were to be paid, we weren't sure the company was solvent enough. So no one sued.

I believe it was their modus operandi. The company continued firing their contractors when it got into arrears before a lawsuit made sense. Sometimes, it's just their business plan.

I agree with the article's author—no pay, no work. Before starting contract work, one should think about the line they won't cross regarding late payments. For me, it's when an invoice becomes overdue, and it's plainly a breach of contract. I will never again cross that line and keep working.

This dynamic is very important to realize, in personal relationships as well. When dealing with someone problematic, it might seem like the events are extraordinary. But usually they are extraordinary only for the impacted, not for those who cause it. It might be just a Tuesday for them (ignorance), or it might part of the plan itself (malice).

Yes, very good point. They will sometimes try to normalize it, which makes it hard to spot.

Indeed, in both cases, it's perfectly normal for the other person to do this! So attempts to bring attention to it will be fruitless. The "ignorant" person will see nothing out of place, and will be bothered by the to-them baseless accusation, and the "malicious" person will be threatened by the realization, so they will try to sweep it back under the rug.

I hate to say this, but this is quite common in Italy for smaller businesses (and most businesses in Italy are small). They have become accustomed to their courts being slow so that this is a negotiation tactic you often hear. A shame on such a nice country...

I can't imagine trying to keep working while there's no pay coming in. I know the industry is brutal, but I won't be able to work if I get evicted from my home. Especially as a contractor, you gotta look out for yourself. If they stop paying, I stop |providing services. The world wouldn't be any different towards me in that regard.

This reminds me of my first "paid" job. I was contracted with a friend to fix the decaying IT infrastructure of a mid-sized local business. We were 18, early 90s. The contract was through a friend of my friend and was a shady affair from the start: nothing in writing or signed.

We agreed upfront to get about 600$ each, which was woefully little for the ordeal we had to go through. The place was a mess of DOS PCs, AIX workstations and ancient early macs. The backups were a cardboard box of unlabeled 5 1/4 inch floppies. We even had to solder our own cables to get some ancient serial printers to work and get the new IP network talking to stuff that wasn't built for it at all.

The owner was paranoid about security so we passworded everything that could be and compiled a long list of passwords.

When everything was working we sat with him to get our money, and then he said he had understood that the deal was $600 shared between us. He didn't budge, so we got nothing and he didn't get the password list.

>$600 shared between us.

Same thing, although in my career as an electrician: sidework realtor had both me and a random plumber (i.e. unrelated to me) out to make repairs on her properties. End of day arrives, my work is completed.

Realtor: "I will pay you when the plumber is done with that bathroom."

Me: "But I am done in that bathroom [installed GFCI outlet], so here is your total for electric work."

Realtor: [feigned?] "I thought the estimate you gave me was for ALL the work, electric AND plumbing..!"

Me: "That doesn't make any sense — you called me for electric work, and this other guy for plumbing work."

Realtor: "That seems unfair."

Me: "Cool well here's the total [again]; if you don't want to pay it I can just throw a lien on the property and mess up the entire sale."

Realtor: [writes me a check, sourpuss] "I guess that makes sense."

She actually called me again for work, but I was never ~hurtin~for~honest~clients... so I declined.

I have an excellent electrician contact, a good electrician (or plumber) is rarely (never?) without work. I have an excellent tree guy. I have an amazing handyman contact. If you find a good vendor, pay them early and often.

Thanks for not making (the worthwhile among) us chase you for long-overdue money.

Towards the end of my electrical contracting career, my few clients were all on retainer. The initial months of pandemic helped me to confidently fire everybody else.

But early in my career I was too afraid to use liens/small-claims; I'd only give a single warning, at this point in my life.

Don’t be so black-and-white about no-pay, no-work. It’s entirely situational and you need to assess how this could work for you. There could be upsides to hanging in there.

My anecdote: During my second job in the games industry, in London, back in the late 90s — I was working for a dev-house that had just finished its first game (I joined halfway through the project).

The lead engine programmer got an offer to work in San Francisco and left the company and I took over his role as I was the only person in the company that could develop a 3D graphics engine (and had done so at my previous job).

They were desperately trying to get two games titles funded, but were having no luck, because it was in the awkward period between the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 where the publishers were not committing.

Eventually they just ran out of money. I was asked to work for nothing whilst they tried to land a deal. Which I did. If I’d have left them there was no way they would’ve got a deal, because they wouldn’t have anybody with experience capable of developing the 3D engine. Selling the team is an important part of the deal.

It still failed, the business went under, and we all went our separate ways. The CEO (and founder) who had asked me to stay and work gratis went on to run a major studio. I went contracting for a while.

Then dotcom happened. My contracts dried up. I needed a job.

I called up my former boss and said “have you got any jobs?”.

His reply: “you start Monday”.

I traded away some of my cash, yes. But I gained loyalty and an ally in the industry. Obviously, most situations where someone isn’t paying you isn’t like this, just don’t fall into the “no pay, no work” dogmatic position by default.

Whilst I respect your experience, is there a chance you may not have been able to find a different opportunity in that time you had been working for free?

This is a major "vector" of abuse in the games industry. Right now, you could go on certain Discord servers and find tens of jobs that "can't pay right now" but will have various benefits in the future.

I'm happy it worked out for you, and maybe the 90s was a different time. But now, to go for the same deal would be foolish. And come to think of it, people were raising hell about it in games, even in the late 90s.

I'd say this practice today needs to die out. I'm sure 80% of companies with a temporary cash crunch (but a legitimate business model) can get bank credit to cover salaries. It's not even a big hassle - the business banking app usually approves the line of credit automatically in a few seconds, anyways. Depending on the regular cashflow, it can be up to small five figures - enough to pay a month or two of salaries. If they don't want to pay, that's a different matter.

This wasn’t a new role, I’d been working at the business for about 18 months by that point. It doesn’t sound like what you describe at all.

I believed in what we were doing. I’d built a new game engine for the Dreamcast (the only nextgen console available at that point), we’d created two good game demos, the team was full of industry veterans and I liked and respected everyone I worked with. I also saw the lengths my boss was going to to make it work (including remortgaging his house to finance the short term).

In hindsight it was obvious where it was going. But I wasn’t being manipulated or abused. And I will argue vigorously and vehemently that we weren’t being taken advantage of. We were fighting to save what we felt was a good thing.

> I'm sure 80% of companies with a temporary cash crunch (but a legitimate business model) can get bank credit to cover salaries

This wouldn’t be an option in the situation I describe. You would need orders and evidence of delayed payments that can be used to cover the loans once they arrive.

That kind of finance is actually quite hard to get in the UK.

As someone in game studio leadership, I found UK business loans easy to access up to 1:1 debt-to-assets. Perhaps it was different in the 90s. And I can understand if it's a scrappy start-up with no assets, though the older I get, the more I believe those business models are irresponsible and often have negative externalities (like someone going unpaid).

You justify working for free, and I get it. Sometimes, I worked for free in my companies, but it built my equity value. I can also somewhat get it if it’s for a good cause—if you personally want a change that your labor effects in the world.

Working for free for someone else without anything of value in return is a different matter. Even if, in the end, you became friends and got a job. Some people in the games industry will say this is normal, but it’s not (and by law in some cases). For example, the UK's living wage is where society decided to draw the line between fair labour relations and abuse.

When it comes to working for free or almost free, I think whether you'd get much better labor conditions elsewhere matters. In many cases, the answer is yes. That's a good litmus test for unfair compensation.

> maybe the 90s was a different time

Yes. There was a great need for anyone with IT knowledge, and the demand was far greater than the available labour.

I remember in 98 I got a job in a (financial) brokerage, and the required skills were:

  show up on time
  don't leave before stock exchange closed
  wear a clean shirt
  be a nice to customers (all were affluent)
  know how to use conditional formatting in Excel
  know how to connect a PC to multiple screens
  know how to place different spreadsheets/windows in those different screens

I knew/could do 'more' than that but hey, money was OK, work was 15mins walking distance

Well, I see your point, but given the answer to op was "Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company," he effectively dodged a bullet.

It's probable that your experience was successful because you already had personal trust on behalf of your company.

You never owe free work. You can choose to do it anyway because you trust someone, but nobody is entitled to act as if you owe them any loyalty.

> It's probable that your experience was successful because you already had personal trust on behalf of your company

Yes, absolutely, I’m merely stating that it doesn’t make sense to make ‘no pay, no work’ a dogmatic position.

And while it might be unpaid, credible CV-lines are more valuable than stretches of unemployment.

In a development job, the only reason to have nothing on your CV is a lack of effort. You can most certainly create projects that are CV worthy, that you will also benefit from financially.

There's "benefit from financially" and then there's "can survive on the income". Mostly likely any early projects won't even be Doordash levels of compensating. Especially in games which this thread focuses on. 6+.moknths of work and half of the indie games can't even break $2000.

Given current times, I understand not having time for hobby projects while trying to survive.

Perhaps in the 90s where we still had some semblance of a social contract on taking care of your debts and your workers.

In the 20's, that's all been torn down. Gifting isn't only commonplace but are being busted out at untold scales these days. There's no sense of community, networks are weaker than ever, and workers have less right than ever, so everyone's struggling. This is all doubly true for the games industry.

I did door to door sales for a while and came to a similar place.

It wasn't that I was expecting to make a wage on a commission job, its that during the training portion I was expected to comp my sales back to the company and then on top of that, my trainer put his name down on my sales anyway.

Ultimately I learned that they handed new people territory that had been walked twice already in the previous 2 months.

The whole hierarchy of the business was designed to suck value out of new starters, and the winning move was to just drop it and leave.

Everybody needs to know their threshold for walking away, whether it's going too long without getting paid, having their pay delayed too many times, or other demands like being asked to work overtime, weekends, etc.

If a company is truly making a good faith effort to pay, I try to cut them slack, especially if they level with me about why they're having a cash flow issue. This requires having insight into the people making the decisions, as well as being willing to take a leap of faith that I won't get screwed. I have a pretty good track record: I come out ahead (i.e. get paid) most of the time, and have rarely been left holding the bag.

The article doesn't say, but I wonder if he ever got paid out for what he was owed after he walked away.

I once ran the tech side of a small startup where money was always tight and we were paying low wages in exchange for equity. But we always made sure to pay our employees first so they could eat and pay rent and keep working. One time one of our more expensive employees quit to take a better paying job. I'm ashamed to say it took us multiple months to finally pay him out his final paycheck - but once he left he was no longer the priority. I remember a few conversations with him where I stated that I was paying the office and server bills on my personal credit card and, no, I wouldn't take a cash advance to pay him his last 2 weeks in arrears. He did eventually get paid.

In some places of the world this is an offence you can get sued for and end paying a lot more than the original sum.

Won’t you think of the small business owner? /sadge

people will generally do what is necessary to get by, which often includes committing various offenses. Life sucks.

It'd up for the judge then to rule if a mere inconvenience like a loan really constitutes a necessity, and to be honest I doubt it ever will.

For anyone listening, if you live in CA absolutely do not do this, especially if you are tight on money. Employee can take 30 days of pay + attorneys fees if they are not paid out within 72 hours of their last paycheck and it's quite easy to win a lawsuit given the facts here. Something like that probably would have killed your startup, assuming you were thin enough to be paying server bills on your credit card. The corporate veil also would not have shielded you in this situation.

Would killing the startup have gotten the employee paid? The threat would probably have gotten them a slow payment plan - but no attorney fees.

Yes, it would. A missed paycheck brings you to the front of the debtor line, ahead of any bank or equity holder, when the company liquidates. The startup's owners would have been personally liable for paying out the employee in such a case.

Massachusetts is similar.

Also, I might've misunderstood a lawyer, but it sounded like a business failing to make payroll would threaten its legal right to operate.

People should remember too that bankruptcy is always an option. Both for a business and an individual for that matter. That is, nobody in theory should want to stiff their employees, clients, contractors, etc. But the reality is that businesses run out of money all the time. The odds that a new venture will survive 5 years are not good. You try and get paid but it's normal that clients will go out of business or barely survive without paying (and little point going after them if there is no money. Since "Going after them" takes time and money.)

In bankrupcy not all debts are equal. And wages come first :)

You’re probably lucky he didn’t speak to a lawyer, this could have been a very costly mistake in many many places. Sucks but also quite right too - you fucked him over.

>He was no longer the priority

Paying him was legally no less a priority than paying any other owed employee wage. Maybe it was indeed a major priority to him.

>and, no, I wouldn't take a cash advance to pay him his last 2 weeks in arrears. He did eventually get paid.

So al though there were options available to you that would have caused you some temporary economic pain, you did indeed decide to fuck him over for a long while anyhow.

If the options are to pay out immediately and risk shuttering the business, or delay, most people will probably delay.

It doesn't make it legally or morally right, but that's the way it goes.

> ...caused you some temporary economic pain

Not only them, but potentially all the other people who rely on the business.

Fortunately, he remained friends with the other guys on the team and continued playing on our company hockey team (hockey-tech startup), so even though he was mad at myself and the CEO, I don't think he wanted to sue us into submission. I think he understood the ~$2500 we owed him (2004) was double the salary of our other guys and potentially could have been the difference between company survival and lights out. He was wise to leave at the time, with a better job in hand. Our finances did get better and we did pay him + interest a few months later. It sucked (and like I said I am ashamed) but there are unfortunate ugly decisions you sometimes have to make at a startup for survival.

I never got paid! Sadly enough.

Wonder where exactly people get the entitlement to someone else's free labor. I'm confident the same individuals would not work for free if the tables were turned. Is it lack of empathy?

Typically yes, a form of lack of empathy, an inability and unwillingness to relate to people that prioritize money over their “amazing groundbreaking idea”

I deal with this a lot, some clients are talking payment, equity, and other sharing right out the gate.

Other clients are thanking me for working for free an hour into an intro call where that assumption wasn't warranted. And then acting like I’m not into their vision enough, when even the future % compensation hasn't been detailed, offered, or considered at all.

Had a call yesterday like that where I pointed out that every founder’s idea are fairly interesting software problems and they also pay to retain me so there is competition for my time. This founder needs capital or to drop the idea until they do, like everyone else.

I don't think it's lack of empathy. Most clients aren't looking to screw you in advance; they just want the work done, but don't always have the money in time to pay for it (true, sometimes as a result of their own failings).

Without a contract, either party is free to prey on the other: the client can try to guilt the worker into working longer before they get paid, but the worker can also try to ask the client for money up front (yes, that's a thing).

That's why a contract is so important: it describes what happens when a client pays late, and presumably sets terms to either make it worthwhile for the worker, or gives the worker an easy way out of the contract.

Maybe lack of empathy, although I don't think it's because managers are especially unempathetic people. We have a deeply encultured expectation that deference, gratitude, and loyalty are owed much more in the upward direction, than the downward direction. We expect employees to act as though they are subjugated, rather than merely subordinate.

Desperate people do desperate things. They probably invested a lot (emotionally, financially, etc) in the company. They have no money. Its either convince people to work for free or close up shop.

Everyone is virtous when things are good. When the chips are down is when things get ugly. I think the vast majority of people lack empathy given the right circumstance. They'll do much worse things than try and manipulate someone into free labour.

The other "No Pay, No Work" early career lesson is: Internships are a rip-off.

It's OK to accept lower compensation at the beginning, and it is always OK to do charity work if you want to help, but unpaid internships are never to your advantage in my opinion.

Depends on the field. Yea generally a bad idea. In tech, absolutely don't take an unpaid internship. In some fields (at least in locales where it's still legal, not California), it's a filter for rich kids who can afford to go unpaid.

So yea, probably don't take an unpaid internship if you're not already a rich kid and don't have a family member telling you it's a good idea.

I've never heard of unpaid internships my whole life outside of the one big NGO that's globally infamous for it. Where are you from that this is such a phenomenon?

Germany, but I believe it is less about location and more about time. Maybe it is a thing of the past but for some time it was almost a requirement to do an unpaid internship before you (maybe) got a job offer for certain industries.

In Germany it was like that for BMW and Siemens.

In some countries, it’s illegal to pay interns in certain situations. For example in Belgium, university interns may not be paid due to university restrictions.

And IIRC, it's illegal in the EU and Belgium has been paying fines every year because they don't want to change the status quo. Better for the country to pay fines (from our tax money) than companies paying a salary to their interns...

Unfortunately few young people actually learn and know this, and many workers are selected to exploit these type of blindspots many young people have for exploitation. This is true in tech especially.

Management often would choose the candidates who were young because they didn't ask questions, they followed directions, they didn't know their rights, and they were desperate for experience to kickstart their careers. They also would require legalese that would steal any potential competing ideas they ended up making outside of work through inventions agreements, and this trend still occurs today.

I've walked away from several MSP jobs in the past because they took approaches like this and was grateful for my past experience and sticking to my principles.

The hard sell pressure, requirements to agree before they'll send you the paperwork (which require conditional agreement pending review), and unwillingness to be reasonable (i.e. your given it on a saturday and it must be agreed to by Monday (few lawyers can review things over the weekend in that timeframe), followed by a withdrawal of any prospective offer for simply asking if parts of the employment contract were negotiable given valid concerns are just a few major red flags I regularly look for in employers today.

If the employer is going to rescind an offer because you ask questions, for me its not just them doing that. Its them triggering a revocation of my conditional acceptance and its mutually rescinded, and I make that clear in my final communication and never apply for those companies again.

Eventually the lack of talent available at these places, through their own actions, will have an impact and drive them towards insolvency.

I hear about 'intern' posts where young people are expected to do a job for free, for extended periods, in return for some industry experience. Mostly I hear about it in the US. I don't think it is a thing here in the UK (is it even legal?). But it sounds horrible.

How common is unpaid intern work?

Why should big, wealthy companies expect young people to work for free?

Is this a deliberate form of gate keeping so that only people from wealthy families can get a foot in the door?

Because low-experienced professionals are a net-negative to projects these days because of the increased complexity of modern development and training went away alongside company loyalty.

Heck it is even hard to get companies to onboard experienced developers with no experience in the stack already used in the company.

Most companies don't expect young people to work for free, they just don't hire them. What you are left is companies who expect young people to work for free, which obviously are not good companies.

>Because low-experienced professionals are a net-negative to projects these days because of the increased complexity of modern development

It has always been the case that new hire are a net negative to start with. Even experienced people are probably a net negative for a few weeks. Inexperienced people are more of a long term investment.

The answer is that it's sometimes legal in the UK: https://www.youthemployment.org.uk/unpaid-internships-advice...

However, previous governments set up ""welfare-to-work"" schemes, effectively a government subsidy to employers, where people were required to work for free: https://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2012/03/no-end-controversy-...

(absurdly huge controversy, the government tried to legislate the outcome of this specific lawsuit through retroactive legislation, in violation of ECHR https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2014/07/08/retrospective-legis... )

They are not strictly speaking illegal in the UK, and were pretty common in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The law requires employers to pay minimum wage to anyone who is a worker (i.e. is doing work for the company) - but "sitting in" doesn't have to be paid. Exceptions are also made for volunteering, and placements as part of a university course (these can be unpaid).

Enforcement isn't consistently applied so some smaller outfits get away with it. The big FAANGs and other major companies pay.

Depends on the country. In many places, the law has gotten into this, and companies find it safer anyway to at least pay minimum wage. It won't be paid much.

On the contrary in the US, I often see young people take jobs which pay around minimum wage and will not count as industry experience in their field - when they have enough qualifications to execute usefully on much higher paying jobs (even if the employer would still be underpaying them compared to the usual hires). My business would have used them - but couldn't find them easily. The job market is a mess.

You meet a lot of weirdos while contracting. I once had a client send me chocolate instead of a bank transfer. I ate the chocolate but still fired him. Surprisingly, he couldn't understand why I was being so immature.

In my country (small, part of EU) We have system in place, if you're full-time employee (something like US salary), and your company doesn't send you your salary, you have an option to report them to certain bureau and they will push this company into insolvency mode, after that company must fight this at the court. (start paying or go under) Yes, even one person, if not paid, can do it to 10k employees company. (And you're not involved at all, you just report it)

If contractor, you have a lot less options, but still you can also report them, and it will show on their credit score. It's not public, but other companies are using services to show credit score and they will see that. Or you can sell your financial claim to other companies.

I'm interested, how this works in US?

You report it to the department of labor.

The department of labor, in theory, investigates the complaint and you'll likely get paid: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints

Unfortunately, the reality is much different, since the US is largely under "at-will" employment (so "full-time employee" means almost nothing), it's generally easiest for an employer to simply fire the employee and immediately shoot them under castle-doctrine for trespassing.

Also, the current government won't increase DoL funding, and wage-theft complaints already often take over a year to process, with a lot of them never making it because a year is simply too long to deal with (not to mention the plaintiff has usually been shot by then).

Aside: if you work pro bono with friends, be prepared to invest emotionally. It is a different cost with different rewards.

Just make sure you can still pay your bills.

Someone pulled that on me years ago. Him and his wife wanted me to hold the fort while they went on holiday. This was after delaying pay cheque twice.

I was gone when they got back and so was their business.

Pre-email ubiquity. So I resigned by email. Which he didn’t see until 2 weeks later.

I foolishly worked for over 6 months without pay at my first job. Do not do it folks.

I also recommend watching this talk if you have not seen it already.

Mike Monteiro: Fuck you, pay me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

I was very reminded of watching this years ago while writing my blog.

I learned that you can often make a lot more money by not chasing it directly.

Any chance you get to trade some capital for a better relationship or network, you should seriously consider it.

Being completely inflexible with others regarding direct and immediate exchange of value for labor is not a good way to get in deep with revenue sharing and ownership agreements. This is also colloquially known as "being an asshole".

Building a reputation sometimes means doing great things for free.

>I was genuinely sad to leave the office, going with my coworkers to the nearby Subway restaurant

That Subway restaurant wouldn't accept to be payed in two months.

Maybe you can accept a delayed payment if you have some money and the company can somehow prove they will be able to pay later. Otherwise it's better to go.

One Friday at a non-tech job there were no paychecks at lunchtime. They did come through later in the day, but needless to say this was not a confidence-builder.

A friend got stiffed at a tech job, a government contractor, I think. I'm not sure whether it was for a month, or for a bit more. Fortunately for him, his expenses were low and his partner was working.

I had one job at a pinball company where my coworkers and I didn't get paid for a couple months. I quickly found work elsewhere. Thankfulfully my backpay did eventually come, but I wasn't going to stick around to see if they would be good to their word again the next time funds dried up. I heard this was a recurring problem even before I was hired on.

Later some of my coworkers sent an article to me mentioning that the owner was under investigation by the SEC for (allegedly) embezzling funds from investors. I think I figured out where everyone's paychecks were going.

I've been doing mobile development client work for over a decade, if I remember correctly, around 2012-2016 money was flowing everywhere.

Every company, client just wanted their own app. App for medicine sales people, internal company Android launcher, an app to adjust your window blinds, fitness app, bible/Muslim apps, timer. All these random stuffs.

Comparing it from the past several years, majority of the projects didn't even make it to MVP because of the cost is just too much for them.

Off-topic:

In 2024-2026

s/app/AI/

How the cycle repeats, just the deliverable changes.

This should be an interesting comment section.

The “loyalty card” is a pretty familiar refrain; especially wrt to startups. Founders work their asses off, and often make huge sacrifices, but also seem to have a difficult time, understanding people that don’t feel the same way (and don’t have as much to gain). They take it personally, when someone “doesn’t love my baby.”

> Firebug

Remember when we didn’t have right-click-console? Firebug was a miracle.

> Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company.

That’s the kind of response that gives you confidence you made the right choice by not giving in.

Like when a man hits on a woman, gets a polite refusal, and then lashes out with “you were ugly anyway, bitch”. Instant confirmation of a dodged bullet.

I've had job interviews where pay wasn't mentioned at all. That was weird. Can't tell what would have happened next.

That's not uncommon. Companies like to pay as little as possible (usually).

Often, the interviewing manager is explicitly instructed not to discuss pay, and HR negotiates it. The managers aren't trusted to do so.

Funny how this describes my workplace's current approach to web dev as ancient history.

The Pentateuch has multiple injunctions against defrauding workers of their wages [even merely overnight!]

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/leviticus/19?13

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/deuteronomy/24?14

I discovered not long ago that it's actually considered "an abomination unto the LORD", so imagine the ancient world equating homosexual buggery with failure to pay wages. If only we still adhered to such moral standards. But seriously, it's true, the USA seems to have strong protections about this sort of abomination, and I am thankful that I've always worked W-2 and never 1099 or under-table for reputable corporations who were always above-board with their payrolls.

Of course I've also donated thousands of hours to my church, including genuinely skilled, high-level sort of labor, and it took me several decades to figure out that I really need to expect nothing at all in return for that kind of service!

When digging into that it's also a good idea to read up on how the jubilee years worked.

Once wage theft is eradicated, if not earlier, we should bring back jubilees.

Jubilees have not stopped since the 14th century or so, for Christendom, and I contend that a lot of Project 2025 and the Trump Administration actions are indeed secular implementations of very sound Jubilee principles.

Government is currently chock-a-block with Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestants who understand exactly how wide justice works in a Jubilee context, and they’re providentially positioned to make it a reality. They are implicitly following the lead of the Holy See and the Holy Father, having declared an Ordinary Jubilee Year of Hope.

The fact that many people hate what’s coming down is a clear indicator that Jubilees work, especially in terms the principles of justice for all, wealth redistribution, freeing slaves and servants, fallow fields, and returning foreigners to their ancestral lands, but when these ideals are set into motion and made reality, some very comfortable and spoiled people whine about how horrible things are...

No. Ancient jubilees were radically egalitarian, and this administration is radically reactionary and hierarchy obsessed.

Somehow a clever person like yourself has been fooled.

I know a lot of sales[wo]men.

They can make a lot of money, but often, their base salary is 0.

It's about the hustle. Founders are like that. When times are tough, they don't get squat, but when times are good, they get a new indoor swimming pool.

Most regular employees aren't like the above. They want some basic assurances. They don't get the huge rewards, but they also don't take the huge risks.

It's rather disappointing to see founders treat regular schlubs with disdain. Not everyone is a hustler, and that's OK.

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