tallyh00

If you charge a reasonable rate, not really, unless you always ask for payment before you complete work. Let's say you charge 100$/hr. That means you are going to demand payment before you complete a full week of work. Say you charge $50/hr. Now you are demanding payment (in hand/check cashed) before two full weeks of work. Good luck finding a company/client who will pay you on that schedule.

You need to weigh both sides, if there was something great on the other side, then I would agree with you. In this case, I don't gain all that much for going public with it.

Thanks, I will check out that book.

I definitely wasted a lot of time and emotion on this. But it felt quite good when they actually paid :)

If I did end up in a similar situation again, regardless of what precautions I took, I think I could at least attempt to pull the same thing off with very little time/effort, having the knowledge of the process that I do now.

Btw, once I realized they weren't paying anytime soon, I of course did go ahead and find another gig (which actually paid).

how about, "hrm... here are two almost equivalent candidates, oh wait that one sued his last company and ruined their rep"

or... what if the HR department of some big company doesn't hire people who have sued their employers?

I'm just making things up but I have a feeling there is some potential situation where it would cost me.

Also what do I gain from it? Vengeance is one, not really a good reason. Helping out the probably not so huge number of other people who might get conned by them in the future is the other.

That reason is pretty decent, but weighed against the personal cost to me, not so much. Also you need to factor in if these future employees would even find my warning. I did a little SEO testing with this already and it wouldn't be that easy to create something easily discoverable.

I agree, the 'red flags' I mentioned probably have very little predictive value.

OP here...

Trust me, I thought about doing this. I even thought of this as a strategy to get paid before I ended up suing them. But considering this wasn't a huge amount of money, I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.