This post was originally a twitter thread, and it’s mainly directed at young people starting out in their careers, or people looking to make a change.
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If you’re going to work for free, you should work for yourself.
Stage 1: Do unpaid work for yourself
Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others
Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <— I am currently here
Stage 4: We’ll see
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I have paid every intern that’s ever worked for me (both at ReferralCandy and @jibabom) and I would never do an unpaid internship myself – I personally can’t respect anybody who doesn’t pay their staff, and I can’t work for anybody I don’t respect. That said…
… I have gotten a steady stream of paid job offers ever since I was ~17. This is because employers know what I’ve done + they know what I’m worth. They know that bc of the work I’ve published in the public domain… that nobody paid me to do. (I never went to University, by the way)
If you want cool and interesting jobs that pay decently, you have to be a cool and interesting person that can demonstrably create value. How fucked up is it that our education systems don’t actually optimise for this – and in fact disincentivize this? The game is rigged.
In April 2018, I was bored and decided to organise an event on Facebook inviting people to scream at a public park. It got a bunch of media attention and I got a couple of job offers (events/community/marketing) because of this. Unpaid work! Fun!
I believed this at 17, as a scared and nervous teenager, & I believe it more strongly now as a moderately accomplished adult: if you want to make an interesting living outside of the classic guilds (law, medicine, etc), the most important thing to do is cultivate taste, publicly.
There are employers out there who would love to hire (and pay) a driven, motivated kid who’s curious about things, good at figuring things out, and get things done. The problem is that there’s no way to know who these kids are unless they have a trail of output to show for it.
Anyway this is just my experience. Your mileage may vary. If you have time to argue about unpaid internships though, you have time to write an interesting essay about something you love, or code up a cute little site, etc, and use THAT to get yourself some paid work.
Definitely do rant about the injustice of unpaid internships in general, but maybe do that after you’re getting paid. It’s not *that* hard to get paid. It’s certainly easier than playing elaborate virtue-signalling games on Twitter. You don’t have to be broke!
When I was a teenager I thought of it like this: If I make stuff I love, other people who like it will reach out to me, and some of them will offer me jobs. There is surely an older, successful, wealthy Visa out there who’ll appreciate my worth &pay me.
I also did think that if this didn’t work out and there was truly nobody out there who cared, then I might as well kill myself. But the simple fact that art exists in the world convinced me that the odds of this were extremely small – ie success was/is just a matter of persisting.
At a meta level I am still playing this game. I would like to be a successful writer by my own constantly-evolving definition of success. I‘d to eventually make a living doing this. I am willing to persist at this for 80 more years if I can. And if I fail, at least I tried, man!