You Should Never Work for Free — Here’s Why
My first job out of college paid me a whopping $0.00 per hour.
Gen Zers would scoff at the idea of that, but when I was their age and trying to get started with my career, you worked for free. I didn’t particularly like it, but that was how you got your foot in the door.
While unpaid internships have slowly fallen out of favor, the premise underlying them — that you need to work for free to obtain experience — has stuck. Even after venturing out on my own I still find myself in situations where I work for free — or at a very steep discount.
Part of it is me and my own financial psychology. There’s a lot of work I’ve done — and still need to do — to deconstruct limiting norms and beliefs around how I make money.
But part of it is our work culture. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting your first company or in a stable job, there’s an implicit expectation that you should do more than you’re being paid to do.
But is working for free a good thing? While trading labor for experience might seem like a novel idea, it hurts you and it hurts your employer. When a price isn’t associated with a company’s most valuable asset — its human capital — it’s impossible to know the right way to capitalize on it.
