You Should Never Work for Free — Here’s Why

Amanda Claypool
11 min readMay 21, 2024
Photo by Johan Mouchet on Unsplash

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.

--

--

Amanda Claypool
Amanda Claypool

Written by Amanda Claypool

I write about the future of the world as it’s unfolding. Download my reading list: https://bit.ly/3xvJZf6