No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons

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.<p>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.<p>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.

If you work for startups, especially boot-strapped startups, there will always be cash-flow constraints sooner or later.<p>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.<p>In lieu of salary, the founders made me a partner. We sank or swam together. And when cash came in we paid ourselves.<p>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&#x27;ve gotten stronger since.<p>I was lucky. I didn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s notice.<p>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&#x27;d probably each spend over 10k euros on the proceedings and representation in Italian courts. And the company wasn&#x27;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&#x27;t sure the company was solvent enough. So no one sued.<p>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&#x27;s just their business plan.<p>I agree with the article&#x27;s author—no pay, no work. Before starting contract work, one should think about the line they won&#x27;t cross regarding late payments. For me, it&#x27;s when an invoice becomes overdue, and it&#x27;s plainly a breach of contract. I will never again cross that line and keep working.

This reminds me of my first &quot;paid&quot; 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.<p>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&#x2F;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&#x27;t built for it at all.<p>The owner was paranoid about security so we passworded everything that could be and compiled a long list of passwords.<p>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&#x27;t budge, so we got nothing and he didn&#x27;t get the password list.

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.<p>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).<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Then dotcom happened. My contracts dried up. I needed a job.<p>I called up my former boss and said “have you got any jobs?”.<p>His reply: “you start Monday”.<p>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.

I did door to door sales for a while and came to a similar place.<p>It wasn&#x27;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.<p>Ultimately I learned that they handed new people territory that had been walked twice already in the previous 2 months.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t say, but I wonder if he ever got paid out for what he was owed after he walked away.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t take a cash advance to pay him his last 2 weeks in arrears. He did eventually get paid.

Wonder where exactly people get the entitlement to someone else&#x27;s free labor. I&#x27;m confident the same individuals would not work for free if the tables were turned. Is it lack of empathy?

The other &quot;<i>No Pay, No Work&quot;</i> early career lesson is: Internships are a rip-off.<p>It&#x27;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.

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.<p>Management often would choose the candidates who were young because they didn&#x27;t ask questions, they followed directions, they didn&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>The hard sell pressure, requirements to agree before they&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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 &#x27;intern&#x27; 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&#x27;t think it is a thing here in the UK (is it even legal?). But it sounds horrible.<p>How common is unpaid intern work?<p>Why should big, wealthy companies expect young people to work for free?<p>Is this a deliberate form of gate keeping so that only people from wealthy families can get a foot in the door?

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&#x27;t understand why I was being so immature.

In my country (small, part of EU) We have system in place, if you&#x27;re full-time employee (something like US salary), and your company doesn&#x27;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&#x27;re not involved at all, you just report it)<p>If contractor, you have a lot less options, but still you can also report them, and it will show on their credit score. It&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m interested, how this works in US?

Aside: if you work pro bono with friends, be prepared to invest emotionally. It is a different cost with different rewards.<p>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.<p>I was gone when they got back and so was their business.<p>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.<p>Mike Monteiro: Fuck you, pay me.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U</a>

I learned that you can often make a lot more money by not chasing it directly.<p>Any chance you get to trade some capital for a better relationship or network, you should seriously consider it.<p>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 &quot;being an asshole&quot;.<p>Building a reputation sometimes means doing great things for free.

&gt;I was genuinely sad to leave the office, going with my coworkers to the nearby Subway restaurant<p>That Subway restaurant wouldn&#x27;t accept to be payed in two months.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>A friend got stiffed at a tech job, a government contractor, I think. I&#x27;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&#x27;t get paid for a couple months. I quickly found work elsewhere. Thankfulfully my backpay did eventually come, but I wasn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s paychecks were going.

I&#x27;ve been doing mobile development client work for over a decade, if I remember correctly, around 2012-2016 money was flowing everywhere.<p>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&#x2F;Muslim apps, timer. All these random stuffs.<p>Comparing it from the past several years, majority of the projects didn&#x27;t even make it to MVP because of the cost is just too much for them.

This should be an interesting comment section.<p>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.”<p><i>&gt; Firebug</i><p>Remember when we didn’t have right-click-console? Firebug was a miracle.

&gt; Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company.<p>That’s the kind of response that gives you confidence you made the right choice by not giving in.<p>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&#x27;ve had job interviews where pay wasn&#x27;t mentioned at all. That was weird. Can&#x27;t tell what would have happened next.

Funny how this describes my workplace&#x27;s current approach to web dev as ancient history.

The Pentateuch has multiple injunctions against defrauding workers of their wages [even merely overnight!]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bible.usccb.org&#x2F;bible&#x2F;leviticus&#x2F;19?13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bible.usccb.org&#x2F;bible&#x2F;leviticus&#x2F;19?13</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bible.usccb.org&#x2F;bible&#x2F;deuteronomy&#x2F;24?14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bible.usccb.org&#x2F;bible&#x2F;deuteronomy&#x2F;24?14</a><p>I discovered not long ago that it&#x27;s actually considered &quot;an abomination unto the LORD&quot;, 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&#x27;s true, the USA seems to have strong protections about this sort of abomination, and I am thankful that I&#x27;ve always worked W-2 and never 1099 or under-table for reputable corporations who were always above-board with their payrolls.<p>Of course I&#x27;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 <i>nothing at all</i> in return for that kind of service!

I know a lot of sales[wo]men.<p>They can make a <i>lot</i> of money, but often, their base salary is 0.<p>It&#x27;s about the hustle. Founders are like that. When times are tough, they don&#x27;t get squat, but when times are good, they get a new indoor swimming pool.<p>Most regular employees aren&#x27;t like the above. They want some basic assurances. They don&#x27;t get the huge rewards, but they also don&#x27;t take the huge risks.<p>It&#x27;s rather disappointing to see founders treat regular schlubs with disdain. Not everyone is a hustler, and that&#x27;s OK.