
My Unpopular Career Advice for Today's College Graduates - markhall
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2018/05/21/advice-for-graduates/#5a32acf600cd
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bgun
_Sometimes the most effective way to get the attention of influential people
is by selling your willingness of wanting to learn from them at any cost, even
if that means working for free or for very little money._

Nope. Giving terrible advice, couching it in "my unpopular opinion", then
backpedaling through "maybe this could work for you, who knows" is lazy
writing and lazier thinking.

~~~
brandall10
Can you elaborate why this is terrible advice?

I have two real-world examples where this notion played out spectacularly:

\- An ex-gf took an unpaid internship at the main museum here in San Diego
with minimal job prospects upon graduating from USCD with a BA in history. 6
months later she took a full-time position at that museum, beating out someone
with a MFA from Stanford simply because she was exposed to so many influential
people in the industry who vouched for her. A year after that shee was
promoted to managing their event planning dept.

\- I transitioned from C# to Rails work by doing a pro-bono project for 4
months @ ~20hrs/week, the main condition was that they paid for a Sr. dev for
mentorship. My mentor on that project continued to bring me work following
that project, so much so that I quit my day job.

Value can be many things. Money is just one of them.

~~~
CalRobert
Oh hey, a great opportunity for a counterexample!

My wife got a Bachelor's from UCLA, then a Master's in Museum Studies from
University College, London. She then worked for free (it was called
"interning" \- which is kind of crazy for someone with a master's) at the San
Diego Air and Space Museum (some kinda weird folks there...), and the USS
Midway. She gave up weekends and time she could have spent earning an income.
It amounted to nothing, though she did get a neat volunteer dinner from the
Air and Space Museum. Now she has a normal job in a normal office because she
has to pay off the debts from school and can't afford to work for free.

Anyway, your anecdote is valid, but so is mine.

~~~
rmdashrfroot
A master's in _museum studies_? Why? Why in the world would you pay for that?
What could the study of that possible produce?

~~~
CalRobert
Apparently, when your ex-husband whom you started dating at 17 is an abusive
asshole who says you're an idiot, your interests are stupid, and you'll never
amount to anything, you may, upon divorce, feel a strong sense of internal
motivation to do all that stuff you always wanted to do, and make decisions
not based purely on financial rationality.

Also, I totally understand the whole "why in the world would you pay for that"
but if you work in tech you're in a fairly privileged position. The thing I
desperately wanted to do most of my life happens to pay well. Somebody else
desperately wanted to work in museums/heritage/archaeology and share
knowledge. And museums do good work - one of the projects she worked on was
repatriating artifacts stolen from Native American graves in the early 20th
century. Since the thieves generally didn't take good notes, it could require
a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to determine an artifact's provenience.
That was more related to her undergrad studies - the graduate degree was more
about a mix of preservation, conservation, etc.

I'm not sure it's worse than making some F2P game or Tinder for dogs. But it's
definitely less profitable.

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alexpotato
I would make a slightly different point:

The best way to earn is to find people who are willing to trade with you in a
way that is fair for both of you.

For example, I've worked (as in full time paid) for companies where I was told
"Do X and we will pay you $Y". Upon completion of X, there was no $Y. This is
an example of unfair trading aka not keeping up their end of the deal.

I've also worked, for very little or no pay, and done even better work and the
people/companies I worked for did exactly what they said they were going to
do.

Everyone has a different value space. If you are young and your time is cheap
and you have lots of energy, find someone who needs that and is willing to
trade you (ideally explicitly) for that in return for whatever you desire.
That could be money, status, knowledge, experience etc

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andyonthewings
I dont think the idea of doing free work in order to learn and acquire
knowledge and skills is that unpopular or controversial.

At least I myself did that when I was in university. I got into open source
community and started contributing to the Haxe programming language. I ported
some libraries from another languages and contributed some unit tests and CI
configs (Travis, AppVeyor, SauceLabs) to the Haxe repo. Since I become a
frequent contributor, the core developers are much more willing to teach and
answer my questions on not just Haxe but coding knowledge in general.

After I graduated I was employed by the Haxe Foundation and that was my first
fulltime paid job.

~~~
tabtab
I had to turn to such when my specialty was replaced by The Web. I boned up on
Web tech, but had no practical Web experience to put on my resume. The only
way I found to get practical experience was to do projects for free, in
exchange for references. It was _survival_ for me.

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qntty
Weird that his "unpopular" advice that sounds exactly like every other advice
article...

~~~
mamon
Good advice, even if it's common knowledge, is usually unpopular, because
people want quick fixes, advice that does not require any effort on their
part.

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RickJWagner
Huh. IMHO, the problem with 'learn, earn, return' is that the peak earning
years are towards the age of retirement.

If by 'return' the author means in some partial way (not full time), then I
can maybe see it. But if he means full-time giving back in your retirement, I
don't think that fits my plans. I plan on some relaxation.

