Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "5 Times It Makes Sense to Work For Free | The 3-Minute Guide" video.

This is terrible advice. People who ask for free work aren't seriously about ever paying for your work and there's frequently so much free work available to begin with, that there's no reason to obtain it from sources other than the public domain or creative commons. Perhaps doing an occasional "free" bit of work for a tax write off makes sense at some points, but certainly not early on and at that point, you should know how much the work is worth. What's more, it's frequently illegal to work for free. An awful lot of those unpaid internships are in violation of minimum wage regulations as private for profit companies are legally barred from having unpaid workers.
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The right way to do it is to take payment after the work is done and offer to completely waive the fee if the work isn't at the promised level. If they're not willing to pay at least a few dollars for the work, then you haven't adequately sold your skills. Part of freelancing is marketing. Sometimes, it does make sense to give things away, but usually that's things like razors where you can make the money back on the blades.
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Unpaid internships have skyrocketed because entry level jobs don't really exist any longer. Even when I graduated nearly 20 years ago, there no entry level jobs to be found in many fields. The "entry" level jobs would require a specific degree and 3-5 years of relevant industry experience. The millenials taking unpaid internships are doing it because it's often times the only way to get the experience as companies are too cheap to pay for training.
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