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Will Work For Food…
Back in the dot-com days, being a designer was a big deal. Everyone wanted a piece of you to design their marketing materials and websites. Those were the days. Quite a few job offers included stock options, high salaries and even BMW’s. Yeah. I’m not kidding. You wouldn’t believe how many people got a BMW as a signing bonus around here.
When it all died down and we all were thrown like meteors back to earth and reality, the money, cars and big lifestyles were gone. Getting a job became pretty tough, with the sudden large number of unemployed designers all vying for the same jobs. These new job offers included a chair and a desk and maybe a halfway decent computer. Oh, and you wouldn’t have a window seat, but instead you might be crammed in the back of some storage closet working for pennies on the dollar. Where do I sign up?
Most of my designer friends eventually found work or changed careers altogether. The starting place for most job searches began at Craigslist back in the day when it was just a San Francisco thing. Sometimes you’d get lucky, sometimes you’d get jacked up. Thing is, these days finding anything worthwhile on Craigslist is just impossible. Most people want to pay you $5 for $1000 worth of work. Imagine being a photographer and being offered $50 to shoot a wedding. Erm. You’d probably take it if you’re hard up or just starting out, but if you’re a professional at all you’d know that taking photos is an art and $50 is a slap in the face. Same goes for designers—there’s actual thought that goes into design, it’s not just slapping words and pictures together.
So the other day this ad was posted on Craigslist:
We’re staffing up and to start with are looking for a kick-butt 1 page website with some flash (and a logo to be honest too!). Need it done in a couple of days, but the is potential for A HUGE amount of freelance down the road. We only pay a little now, but can stock you up with CASES OF RAMEN NOODLES and MORE BIG $$ later! Please don’t hesitate to send samples, cover letter and resume.
FULL-TIME POTENTIAL! GOD BLESS!
FYI – work at home or on-site, we’re flexible!!
• Job location is lincoln park
• Compensation: $150 AND RAMEN, Future Full-time $65-$82k
It was mentioned that the guy has around 50 cases of Ramen to offer. Yeah. My ass isn’t working for Ramen. What’s that even come to, like $12? I’ll bet the postage to send him my portfolio, resume and cover letter would cost more than the ramen. But even if you take the $150 into consideration, that’s not even a down payment for what he’s asking for. I mean, that might get you an unformatted website with just text running down it. Like a white page with unformatted text all over it. But add to that a logo and you’re talking $1000 minimum, because it actually takes time and effort to create an original logo. And then he wants Flash. Erm. So a couple weeks worth of work for $150 and 50 cases of Ramen.
So much for all of that schooling to learn an art. And to think they used to offer us cars. Now it’s Ramen. Dude.
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This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.