Most professionals do work for free, in small amounts relative to the amount of money at stake. If you clearly only need 2 hours of lawyer time, you pay for both of those hours. But if you're talking about maybe hiring a lawyer to do something complicated for you, the lawyer will give you an hour or two of time for free, in which they will use their professional expertise (i.e. do work) to assess whether or not your case will benefit from their services. But maybe you think law is a situation where the client has the power in the relationship? No worries, accountants do that too, as do architects and building contractors, as do SaaS companies, as do.... basically, as do members of every industry where the customer isn't obviously a penny pincher (i.e. retail sales does not do this).
You made this exact case yourself in a related comment, in which you called meeting people business development. I agree there's a non-zero distinction here between work-hire-test and consulting-about-consulting, but claiming that the issue is that "you shouldn't work for free" is misleading.
Also, you suggest that if they pay, that costs them instead of costing you. It already costs them more to interview than it costs you. But sure, if making sure they don't get any benefit out of their relationship with you unless you get benefit too, tell them you'll only do a work-hire if they make a donation to the EFF in the value of your hourly rate.
> But if you're talking about maybe hiring a lawyer to do something complicated for you, the lawyer will give you an hour or two of time for free, in which they will use their professional expertise (i.e. do work) to assess whether or not your case will benefit from their services.
Of course. That's the sit-down-and-chat "interview". But lawyers don't draft up a contract for you to demonstrate that they can write up a contract to your satisfaction. If you want a lawyer's expertise applied concretely to something of your direction, you pay. And while lawyers do have bar exams, they don't have a very detailed demonstration of their work up on Lawhub for your perusal!
> I agree there's a non-zero distinction here between work-hire-test and consulting-about-consulting, but claiming that the issue is that "you shouldn't work for free" is misleading.
I think it's misleading only if you consider the beneficiary of that work to be the same in both cases. I don't. The only beneficiary of every work-sample test I've ever been given was the company--it goes into some black hole and whether it was even good or not, to say nothing of any actionable feedback, has literally-literally never been forthcoming. On the other hand, I have very rarely not benefited in some way from sitting down and chatting with a technical leader at a company, whether it was directly about their problems (or their solutions!) or about tech in general. Both in a consulting-about-consulting capacity and an interview one.
> Also, you suggest that if they pay, that costs them instead of costing you. It already costs them more to interview than it costs you.
In an absolute sense, it definitely costs them more. In a relative one, it emphatically does not: they've got plenty of bodies that can parallelize. I can be interviewing with them, or I can be working, or I can be mopping my bathroom floor. I can't be doing all of those things at once.
You made this exact case yourself in a related comment, in which you called meeting people business development. I agree there's a non-zero distinction here between work-hire-test and consulting-about-consulting, but claiming that the issue is that "you shouldn't work for free" is misleading.
Also, you suggest that if they pay, that costs them instead of costing you. It already costs them more to interview than it costs you. But sure, if making sure they don't get any benefit out of their relationship with you unless you get benefit too, tell them you'll only do a work-hire if they make a donation to the EFF in the value of your hourly rate.