"I'm not advocating for any particular solution, just trying to draw parallels."
However, the fundamental break here is that the oatmeal makes his content available on the internet largely for free, whereas it can be difficult or impossible to access paywalled, unreleased, or service-based content.
People generally seem okay with control over creative content when general access to the content is not what is at stake.
I'm a freelancer, and over the last couple of years I've transitioned over several positions. It is much easier to negotiate a new salary when you have a job offer in hand, though I've never taken a counter offer.
It helps to know that there is usually a large-ish cost in acquiring a new hire that most folks want to avoid... and that just because you have a job offer from someone else you don't necessarily have to take it.
The last two clients I worked with were quite flattered when I asked for a counter offer, though because a) I'm still kind of new as a developer and b) it's my second career neither of these folks were paying half what my new offer was neither could really match the newer offer.
Perhaps it would be different if I were a w2 employee (and I believe that I only have one or two more transitions to make before I top out at what I can effectively earn, though I am quite good at what I do).... but having a job offer in hand doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't specifically ask your current employers to make a counter offer.
But I am not saying that we shouldn't make it better (though if it would ceases to function in favor of some yet unnamed better thing, I will be much happier than if it were merely "better").
However, once you want to talk about freedom in the labor market, it should be pretty clear that there is none at all: what about me? Through no fault of my own, I can't afford to commute into a city, so I occasionally lose work and make less than I otherwise would.
But since we really can't do much about these systematic issues on an individual level, I can respect your stance towards banning unpaid internships outright: seems like an okay idea to me.
I am not saying that we should make reforms.
I am saying that it's possible to modify how capitalism operates by means other than banning practices, that is, by improving what people are doing with unpaid internships by 1) not treating them as labor in any sense and 2) not making their exchange about money.
Or if you prefer, why internships at all: why not abolish the whole concept of underpaid, low skilled labor and -only- hire "employees" at a real rate while working on helping them gain newer and better skill sets?
Well, what about the folks who also couldn't afford to go to the school that the guy was going to?
I mean, ultimately, the big obvious problem of capitalism is that the upkeep of labor is pushed onto the laborer... almost to the point where (to a very small extent) it could be possible that forcing labor to pay for its upkeep while exploiting it for profit is a defining characteristic of capitalism.
While I find it to be an interesting discussion, unless you want to decry systematic problems, you're really not going far enough with your "what about".
And we don't have to do everything within that system, do we? I mean, isn't direct action a good response to large, systematic problems?
"Wait, what are you saying? Employment should be predicated on the employer giving the employee an adequate monetary reward in exchange for an adequate monetary reward for the employee? And if either side isn't getting their adequate monetary reward, the job shouldn't exist? This is a radical concept!"
No, my point is that an internship is not a"job", interns shouldn't be treated like "employees", and that I was trading, based on my experience as a both a teacher and an expert in the content area for a personal reward of getting to teach for a bit.
When internships are equivocal with jobs, they are exploitative. I agree with you and the linked article on that.
What is not exploitative is when there is an actual exchange of, say, useful information and pedagogy in a system where you can't learn techniques without making stuff, especially in a way that privileged the growth of both a specific person and a larger workforce.
"... unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality."
I believe that they can be, but as someone who actually had an unpaid intern (and who eventually got said intern a job at the company where we were working), let me make a case that they do not have to be exploitative.
I personally enjoy teaching, and have taught at two different universities. In addition to simply being a rewarding thing to do, it is a good way to get even better at whatever you are teaching.
So when I was the production manager in charge of making a bunch of marketing sites for small insurance agencies, I called up one of the local universities. They were quite happy (after some conversations with their faculty) to send me a student who was getting ready to graduate and who was interested in creating content for the web.
I didn't expect the intern to get any actual work done, just to kind of try and work through some of the projects that we were doing. The work that I was giving him was pretty much the same work that the paid staff were getting, and although we actually did end up using elements of his designs he was much slower and had a much smaller skill set than someone I would actually hire.
However, after a semester of working with us, his markup, scripting, and associated skills were a lot better. In addition to his own efforts, I spent time structuring his work assignments in ways that built from one topic to the next, and was available to critique his work in ways that he found useful.
So, this relationship was mutually beneficial: he is more skilled than he was, has at least some work experience to put down (other than food service), he received course credit (IIRC), and got a picture of what the inside of that kind of agency looks like.
For our part, we got a very small amount of marginal work, and for my personal part I improved my own scripting and CSS skills, in addition to simply enjoying working with folks who are learning.
Now, if we were just trying to fill a minimally skilled position with someone who was an employee and skim by calling them an "intern" instead of "an exploited worker", that would be different.
But I believe it is possible (though perhaps not likely) that unpaid, non-exploitative internship relationships can exist.
This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.
Not that I have anything to do with it, but two issues come to mind immediately: it may be easier to get organic search traffic for the idea, and it is a good way of keeping projects nice and separate.
The first sentence in the article:
"About the title
Many people were misled by it, and this wasn’t my intention. I was merely alluding to the book by Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, which spent time explaining and justifying his life as a mathematician. (Hardy, in turn, was alluding to the Apology of Socrates. It’s an apology in the classical sense (an intellectual justification), not an expression of remorse. My mistake - as a math geek, it’s easy for me to forget that most people have never heard of Hardy."
"Apology" doesn't necessarily imply remorse, just explication.
One of the common jokes between my wife and I is to setup a "home surgery kit" for some point in some horrible dystopian future.
However, we were thinking it out and were moved to wonder why there isn't more straightforward "how-tos" as far as medicine is concerned: how-to relocate joints, how-to suture, how-to collect appropriate equipment, how-to operate in a sane and sanitary manner.
This is, of course as lay people... for all we know all the information is available to whoever is willing to look for it and take the risks involved with amateur medicine.
However, I wonder if what trained people think about the ethics of making professional medical techniques and equipment available to lay folks.
IMO, when you are in a situation where you have to teach, ultimately you realize that you both know your subject material well enough to help out people who are new to the material even if you might get minor details wrong.
And in the event that you get something important wrong (it's happened to me, FWIW), people know that you are human-- as long as you're willing to own up and figure out where you are wrong (and actually do have a bit of mastery over the larger material) most students are happy to be learning along with you.
The only way to overcome is to actually make mistakes and practice dealing with them.
Fortunately, the more you teach, the more you will find opportunities to deal with your misunderstandings of the world.
A secondary problem with going it alone for coding your MVP is that you don't amass skills at the same rate as someone who is working full time as a programmer.
You can learn quite a bit more material if you are under the gun to get changes made for clients who are paying you, and this can be multiplied when you are working with other people who know more about solving programming problems.
For what it's worth, I aspire to be the "technical founder" for a couple of startup ideas that I work on, but I quit doing other things with my one-man-shop media business.
My strategy (as someone who programmed in HS/College and quit for a decade, and who is now moving from being a wordpress hack to owning a more diverse set of programming tools to solve the problems I am give) has been to find work as a freelancer for a progressively higher-level agencies.
Even though ultimately my goal is to have the tech chops to realize my vision (and working for other people is a sideline to that), it doesn't hurt that I've been making a really good living programming for other people while learning how to do a diverse set of technical tasks.
This plan, of course, has taken me two years so far, and I have budgeted another two years for the same path.
If your time frame is short for a real product, indeed: "you need a team of people to succeed while the getting is still good".
However, the fundamental break here is that the oatmeal makes his content available on the internet largely for free, whereas it can be difficult or impossible to access paywalled, unreleased, or service-based content.
People generally seem okay with control over creative content when general access to the content is not what is at stake.