People are sorted into different classes in companies. You’ll never get a company to pay six figures for someone they consider a free intern - regardless of whether it’s in their economic interest.

Nobody's saying she should have been earning six figures. But they could certainly have been smart enough to offer her and other prolific quizmakers paid positions with a revenue share upside if they thought they'd get more quizzes as a result. She's 19 and made 700 quizzes for free - she'd have probably thought an entry level wage and a $10k bonus was Buzzfeed being very generous.

> You’ll never get a company to pay six figures for someone they consider a free intern

And yet here they are, having lost that percentage of revenue because they had this mindset. I don't think she needed a six figure salary necessarily, but BF made exactly no attempt to do _anything_. Unlike an unpaid intern, McMahon could have kept doing this indefinitely, not just for three summer months.

It’s human nature, and it happens not just in business. People get up in arms whenever an open source project tries to monetize in some way other than “support”.

Isn’t the whole point of having things like CEOs and shareholder-elected boards of directors, to find people who are good at optimizing for the business’s profits over what their own human natures tell them to do?

Sure, as irrational as that may be, you're right that it's a larger problem to fix that's probably out of scope here.

But the larger point is that economically productive employees in their early career are almost always exploited, so it wouldn't have been hard for Buzzfeed to throw some relatively token amount towards her and have her be over the moon with it. Most college students would love to get $20k for doing something they were procrastinating and doing for free, especially if you package it with an ego-boosting title.

> If someone is providing you a service for free that accounts for a very meaningful percentage of revenue, how much revenue could they be generating for you if you actually incentivized them to do that work? 1.25x? 1.5x? 2x? More?

In some cases, it could be less output, or lower quality. Money (or other explicit rewards) changes the psychology of doing work vs. volunteering it. It adds pressure, makes the work feel like a job instead of a hobby, and can lead the person doing the work to choke on deadlines, slack off, look for shortcuts, or even give up entirely.

Of course, people providing valuable services to a for-profit business should be fairly compensated, and companies shouldn’t be trying to exploit volunteers.

But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work.

I used to write several short articles per day, over several years. I did it for free and highly enjoyed it, but I was eventually paid to do the same (on the same topic), so I can second the commentor above. Once it was paid, I lost interest over time and saw it as a burden more than a pleasure.

It's hard to make money for creative endeavors, for several reasons, and there are generally two ways to make money from them: put everything into it and hope for the best, or have a "real job" and do the creative thing on the side. Regardless, and personally-speaking, I prefer doing creative things for free because that's the best way to keep my interest-level high.

>But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work.

I'm glad I don't work for you.

I think what jacobolus is saying is after a certain point, more money won't necessarily lead to better quality of work.

[0] https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work

My argument is that if you pay less than your competitors, you can't expect to hire and retain the best people.

edit: More to the point, I think this idea that people don't work for money is one pushed by management at the expense of the workers, and when I hear employers putting that out there, I assume those employers are... bad to work for, because they think that by being manipulative, they can get you to work for less.

Usually, those employers have less pleasant cultures and pay less than employers who simply pay more than their competition.

Much of the best work I know about was done as people’s hobby projects, self-selected school projects, self-selected projects funded by some kind of patronage system with money not directly tied to output, etc.

I don’t employ anyone, so you don’t need to worry about whether I would hire you to keep doing your hobby and kill your love for it.

I guess since those mangers are generally well paid they must be bad at what they do.

That point, however, is a lot higher than zero, more so in areas with a high cost of living, and still more so for a 19 year old who doesn't have any savings to fall back on and has to establish his earning baseline.

No, I think parts of this are very true. Apple Retail doesn't pay their staff commissions so there's no incentive to drive expensive sales that the staff personally profit from (partly I guess because of just how expensive and seasonal Apple product sales are?).

Myself, and a few other developers, refuse to monetise our third-party apps for the video game Destiny because doing it for free means we have no obligation to any customers. If I was being paid to do this, I would enjoy it a lot less.

It could also be that the marginal traffic or revenue generated by her over the next best quiz author is much less than $200k. If so, having her specifically may only be worth, say, $5k and not worth the hassle in the context of the overall program continuing to work.

I think the logic is there'll always be another naive teenager willing to work for free.

And they're probably not wrong. Bright-eyed teenage students are a self-renewing resource. Industries like BuzzFeeds thrive on them. As long as they keep them coming in as content consumers, they'll never be lacking of people willing to spend time creating content for them. BF can dole out status in a semi-respected field. That alone has value to the students.

This isn't that new. Plenty of companies seem to be A-Okay not paying interns to do real jobs. Apprenticeships in the UK pay just £3.70/h. And every junior position requires 3 years industry experience. It's no surprise that people are forced into working for pennies.

The only real problem for BuzzFeed here is people being able to kick up enough fuss that makes them look bad. Given how the rest of the world treats young workers, I think they'll be fine.

I wonder if she would have kept up the same good work if she had been paid for it. Not meaning it in a bad way, I mean the difference of doing it for fun and doing it for money.