If you charge a reasonable rate, not really, unless you always ask for payment before you complete work. Let's say you charge 100$/hr. That means you are going to demand payment before you complete a full week of work. Say you charge $50/hr. Now you are demanding payment (in hand/check cashed) before two full weeks of work. Good luck finding a company/client who will pay you on that schedule.
Yeah, most of my consulting is really low-quantity in the hours arena, as it's not my main income stream. Anything more than a week f/t I'm really careful with.
I meant more viable from a legal standpoint I think.
I definitely wasted a lot of time and emotion on this. But it felt quite good when they actually paid :)
If I did end up in a similar situation again, regardless of what precautions I took, I think I could at least attempt to pull the same thing off with very little time/effort, having the knowledge of the process that I do now.
Btw, once I realized they weren't paying anytime soon, I of course did go ahead and find another gig (which actually paid).
Trust me, I thought about doing this. I even thought of this as a strategy to get paid before I ended up suing them. But considering this wasn't a huge amount of money, I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.
how about, "hrm... here are two almost equivalent candidates, oh wait that one sued his last company and ruined their rep"
or... what if the HR department of some big company doesn't hire people who have sued their employers?
I'm just making things up but I have a feeling there is some potential situation where it would cost me.
Also what do I gain from it? Vengeance is one, not really a good reason. Helping out the probably not so huge number of other people who might get conned by them in the future is the other.
That reason is pretty decent, but weighed against the personal cost to me, not so much. Also you need to factor in if these future employees would even find my warning. I did a little SEO testing with this already and it wouldn't be that easy to create something easily discoverable.
If the HR department of some company doesn't hire people who sue employers for an extreme example of non-payment, would you really want to work for such a company? Wouldn't this only hurt your chances with companies that have serious problems paying their contractors?
Not only did you explain your side of the story very reasonably, you did... win the suit. It's not some he said/she said deal, a court of law ruled you had been wronged.
If you want a gain: companies that don't pay their employees will self-select themselves out of trying to get free work from you.
For people like text: Essentially not doing something because someone, somewhere, who might at some point give you money might be offended is a bad idea.
You need to weigh both sides, if there was something great on the other side, then I would agree with you. In this case, I don't gain all that much for going public with it.
