> If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefu

> If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected. This happens in charity-sector voluntary organisations too. Having worked extensively for free (both in open source and community charity work), I found it becomes extremely draining when you really get to appreciate how people take your free time for granted, get angry if you don't give more and more to fulfil their unrealistic expectations, you can't find a way off the treadmill that doesn't get you into difficulties somehow, and there's not much support or meaningful help if you're having a rough time of it. It's one of those things that sounds theoretically obvious from a distance, but actually being in the thick of it is such a different and unexpected experience. It does lead to burnout as well as lasting trauma. Also, to what I call "weaponisation" of language making it harder to talk about such things. For example, "you seem like you're heading for burnout", from people saying it for office politics reasons (self promotion) rather than empathy, and who are often the chief causes of said burnout and trauma. I have seen people work 70 hour weeks in that situation for free, in addition to their day job they have to do to be paid, feeling more obligated to do the free work than the paid work when they clash, because of the pressures of expectations, and a bit of a "100 bosses 5 workers" problem in co-operative type social organisations.