Note: I’m running for the PASS board of directors. Candidates are not allowed to disparage PASS, and I’m of the opinion that I’m not disparaging PASS in this post, but if anyone thinks I am, please let me know in the comments.
One topic I’m always yelling about on Twitter and to any community speakers I chat with, is to never do anything for a for profit company without compensation. Compensation can take the form of having your travel expenses paid for a conference, or just getting paid for work product. No matter how small the effort, it’s a lot of work to write a column, or do a presentation, and you are a subject matter expert whether you realize it or not. Community events are a different story—I’ve spoken at user groups, virtual chapters, many SQL Saturdays and even some community conferences, like SQLBits (in person SQLBits does provide hotel rooms for speakers) and EightKB without any compensation.
I’ve written about the PASS Pro subscription offering, that PASS and C&C launched to build a secondary revenue stream, beyond PASS Summit. When it was launched, I said, conceptually it was a good idea, but I didn’t have faith in C&C to provide good execution. I also thought PASS would struggle to fill a content pipeline, without a large capital infusion to pay speakers to build content, the way Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning do.
It turns out my assumption was correct, as this morning I received an email (forwarded to me) asking PASS speakers to teach Microsoft Learn modules to PASS Pro members. The work consists of doing a webinar and leading a Q&A session for an hour, and the compensation is “This is a volunteer position”. Yes, that’s it—PASS expects folks to do this work for free.
My (and DCAC’s) typical compensation for something like this would be $1000 at a minimum. In addition to the active training time we are typically paid for the time required to prepare to give the training class. Prep time for Azure training is hard—Azure changes all of the time, which means you frequently need to update demos, change screenshots in slides, and possibly even refactor entire sections of training because the Azure platform is constantly changing. Asking the community to provide free training to a service, that is an attempt to prop up a for-profit event management company is just unconscionable to me.
Because PASS Pro is a paywalled service there are a limited number of people who can attend these events. This means this training is not upholding the PASS mission of Connect, Share, Learn to the community at large. More importantly PASS is asking experts to provide their expertise and skill for free. Just like artists shouldn’t work ‘for exposure’, you shouldn’t either. If someone is asking you to build content for them, you have a valuable level of expertise that that company needs.
I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but I’ve worked long and hard to have a very solid understanding of the Azure ecosystem, and I consider myself knowledgeable. My knowledge is valuable—it took me a long time to acquire that knowledge as well as the ability to teach others that knowledge in a manner that they can understand. That knowledge and skill is valuable, and asking professionals to work for free completely undermines the foundation of having a Professional Association.
I’ll take this a step further and say that anyone who does this for free is actively harming the rest of the community. As I mentioned before we at DCAC are paid for things like this, along with many other members of the data community and the Microsoft Certified Trainer community. When others do free training for a paid service you are undercutting all of those people. You may ask what I think about people doing things on YouTube or other free services—those videos are available for the whole world to see, and in many cases are loss leaders to try to get viewers to subscribe to paid services.
I’m of the opinion that PASS Pro being a paid service had the potential to divide the community. However, when speakers are paid, that’s another opportunity for speakers to make money, and is how nearly all legitimate online training services work. If the success of your business model depends on free labor for your paid service, that’s just theft of labor, and you don’t have a feasible business model.
