Working on spec

For those of you who are unaware of the practice; working on spec is basically creating a work with the hope of selling it, as opposed to for hire.Spec is just a shortened 'speculation'

The broad idea is fairly ok, albeit a risky business model for a career; you create something and try to sell it, write up an article and approach a magazine with it, usually self motivated.

As a whole in the comicbook and art publications industry a lot of work is done on essentially spec, As an artist you invest your time as part of a team doing a job as a proposal for one of the bigbods, on the agreement that if it gets picked up and published you get a certain percentage of the returns, this is called a backend payment and involves a substantial amount of trust. I feel that this is still ok since the person hiring you( usually the wrter) is in the same position and you're using each other in the hope of getting noticed.

then you get something else entirely, or at least the way I see it( I want your opinions here)
A biggish company holds a kind of lottery in which the creative artist must complete a large portion of work, in fact a finished product in order to win.The more complete and final the project the more chance you win, and what do you win?

the chance to get the job.

I have a problem with this, the sort of thing I'm talking about: [link] . (This is just the example that prompted me to write, generally it is a very big problem in South Africa and I wouldn't want anyone to bash them, the reason I'm using it as an example is that it is a nice concise example, most companies will distribute e pamphlets on forums, get fb ads, or keep the info over several pages on their site, these guys just made it easy keeping it neatly on one page.)

unlike a comicbook where you are credited as a co-creator and the job will genuinely further your career on publication, this one at most is one that get's filed in your own portfolio. I personally had not visited 702's site before today so I'm leaning towards the idea that it's not a place people go to seek out graphic designers or web developers(yes, it's also two jobs in one), even if you do get to put your name in a link at the bottom.Whereas comicbooks are where I go when I'm looking for a penciller.

Perhaps, if upon winning you can charge them the kind of fee it would take to sustain your creative enterprize with a business model based on speculative projects; in effect having them pay for the overheads, expenses and debt that goes with not earning a cent for the majority of your work, then it would be a fair offer. Otherwise and as far as I can see it is very damaging to the industry.

what do you think?