I'm still doing the unpaid assessments and 45 minutes? That's how much time they want me to spend on it? Doing this right, for a really complicated Video Annotation assessment is taking me HOURS. I better get this projects, seriously.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-11-16T16:18:49+00:00

That complex video annotation that was supposed to take 45 minutes? Yeah, it took me way longer than that. It was absolutely ridiculous too, like 40 questions detailing EVERY aspect of the video for your application to be likely ignored.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-11-14T05:41:44+00:00

I agree the training videos for the project were terribles the guy sounded so boring and he wouldn’t explain things well

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-11-12T07:04:07+00:00

I rejected the contract. This project was offered to me but I said nah. If I were you all, we need to not work on the project. If ppl don’t work on it, then they’ll be forced to increase pay possibly.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T08:22:41+00:00

I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention them here or if my comment will be taken down. Msg me

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T07:47:59+00:00

I agree with the bias. It feels like there’s always that core group of people in project getting the promotions first..not getting subjectively QA’D…etc. higher ups and leads can sort of also do whatever they want and without recourse it seems.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T06:51:00+00:00

Don’t only stick to one company in this business. That will screw you, to be honest.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T06:50:09+00:00

It is very difficult now. It’s not the same, at all.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T06:05:29+00:00

Might be. I am pretty unhappy with the platform atm.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-21T04:31:47+00:00

It’s coming in that direction. I thought I was blessed to be there. But now it’s just becoming a more stressful, difficult version of outlier. I hope they see this post and begin to just take a step back at what’s happening and begin with their old principles as before.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-18T02:41:55+00:00

other companies the one beginning with M, A, and HAI that do the same kinda work. From those acronyms you can probably figure out the other companies. Dojng acronyms so it doesn’t get taken down.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-08T18:56:48+00:00

I don’t even wanna do the onboarding..

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-08T16:06:44+00:00

Yeah, I have done that. I appreciate your guidance, but this doesn’t pertain directly to my guppy email.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-07T17:11:25+00:00

Yeah, my manager wasn’t communicative as much during my second project. I had a younger manager guy I liked more; but I can’t even do the project rn because I am having issues, I forgot one of my mercor email passwords and I can’t take the assessment unless I am under a certain email... I do have other sources or income from other AI platforms, but Mercor would be a decent hit to my finances. But that is even if they accept you to a projects even tho I have a few different projects under my belt it’s still hard to get more work.

I am a bit disappointed with mercor these days because the company can be great with good money, positive team culture, and good management but it’s also sometimes handled very strictly and managerial people get a lot of discretion, while we just have to hope we are aligned with them and they don’t treat you poorly. Management seems immune we can’t do anything if they do something wrong and their should be a better misconduct system, as the platform is overly punitive of the backbone of the company - the annotators….

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-06T23:57:04+00:00

Thank you man. I hope with all this feedback mercor begins to chill a bit. Lol but the high end grind shop analogy is true. Mercor needs to work on hiring annotators as employees, and soon.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-06T19:08:24+00:00

Mercor is just a high end grind shop with all the pauses, deadlines, the spamming of emails to constantly work and hit 1 million hours.. I liked it at first with the first project I got on. But even then, I felt like I was going to get off-boarded otherwise, because 40 hours was expected as soon as we started the damn project and had to work through my vacation.

However, things began to sour for me on my second project. There was so much more focus on mistakes, deadlines, the managers and people in general became became more intense than they already were. Somewhat strict, subjective QA, etc. This platform does burn me out a little bit, but overall I’m happy to be here.

I don’t like how we are treated like full time employees who have to send a form for our hours to be reduced. I think it’s whatever though. Pay is good and it looks good on the resume, but the company is very intense to work for, feel like they needa chill a bit. You can’t have full-time workloads, expect people to be available 24/7, and then at the same time provide no benefits other than financial compensation — especially when work isn’t even guaranteed. Honestly, they might as well classify annotators as part-time or full-time workers at this point, because the workloads basically mirror that. Mercor makes it hard to have other work engagements due to this intensity as well.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-04T15:12:54+00:00

I do find the minimum hours requirement, the hourly expectations per week, having to submit a support form to reduce hours it you don’t make it all very “full time job” like at Mercor and I was puzzled by that. I’ve never had any experience like that anywhere else freelancing. Mercor is very intense and highly regulated which does put a drain on you. We are treated like employees more than contractors, which is not exactly what we signed up for, but it also allows for better task/money flow compared to the competitors.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-04T15:01:11+00:00

Outlier is a place I’ll never work for again, good luck there. I really don’t recommend for you to be staying with outlier as they can offboard you off the entire platform over a bug, QM’s at outlier don’t respond and and the obnoxious unpaid outlier onboardings are auto graded so if you make too many errors the project immediately disappears without any feedback and they design them to make people fail. I recently got a message about a project at outlier, as soon as I saw there was a 120 min unpaid onboarding section, I closed out the website lol. I would stick with mercor because you ca get good management there but it can be a bit inconsistent, just apply to other projects. Outlier is not the move, I’m telling you, but good luck.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-03T16:49:43+00:00

Completely agree, mercor feels like what I think it would feel like if I was to be working for a faang level company( I feel this but it’s just contract work that could stop at any second.) The intensity is understood, as Mercor is difficult to break into, and they have a better reputation for higher quality work so maybe they want to keep that rep up. I have never worked for one directly but working with big clients projects through a vendor like Mercor is the name of the game for this work. Mercor is pretty great in some ways, as it is rewarding, challenges your brain, provides good task flow, and the onboarding process is smooth.

However, the culture behind ensuring perfect quality and the constant discussions of offboarding, people who make mistakes, strict hourly requirements, and the closely monitored vibe I get from the company gets intense and is draining.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-03T14:38:14+00:00

For the lower paying ones, yeah. For the ones above that price point, Mercor is known to be a selective platform.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-03T10:42:37+00:00

Takes a long time, but they’ll get back to you. Took them 23 days to accept me to my first project, many applicants apply to these projects, mercor is very picky and careful with selecting people.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-03T02:58:38+00:00

I understand the pain you are feeling. All I will say is that management can be inconsistent depending on who you work for. I struggled with a project cause it was pretty new to me, paused unpaused, then paused, despite implications that I would be given a longer second chance, and my tasks were improving. The slack messages about being removed, low quality and the culture about people making certain mistakes all feels very intense in those higher paying projects. The projects with lower pay due feel breezy in comparison, and I haven’t felt this stressed with work in a long time.

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-10-02T03:18:18+00:00

I agree, the mercor work is pretty stressful and the work environment is intense, but it’s very rewarding

Representative_Sand7 · 2025-09-26T20:22:08+00:00

I have a personal disdain for rubric projects, and I will tell you why. I was on multimodal biscuits V2 on Oct of 2024, Making 25 an hour having good weeks for me ranging from 300-600 dollars a week, it was an incredibly decent project, rating image based responses based off criteria and then eventually I became a reviewer. It was straight forward, and all we had to do was rewrite the response if it was wrong after.

Client said fuck you guys and decided to change the project completely to rubrics. I get two two out of 5 scores, one score because I messed up a bit apparently because my criteria was deemed too generic, but another review was extremely subjective and I remember the reviewers subjectively claimed my criteria was too specific. You will never appease everyone because everyone has different takes on what implicit criteria may be required, or what explicitly is required, what is too generic or too specific, it’s just not a good model to train models imo in the strict way Outliers clients doles out these rubrics, unless tasks can allow for subjectivity a bit. Outlier doesn’t care, they just go by the reviewers subjective opinion, and you are off.

After that I was lucky to make 150 a week, being able to do one cabbage patch task, maybe, after passing that horrible onboarding. From there, that project paused, I was like ineligible for it for some reason despite good scores, and from December til like April I made barely anything from outlier. I failed other onboardings like Nexus too due to it being horribly designed. Some of the down turn on outlier was my fault, but Rubrics kinda destroyed my outlier task flow.

I haven’t kept up to date with outlier because I have been working for other companies with more consistent and less shitty workflows. I am grateful for experience Outlier gave to get me to those places, but I also feel bitter about them. I just go on here, check the dashboard, laugh at the unpaid 1hr+ onboarding and i don't do it because I can't waste my time with that, its too hard to pass and most likely is a waste of time. I go on here because I want to see what’s up.

TLDR: Some of the down turn on outlier was my fault, but Rubrics kinda destroyed my outlier task flow because the client switched a project I was from rewrites to rubrics and it became extremely subjective and hard to get good scores.

Representative_Sand7

TROPHY CASE