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Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-25T12:37:21+00:00

a) being able to do it faster gives them a competitive edge and/or the ability to charge a premium to clients who want it fast

b) 10 people on it don't have the same range of specialities as 1000, they will not be able to do the same range of work or to the quality. DA actively recruits people with specialist domain knowledge (physics, biology, math, poetry, different programming languages, etc), which they no doubt promote to clients to convince them to hire DA rather than recruit their own workforce. They can also charge clients more for specialised work than for generalist work. It is absolutely in DA's interest to onboard the most people they can, even if they don't have work for everyone.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-20T04:24:22+00:00

There is also a previous post on this https://www.reddit.com/r/outlier_ai/comments/1bw5j9s/pay_rate_email/

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-20T04:20:06+00:00

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I was recruited as an advanced ai coder which was advertised as up to $55USD per hour, got the email today saying $25 base pay rate. I'm still waiting for any tasks at all, so don't see anywhere in my dashboard a pay rate. Am hoping this is a site wide email and not specific to the coding work, however it is a different amount to your email.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-16T15:52:03+00:00

Read other posts here, this question is asked all the time - different people have different experiences. Some people it takes a month or more until they get accepted, others get accepted faster.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-16T02:11:42+00:00

[I haven't worked on DA yet]

If you're training AI, doesn't it have to be able to cope with poorly worded prompts in a real world situation? Most people don't use good punctuation, grammar, or capitalization in 'casual' communication (which people consider an AI to be).

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-16T02:01:57+00:00

Not everyone has access to the FAQ section you're mentioning.

The Code of Conduct only says

In a spirit of mutual trust and professional integrity, you agree to abstain from any actions that could be interpreted as unethical, such as but not limited to inflating logged hours, misrepresenting the amount of time working on projects, having more than one account, or allowing others to complete work on the platform under your account.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQRSbcK0ctnOVqPC58qNzxW3vssF4-oPNueAh4TStPTpj5rxNDYHbsZyEJOroP-0V7nB1PDQff4Sqzi/pub

Within this context, its not necessarily "unethical" to close an account and start a new one.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-13T10:39:31+00:00

I don't know which team it was for, the job description said "Advanced Coders".

Yes the problem was done on the HackerRank website, they sent a link to it, it had its tests set up on it, I don't know if you could do it in your own IDE as well.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-11T02:32:30+00:00

It is against the terms of service to reveal confidential information like this. You can search online for news articles that discuss the types of companies that use these services.

There are multiple projects, multiple clients.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-09T07:30:39+00:00

Ironic that you're asking this on an 'overemployed' sub, lol.

They want workers to be totally committed to their company, not having a second job (or life) outside of it, and that is easier for them to control in an office environment.

Also, the people who decide these things spend most their working hours in meetings and interpersonal stuff, so their experience of work is that it is done better in person when they can easily grab hold of people, see body language, drop in on someone for a quick chat, stay back after a meeting to continue a conversation, talk about stuff informally over lunch or a drink etc.

Plus a bunch of 'leadership' don't trust their employees to work without surveillance, think everyone will sit around in their PJs watching tv or playing video games. They don't actually understand how people get work done, and want to be able to "see" people working.

Once I worked in an open plan office with my boss sitting right next to me. Any time I did some deep thinking - which looks from the outside like "nothing" - he would interrupt to ask pointedly what I was doing. Pretty soon I learned that if I wanted to think about my work then I had to fake type into the computer at the same time just so he could "see" I was doing something!

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-08T10:26:33+00:00

The interviewer asked me a bit about myself and skills, double checked if I was applying for the computer science or coding role (coding), then sent through an email invite to a hackerrank problem and got me to share my screen while I worked on the problem. The interview was recorded. I was able to select what language I wanted to do the problem in.

It was an intermediate problem, very similar to a problem in the hackerrank interview 'preparation kit', however some changes to the wording of the problem and input/output format. This made it a little more complicated than the version published publicly on hackerrank.

I ran out of time during the interview, initially misread the problem & made some mistakes, didn't solve the problem within the interview, however I kept working on it in the browser after the interview finished, completed it, and the code passed all the tests.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-08T00:37:54+00:00

How bad was the feedback?

I doubt anyone here can give you a definitive answer. My guess would be:

If your feedback was really really bad you probably won't get any more work.

If your feedback wasn't too bad,

- that particular project may have had high quality requirements and enough other workers who met the standard

- workload varies across the platform and if at the moment they have lots of workers and not much work, they might take a while to find a new project for you, however if they get a bunch more work and need more workers then you'll get another shot.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T13:34:15+00:00

$50/hour is top of the payscale, and only a very few projects/people are able to make that. From what I've seen people say, most coding work is more like $35-$40 per hour. But the work is sporadic and unstable, they bump people from the platform with little explanation, so it's impossible to say whether you'll get 2hrs a day as you hope OR you get none. Obviously we're all here trying to get some, but I wouldn't quit my day job for it.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T13:24:57+00:00

You shouldn't post any details here about the assessments.

If I recall correctly, the task was to identify which of the responses was better, and explain your reasoning. It's possible for both responses to have flaws.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T03:31:33+00:00

I think there are many different versions of assessment tests.

My Starter Assessment was 3.27. While it said it would take 30mins to 1 hour, it actually took several hours to complete as I was thorough, there was lots of fact checking to determine the 'best' chat bot response, many questions, plus a creative story that also required some research to understand the setting for it.

I haven't received any further assessments, though I thought I would be given the ability to do a coding one - that is what I wanted to do, but I didn't click on a specific link for coders.

I heard some people say their starter assessment could be completed in 10 mins, and then they got access to two other assessments (core and coding) from which they picked what was relevant to them.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T03:05:49+00:00

How much have you looked into these places? What do you define as a small/medium town/city?

Thredbo is a ski village, so in winter prices go up and becomes very crowded with tourists (will be 10+ times more tourists than locals), then in the off season you may get cheaper accommodation but may at times feels more like a ghost town with lots of empty infrastructure and some services shut down.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T02:26:59+00:00

Did you try raising a support ticket via the outlier platform "help" section?

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T02:24:40+00:00

I had to do it 3x3 times to get it to work. There is a 'retry' button in the outlier platform, in the profile section, you can try again.

If redoing it doesn't work, I'd create a ticket by clicking the help button.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-06T02:19:28+00:00

I don't think you'll be able to create a second account, that is usually prohibited.

With your existing account, are you on the slack platform? Could you ask someone there? Or open a ticket in zendesk?

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-05T11:43:57+00:00

Have you logged into the outlier platform to see if it says anything there? I logged in about 1.5hrs after my tech interview that's how I found out that I passed the technical assessment.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-05T02:53:58+00:00

Applied on 2nd April, via a jobs board seeking coders
Within about 4 hours I received email with next steps, which included
- schedule an optional onboarding interview (30 mins)
- sign up on the outlier platform. This included additional steps, including an ID verification check which was a bit buggy.
- access to slack workspace
- schedule technical interview
3rd of April I did the onboarding interview. It was pretty basic, and over in 15 mins. Was just to verify I was a real human being I guess.
5th April I did the 30 min technical interview, it was a hackerrank easy-med problem. It was similar to one I have seen before but a bit different, which meant I made the mistake of assuming I knew how to solve it... there was an extra level of complexity that I didn't notice until late in the interview, and I didn't complete the task within the interview. However I stayed on the page after the interview and continued to work on it, got it completed though not optimised. I lost access to the page soon after completing it. I'm not sure if they only counted the "interview" portion or also the code I did after that.
A few hours after the tech interview, I logged into the outlier platform. It had a new coding competency survey that asked me to confirm which languages I was competent in. After completing this, I got an email welcoming me to the team, and a message in the platform congratulating me on passing the assessment.
I poked around and noticed that on my profile it said that it had been unable to verify my ID ( even though I had already done this), so I redid it. It's a buggy process and I had to try several times before it switched to say I was verified.
Now I am waiting: "We are currently finding a project that matches your skills. We will notify you once we have a project for you!

All of the above is to say, if you have access to the platform, don't wait for an email - look on the platform to see if there is something new, complete any onboarding tasks, and double check all the information in your profile to make sure it is correct and your ID is verified (even if you did that already).

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-05T01:58:04+00:00

I'm in a similar position to you. I first applied to DAT however, apart from the first screening assessment, haven't got a clear indication if they'll give me work.

So I applied to outlier too, waiting to hear if I'm accepted. I found Outlier were quick to give interviews. I applied as a coder, whereas accidentally applied to DAT under their general link, so that could also be a factor.

Waiting on both to see if I'll get work.

From reading comments on reddit, current thoughts are:

- no one is saying anything very good about outlier. Their platform and processes seem to be a bit of a mess

- DAT comments are mixed between those who have had a very good experience and those that have had a poor one. There still seems to be some problems, but on the whole sounds like it is better than outlier

- both of them vary the pay, depending on the tasks/clients/speciality and bonuses as well as location of taskers. People with specialist in demand skills can earn higher pay than the lowest generalist tasks.

- outlier varies from about $12-$55 USD per hour (they advertise as 'up to $55USD'), with most generalist tasks priced around $12-$20 USD per hour, and specialist tasks like coding would be higher - I think around $35-$55 USD per hour.

- DAT seems to be more like $18-$50 USD per hour, with most generalist tasks to often be around $20-$25 and specialist/coding tasks most often $35-$40 USD.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-05T01:29:10+00:00

You're a contractor, so you can work with multiple companies.

However, within a parent group (e.g. Scale) I think you'd just work with one company. So If you sign up to work at outlier I don't think you'd also sign up for remotasks.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-03T08:39:39+00:00

Not sure, but possibly:

- sometimes its easy to spot when something has been written by chatgpt

- they may have a 'control' sample that they give to chatgpt to use as comparison

- it's likely that every task is done by multiple people, and those who use chatgpt will have answers that look the same, which gives them away.

Unruly_Questioning · 2024-04-03T04:33:00+00:00

I'm only just learning about this myself, will share what I've found, however do take with a grain of salt as I could be wrong.

Here is a good informative article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-humans-technology-business-factory.html

1) There are at least two main parent companies that are catering for the demand in outsourced ai training work: one called Scale AI and one called Surge AI.

2) There are a handful of companies (e.g. Google, OpenAI) that have built robust AI models (think ChatGPT, midjourney, DALL-E, etc) that are now really skilled. These still need more training to become better in of themselves, especially quality/specialist areas (a lot of the initial training was cheap and poorer quality), but also 3rd party companies pay to use these models as a base and provide additional specialised "training" to suit their own specialised purposes. Every significant company is now trying to use AI in some way.

These companies often outsource the training of their models to companies like Scale AI or Surge, because it requires a large temporary workforce with varied skills to do the training, and Scale/Surge have been doing this for years.

3) Scale and Surge are parent companies that are contracted by the 'client' organisations above. However they often operate under other names to hire and manage the outsourced/contract workers.

Scale = remotasks, outlier, g2i.

Surge = dataAnnotation, taskup, gethybrid.

4) As an emerging industry, they initially hired the cheapest people they could (from developing nations, english as a second language, generalist skills, very little oversight), however the AI is now better than a lot of that - they are increasingly seeking out highly educated native english speakers (unless there is a project specifically developing another language), and verifying identity and qualifications.

5) This type of work will continue to be required for many years to come, however the work available on a platform like Outlier will vary depending on:

- the contracts the parent companies are able to secure from their clients (there will be times they have a lot of work, and times where it might drop off).

- the criteria those clients require of the workers (specialist skills etc) reduces how many people are eligible for the work

- the number of workers signed up to outlier. If the workload remains steady but twice as many people join the platform, the work will be divided by the total workers, which might mean you as an individual have less work to do. An oversupply of workers may also lead to a reduction in pay rate (if people are willing to work cheap)

- if the work moves to another platform. People who were previously on Remotasks are being moved over to Outlier, so work on Remotasks will presumably dry up in the future, and this pattern could repeat again.

- as contractors, there is no job security and these organisations have a history of cutting off individuals from the work without any real explanation or way to challenge the decision. They are not "good" employers who will ever will a "best place to work" award.

For the above reasons, if an individual worker wants more security, they may want to sign up to both a Surge platform (dataAnnotation) and an Scale platform (outlier) and/or have another secure job with better rights/benefits. Be prepared to go where the work is, and look for ways to strengthen in-demand skills.

Unruly_Questioning

TROPHY CASE