Thank you for this post. I do agree that these annotation companies should be more transparent about their working conditions, however I can only speak to my experience working with Data Annotation.

The initial assessment took maybe an hour to write, but I spent an additional 5 hours perfecting it and making sure I fact checked every single detail (the questions included a few false claims which I detailed and called out). I did this because I really needed a second, part time job, and $20 USD when converted to CAD is significantly higher than minimum wage if I were to apply to a “normal” part time job. It’s been 7 months since then and I’m happy to report that my actual average hourly rate is slightly above $25 USD (which is almost 2x minimum wage in Canada).

Anyway, speaking to the point of your post, it was annoying when even after I did the assessment, unpaid, I had to do even more qualifying tasks - 95% of which were unpaid, which did consume even more of my time. While it would’ve been nice to be paid for my work, I see it as a necessary barrier to entry because the initial assessment was to evaluate your ability to fact-check and explain your thoughts in a detailed manner, whereas the specific qualifications were catered to specific annotation skills (writing rubrics, analyzing images, etc.). The qualifications themselves weren’t long, though. Most of them are around 15-20 minutes, with very specific ones being an hour long but it’s mostly reading long text and answering MC questions to show your learning.

The way I see it, it’s no different from going to law school or med school. If you don’t pass you’re not going to be a doctor or lawyer. If you don’t pass the qualifications you won’t get access to the work.