7 ms·

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs

by ptero 7y ago

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just me? This is an honest question.

londons_explore 7y ago
Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  How open are Amazon to this? Ooh, the idea of mTurk is "human powered." OTOH, a market for tasks that can be do e via a combination of automations and humans could be powerful.
  - jwieczorek 7y ago
    Such a combination is what Unbabel does in translation. ML-driven automated translation followed by crowd-sourced human review and corrections. It's a neat idea and could be the future of translation (as opposed to full automation).
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    I would assume that Amazon already does this. If a task is trivial enough for an AI, they would do it themselves and get the posters money before the job gets forwarded to the Turks.
    - dalbasal 7y ago
      Sure, Amazon have all sorts of ml APIs. But a task platform where anyone can complete the tasks using ai, humans or a combination that f both could be substantial impressive. Say you need to look through 20k images and determine if they contain hipsters. There may not be an off-the-shelf hipster detector. Maybe you could make one, or use humans or a combination by training an NN.. etc.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  As someone who regularly purchases work from MTurk, some rando's crumby bot is absolutely not what I'm looking for. We're training our own AI from MTurk responses, and we're sending to MTurk difficult edgecases that our own AI gets wrong.
  - fouc 7y ago
    It's AI turtles all the way down.
blueboo 7y ago
We believe it's insane and dismiss it out of hand because we all realize Mechanical Turk doesn't pay a living wage in the developed world. But I dunno, I feel OK with the premise that this guy reduced his expenses and optimized his career as much as he could. Say you did all that and had a few hours a week you wanted to use to make your household budget a bit healthier...getting paid for some kind of remote work via an automated system that'll accommodate your inconsistent hours has an appeal!
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  Yes, but someone who calls himself a BA should be able to get better return for his time.
  - mruts 7y ago
    He probably can but MTurk is superior because of liquidity and flexibility. There are very few jobs in which value is created and paid for in a span of a minute. By turning dead time into money, generating money in a way you could not for other jobs. And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s probably a, if not good, understandable reason for it.
    - codetrotter 7y ago
      > And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. I agree with everything you said but just wanted to point out that in the comment you responded to, “BA” means “Business Analyst”, whereas in the sentence you wrote that I quoted it seems that you took “BA” to mean “Bachelor of Arts”.
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      > A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s probably a, if not good, understandable reason for it. In this case, presumably a middle-class kid who was fed a line that going to college is the way forward. They were probably decent but not outstanding students who went mostly because that was expected and got a A of Arts degree because the BS degrees are miserable. Motivated folks can make that BA work, but your barista was probably going to end up there with or without a Bachelor's; the BA just means they're promotable, or may be able to break out of that place later.
oflordal 7y ago
If you think it is fun, having a hobby (mturk) that is a small net positive can save you a lot of money compared to having a hobby which is a net loss (most hobbies).
- cies 7y ago
  > If you think it is fun [...] (mturk) If this was generally perceived as fun, then Amazon would charge money for you to "play" mturk. The fact mturk work pays tells me that mturk is pretty much nobody's hobby.
  - phalangion 7y ago
    The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend?
    - cies 7y ago
      > The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. That the pay is fun (or enables fun) does not make the work fun. Here mturk was named a potential "hobby", that's just ridiculous to me. > Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend? You could argue that EVE setup is "work" required to enable some "fun" play. I don't think anyone would consider EVE setup (just the setup) as a hobby.
      - phalangion 7y ago
        Some people's "hobby" is couponing. I doubt they consider the act of digging through papers to find and cut out coupons to be fun, but the act as a whole is. But I guess if you define a hobby strictly as something you do not for pay, you're correct. If you define it more broadly as something you do during non-work time, then it fits.
prepend 7y ago
All the things you mention are not exclusive to MTurk. So he could do those and make a few hundred extra. I view this as passive time where spending a few hours while watching tv, or rocking the baby, or whatnot seems acceptable to some people. Many free to play games have the same attention span requirements and they don’t pay anything.
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  It's not that easy. You do have to pay attention and, if you think you can mindlessly click on anything and get away with it, you're wrong. There are tests and traps to make sure you aren't doing that.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling conflicts from a second job, additional time taken away from family, etc. Mechanical Turk generally sucks as a substitute for a regular job, but can make sense as supplemental income, even at nominally very low hourly pay. If you work 8 hours at $10/hour but have a 30 minute commute, you are really getting $80 for 9 hours of your time. That actually puts you below $9/hour to think of it that way. If you do freelance work, iirc, freelancers chase their pay about 40% of the time. That also drives their real wages down. Plus, there is time involved in getting each assignment. I have read that you can expect to do one unbillable hour for every billable hour, so you need to charge at least twice as much to make the same wage. Plus, for jobs with benefits, roughly half your compensation can be in the form of benefits. So freelancers should charge four times as much as the hourly rate they would accept at a salaried job with benefits. But if you already have benefits and just want to supplement your income, you can accept half as much. If you can eliminate some of the time burden of freelancing, you can halve it again. Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of time.
- ptero 7y ago
  Fair enough, but there are risks there, too. Not claiming that it is necessarily the case, but when one has a fixed income job and a variable income one, effort and attention tends to skew to a variable one (you get soame $$ from the other one regardless). So your main job (promotions, etc.) can suffer. And for a long game one will likely get much further by investing in primary job or developing new skills (teaching math to kids, home improvements, whatever) that gets them out of competing with millions of unskilled, low wage participants in MTurk. I view MTurk as temporary fix for desperate times only. My 2c.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 7y ago
navigatesol 7y ago
>This sounds insane to me. Isn't the entire point of the article that he thought it sounded like a good idea, and turned out that it wasn't? In principle, it's easier than some of the options you list, since any corporate job ("analyst") involves a lot of downtime at your computer.
pavel_lishin 7y ago
> figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise Not sure about other parents, but when we had our baby, I was less ready for additional responsibilities than at any other point in my life.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Never been more drained then after baby-induced insomnia. A couple of low-effort, no-brain mturk forms to make extra diaper money? Great! I'll bust out the laptop while killing time at a kid's soccer practice.
anewguy9000 7y ago
“I’d literally be sitting around bored half the day without it" lol
AcerbicZero 7y ago
The article is more or less an advertisement for the book the "senior business analyst" has written, with a little context thrown on top to make it look legit. If you look at the authors other works, this seems to line up with their style. That might be a little harsh, and perhaps there is no ill-intent here, but the majority of the second half of the article reads like a low-pressure sales pitch to me.

by ptero 7y ago

londons_explore 7y ago

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

dalbasal 7y ago
How open are Amazon to this? Ooh, the idea of mTurk is "human powered." OTOH, a market for tasks that can be do e via a combination of automations and humans could be powerful.
- jwieczorek 7y ago
  Such a combination is what Unbabel does in translation. ML-driven automated translation followed by crowd-sourced human review and corrections. It's a neat idea and could be the future of translation (as opposed to full automation).
- dahfizz 7y ago
  I would assume that Amazon already does this. If a task is trivial enough for an AI, they would do it themselves and get the posters money before the job gets forwarded to the Turks.
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    Sure, Amazon have all sorts of ml APIs. But a task platform where anyone can complete the tasks using ai, humans or a combination that f both could be substantial impressive. Say you need to look through 20k images and determine if they contain hipsters. There may not be an off-the-shelf hipster detector. Maybe you could make one, or use humans or a combination by training an NN.. etc.
brighter2morrow 7y ago
As someone who regularly purchases work from MTurk, some rando's crumby bot is absolutely not what I'm looking for. We're training our own AI from MTurk responses, and we're sending to MTurk difficult edgecases that our own AI gets wrong.
- fouc 7y ago
  It's AI turtles all the way down.

blueboo 7y ago

We believe it's insane and dismiss it out of hand because we all realize Mechanical Turk doesn't pay a living wage in the developed world. But I dunno, I feel OK with the premise that this guy reduced his expenses and optimized his career as much as he could. Say you did all that and had a few hours a week you wanted to use to make your household budget a bit healthier...getting paid for some kind of remote work via an automated system that'll accommodate your inconsistent hours has an appeal!

Ma8ee 7y ago
Yes, but someone who calls himself a BA should be able to get better return for his time.
- mruts 7y ago
  He probably can but MTurk is superior because of liquidity and flexibility. There are very few jobs in which value is created and paid for in a span of a minute. By turning dead time into money, generating money in a way you could not for other jobs. And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s probably a, if not good, understandable reason for it.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    > And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. I agree with everything you said but just wanted to point out that in the comment you responded to, “BA” means “Business Analyst”, whereas in the sentence you wrote that I quoted it seems that you took “BA” to mean “Bachelor of Arts”.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    > A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s probably a, if not good, understandable reason for it. In this case, presumably a middle-class kid who was fed a line that going to college is the way forward. They were probably decent but not outstanding students who went mostly because that was expected and got a A of Arts degree because the BS degrees are miserable. Motivated folks can make that BA work, but your barista was probably going to end up there with or without a Bachelor's; the BA just means they're promotable, or may be able to break out of that place later.

oflordal 7y ago

If you think it is fun, having a hobby (mturk) that is a small net positive can save you a lot of money compared to having a hobby which is a net loss (most hobbies).

cies 7y ago
> If you think it is fun [...] (mturk) If this was generally perceived as fun, then Amazon would charge money for you to "play" mturk. The fact mturk work pays tells me that mturk is pretty much nobody's hobby.
- phalangion 7y ago
  The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend?
  - cies 7y ago
    > The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. That the pay is fun (or enables fun) does not make the work fun. Here mturk was named a potential "hobby", that's just ridiculous to me. > Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend? You could argue that EVE setup is "work" required to enable some "fun" play. I don't think anyone would consider EVE setup (just the setup) as a hobby.
    - phalangion 7y ago
      Some people's "hobby" is couponing. I doubt they consider the act of digging through papers to find and cut out coupons to be fun, but the act as a whole is. But I guess if you define a hobby strictly as something you do not for pay, you're correct. If you define it more broadly as something you do during non-work time, then it fits.

prepend 7y ago

All the things you mention are not exclusive to MTurk. So he could do those and make a few hundred extra. I view this as passive time where spending a few hours while watching tv, or rocking the baby, or whatnot seems acceptable to some people. Many free to play games have the same attention span requirements and they don’t pay anything.

sureaboutthis 7y ago
It's not that easy. You do have to pay attention and, if you think you can mindlessly click on anything and get away with it, you're wrong. There are tests and traps to make sure you aren't doing that.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling conflicts from a second job, additional time taken away from family, etc. Mechanical Turk generally sucks as a substitute for a regular job, but can make sense as supplemental income, even at nominally very low hourly pay. If you work 8 hours at $10/hour but have a 30 minute commute, you are really getting $80 for 9 hours of your time. That actually puts you below $9/hour to think of it that way. If you do freelance work, iirc, freelancers chase their pay about 40% of the time. That also drives their real wages down. Plus, there is time involved in getting each assignment. I have read that you can expect to do one unbillable hour for every billable hour, so you need to charge at least twice as much to make the same wage. Plus, for jobs with benefits, roughly half your compensation can be in the form of benefits. So freelancers should charge four times as much as the hourly rate they would accept at a salaried job with benefits. But if you already have benefits and just want to supplement your income, you can accept half as much. If you can eliminate some of the time burden of freelancing, you can halve it again. Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of time.

ptero 7y ago
Fair enough, but there are risks there, too. Not claiming that it is necessarily the case, but when one has a fixed income job and a variable income one, effort and attention tends to skew to a variable one (you get soame $$ from the other one regardless). So your main job (promotions, etc.) can suffer. And for a long game one will likely get much further by investing in primary job or developing new skills (teaching math to kids, home improvements, whatever) that gets them out of competing with millions of unskilled, low wage participants in MTurk. I view MTurk as temporary fix for desperate times only. My 2c.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
7y ago

navigatesol 7y ago

>This sounds insane to me. Isn't the entire point of the article that he thought it sounded like a good idea, and turned out that it wasn't? In principle, it's easier than some of the options you list, since any corporate job ("analyst") involves a lot of downtime at your computer.

pavel_lishin 7y ago

> figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise Not sure about other parents, but when we had our baby, I was less ready for additional responsibilities than at any other point in my life.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
Never been more drained then after baby-induced insomnia. A couple of low-effort, no-brain mturk forms to make extra diaper money? Great! I'll bust out the laptop while killing time at a kid's soccer practice.

anewguy9000 7y ago

“I’d literally be sitting around bored half the day without it" lol

AcerbicZero 7y ago

The article is more or less an advertisement for the book the "senior business analyst" has written, with a little context thrown on top to make it look legit. If you look at the authors other works, this seems to line up with their style. That might be a little harsh, and perhaps there is no ill-intent here, but the majority of the second half of the article reads like a low-pressure sales pitch to me.