8 ms·

When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate

When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing of jobs (hits.) Bot would only accept jobs that fit my specified time/money ratio, or known hits that paid well and predictably. Having the experience of using these "gig" side jobs I don't think there's anything wrong with people automating them to make the work less miserable and more lucrative. Frankly, anything but the best paying jobs cost more to do per hour than a federal minimum wage job. Thanks to automation I made around $16/hour (and I also had to pay taxes on that so it wasn't even that good!) Don't hate the player, hate the game. And the game here is cutthroat and designed to exploit 1099 workers for below market labor cost.

tesmar2 6y ago
If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost. Cue the obligatory pedantic HN Econ 101 analysis. Actually, most interviews with Turks say the payment is less important than being able to do hits between classes, or without any commuting. Also, some workloads are done on Turk as carefully planned statistical trials, which cannot easily be done offline. So, nothing to do with HN Econ 101 today. Class is out.
- MichaelGlass 6y ago
  "below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?) e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheating-on-social-securityfica-taxes/#5289694a3ce4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#4e9896de720b https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.
    - brorfred 6y ago
      Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.
      - black_puppydog 6y ago
        Yeah, I never understood how "free everything" advocates tend to be so much against the freedom of the individual to refer decisions/actions to a collective when that happens to be the better course of action.
        D895n9o33436N42 6y ago
        “Free market” isn’t “free everything”. In a free market the bid-ask spread is king. It’s just another kind of tyranny, which, like all such things, benefits those who are set up to take advantage of it, and leaves most others in the dust.
        floor2 6y ago
        Maybe your lack of understanding is because you're arguing against an imaginary straw man? A group forming a collective and negotiating as such fits perfectly fine with free market ideals. This exists in many forms that all manner of libertarian, free-market, whatever label people are OK with. When that group uses violence, threats and coercion to their benefit is where people object. Examples - blocking an employer from hiring non-union employees, harming or threatening to harm workers during a strike, forcing people to join a union to get/keep a job, preventing new workers or new firms from entering the market through regulation, etc. If you want to say "You can hire these 20 union workers at a rate of $$$, we all stand together" that's fine. When you say "You need to hire these 20 union workers, and if you don't, we'll surround your business and threaten, harass and intimidate the people you hire instead" is where you've jumped into violence and extortion rather than free market negotiation.
nuker 6y ago
> .. I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing .. So it is not bots, it is your own customers, that know how to code. You should not fight your own customers, right? Coding skills in this century is like reading skills in previous one.
- simsla 6y ago
  Sometimes you should. Apart from it being zero-sum and this depriving other people of opportunity, with some of these services there's a promise of "starting fulfillment" upon acceptance. This is voided when a bot picks it up. Real life example: I ordered an Uber, which was accepted by a "driver" just two streets down. Except the car still hadn't started moving 10 minutes later. So I walked over, and the GPS signal seemed to be coming from a parked car, no driver in sight. Messaged and called the driver, but no response, even 20 minutes after acceptance. Had to contact Uber to get the cancellation fee back.

tesmar2 6y ago

If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.

redis_mlc 6y ago
> If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost. Cue the obligatory pedantic HN Econ 101 analysis. Actually, most interviews with Turks say the payment is less important than being able to do hits between classes, or without any commuting. Also, some workloads are done on Turk as carefully planned statistical trials, which cannot easily be done offline. So, nothing to do with HN Econ 101 today. Class is out.
MichaelGlass 6y ago
"below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?) e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheating-on-social-securityfica-taxes/#5289694a3ce4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#4e9896de720b https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.
  - brorfred 6y ago
    Free market idealists also tend to be very against the natural way for workers to consolidate and leverage negotiation power: trade unions.
    - black_puppydog 6y ago
      Yeah, I never understood how "free everything" advocates tend to be so much against the freedom of the individual to refer decisions/actions to a collective when that happens to be the better course of action.
      - D895n9o33436N42 6y ago
        “Free market” isn’t “free everything”. In a free market the bid-ask spread is king. It’s just another kind of tyranny, which, like all such things, benefits those who are set up to take advantage of it, and leaves most others in the dust.
      - floor2 6y ago
        Maybe your lack of understanding is because you're arguing against an imaginary straw man? A group forming a collective and negotiating as such fits perfectly fine with free market ideals. This exists in many forms that all manner of libertarian, free-market, whatever label people are OK with. When that group uses violence, threats and coercion to their benefit is where people object. Examples - blocking an employer from hiring non-union employees, harming or threatening to harm workers during a strike, forcing people to join a union to get/keep a job, preventing new workers or new firms from entering the market through regulation, etc. If you want to say "You can hire these 20 union workers at a rate of $$$, we all stand together" that's fine. When you say "You need to hire these 20 union workers, and if you don't, we'll surround your business and threaten, harass and intimidate the people you hire instead" is where you've jumped into violence and extortion rather than free market negotiation.

nuker 6y ago

> .. I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing .. So it is not bots, it is your own customers, that know how to code. You should not fight your own customers, right? Coding skills in this century is like reading skills in previous one.

simsla 6y ago
Sometimes you should. Apart from it being zero-sum and this depriving other people of opportunity, with some of these services there's a promise of "starting fulfillment" upon acceptance. This is voided when a bot picks it up. Real life example: I ordered an Uber, which was accepted by a "driver" just two streets down. Except the car still hadn't started moving 10 minutes later. So I walked over, and the GPS signal seemed to be coming from a parked car, no driver in sight. Messaged and called the driver, but no response, even 20 minutes after acceptance. Had to contact Uber to get the cancellation fee back.