An hour of being a gig economy worker
It’s for an amazing class on crowdsourcing by Prof. Steven Dow at UCSD!
What platform and what kinds of tasks did you perform as part of this assignment?
Amazon Mechanical Turk didn’t work out as they have too long a verification process and Topcoder (my second choice, more or less selected randomly) seemed inappropriate to make a quick buck with most projects paying well but being much more complex than what I noticed on mTurk. Finally, I picked Freelancer and filtered out the task from an assortment of programming and user experience design jobs.
The task I did was marked to be exactly an hour long; most other jobs were longer or part of an extended “project”.
In essence, it was about testing (mostly in terms of design, but also based on actual functioning) a set of related web pages that formed a section of an unpublished site and conveying my critique in the form of responses to a survey.
What hourly wage did you earn?
I could just submit a bid (and ended up doing the task before winning, but only submitted parts as a “preview”) since the task would be assigned only after 5 days. The requester’s specified budget as per the description was $25 and the lowest bid was $20, which I matched. I actually decided to do it for $15, but it turned out that the site would charge a relatively significant $5 as its share, making it effectively the same as the lowest competing bid!
List one or more problems that you ran into while working on tasks for an hour.
Simply put, as I proceeded with the task, I realized that it was not easy to do it as well as I would like within an hour: after completing the first page of the survey, I found that the progress bar was not well implemented (the representation took some playing around to be understood).
Sidebar: uploading a photo to sign up wasn’t something I was too comfortable with. Ultimately, I did it with a real one that was not uploaded elsewhere (I didn’t want anyone to look me up on the web and know my real identity).
Apart from this, there were no noticeable issues that I faced. In general, the survey questions were surprisingly articulate, so the task at hand was pretty easy for anyone with basic analysis skills and design intuition/training. Even finding and zeroing in on the task was easy because of nice filtering options (it took a mere two minutes).
What effects do you think these problems had on the work you submitted?
Since it wasn’t an entirely clerical task (in which case it wouldn’t be really easy to speed things up), I decided to satisfice and put in exactly as much effort as the survey questions demanded and kept any other opinions aside. This addressed the only “problem” with the given task.
What effects do you think these problems have on the “average” worker on this platform?
- This was not a task for unskilled labor, which makes me believe they would respond similarly, maybe even being more efficient than me (since I was a first-time “worker” and coming from an academic background, pay much more attention to the quality of work and finer details).
- If they did it quickly by providing terse replies, they could finish it much faster but risk missing out on show-stopping bugs and being rated lowly (or have their work rejected): I’m not sure what happens as I’ve yet to explore the interface to submit work and get reviewed, which I believe will be apparent only if and when I get selected for the job.
What ideas do you have on how to improve the chosen platform based on your experience?
- I would really like to know how accurately/honestly timed tasks requested by “employers” are as part of a tiered rating system, instead of having to go through reviews (which I didn’t do in the first place, since I liked the task and decided to just go for it). Note that the employer had a perfect 5-star rating.
- Also, signing up anonymously and going through some basic tasks for the purpose of verification would be more acceptable than having to upload a profile picture (a fake one would have been pointless and many of the other bidders had seemingly real photos).
