
The secret lives of Google raters - james_pm
https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of-google-raters/
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croon
Cliff notes:

* Google raters are subcontractors for contracting companies, among which one is Leapforce.

* Google flaunts new contract requiring takers to use employees instead of subcontractors.

* Leapforce decides to employ raters, but at much reduced salaries and no benefits.

* Raters who work mostly from home are the losers in the equation, and have a hard time finding other work.

This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less
security, less employee power.

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kartan
> This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay,
> less security, less employee power.

The gig economy is just a big scam on taxpayers shoulders. Companies get the
benefit of low paid workers and low or not-at-all taxes. And the rest of the
society has to pay the burden of increasing poverty. It is a kind of Tragedy
of the Commons, one rips the benefit while the whole pays the cost.

It is fueled by the mentality of "at least they have a job". Having a job is
not a goal in itself, the goal is that people are able to support themselves
in a reasonable way. Having a job is a means to that end. People will be
better with a Basic Income, waiting for a better opportunity that brings more
value to them and to society. Once you land on a low paid, a-lot-of-hours job
it is hard to get out of it. And companies that depend on this kind of jobs
are inefficient and have no incentive to do things better.

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james_pm
The remote work aspect makes it even easier to lose sight of the human doing
the work. Once they are just another resource in the dashboard like an AWS
instance, some system somewhere can spool more up when you need them, cut them
loose when you don't.

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eru
That was the whole advertisement pitch of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, wasn't it?

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hopfog
I used to work as a rater through Lionbridge back in the EWOQ days and I
honestly have nothing bad to say about it. The pay was quite good and it was
all remote work where I set my own hours. I never had a problem with not being
a "real Googler". I always saw it as working for Lionbridge, not Google.

Granted, I was in the privileged position of only having it as a side income
while studying so I never expected any job security to begin with. In that
context it was great though.

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zhte415
Google outsource work to shoddy companies then? And bask in glory of $item

Mechanical Turks exist across industry. From a governance perspective, that
manual processes exist is a huge problem for control of operational risk, but
when outsourced to a service provider, who knows? This is where strong
policies need to exist.

Example (a system I was to come to hear of): Outsourced signature recognition
system. Three years paying a team of 5 developers that created nothing (that
worked even coherently). Manager announced system successful, with XUZ
maintenance costs for database, etc. These maintenance costs were 6 people on
24 hour staggered shifts looking at scanned copies/images of signatures in
(near) real-time. Ideal solution didn't exist, so use management skill and
create a budget that covers this up. Indeed, this is fraud, but 'back in the
day' apparently; probably less than 8 years ago.

Only after 'working' effectively for 4+ years was this discovered via internal
audit.

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ksk
I'm no fan of Google, but I don't agree with the idea that Google is obligated
to have them as employees. If anything, it just shows the BS of the whole AI
narrative that a lot of startups (also non startups like MS/FB/Google) have
been trying to push.

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sunshiney
If you study how Leapforce interacts with or what they require of their
subcontractors and compare to the Labor & Industry definition of business
owner/independent contractor, you would see that they are abusing the
definition. Leapforce subcontractors are employees.

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ksk
I agree that Leapforce is responsible, I just don't get how Google is as well.

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dignick
It seems that where companies are outsourcing jobs with a 'gig economy' model,
they know these jobs will be automated in the near future and want to be able
to easily replace humans with computers. Amazon has the same setup with
delivery drivers here in the UK. If they expected these jobs to be long term,
they would invest in them in-house.

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gnicholas
Sounds like the cost/benefit will change dramatically for many raters. The
fixed costs for existing raters include "a few hours a week" of ongoing
training. Under the old system, this time cost was amortized over up to 40
hours of paid work. Now that only 26 hours will be allowed, many existing
raters may rationally decide that the unpaid training is too big a drag on
their maximum wages.

The fixed costs are even greater for people who are not currently raters. The
amount of time it takes to pass the entrance exams (based on the 160-page
manual) will now have to be recouped with about half as many paid hours per
week.

This will have the same effect on new rater signup that plummeting gas prices
have on hybrid vehicle sales.

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ChoGGi
That's a little disappointing, I was hoping for an article about how rat
catchers were dealing with the unique issues of Google data centres (or some
such).

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lapsock
Leapforce's exam is not hard to pass at all. At least it wasn't when I worked
for them back in 2010 as an 18 year old with English as a second language.

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dsfyu404ed
What was the nature of the exam?

The reason that the people that one rater's referred didn't pass might simply
be a cultural difference between the rater's locale and the locale of whoever
designed the "right" answers.

For example, if you assume the test was written by people in SV it would not
be a stretch to imagine a bunch of people failing because they (for example)
failed to flag content that included the confederate battle flag as offensive.

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groby_b
And they should fail. Promotion of slavery is offensive.

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dsfyu404ed
But it may not be considered direct "promotion of slavery" in a particular
locale and/or may be subtle enough within the thing matter being examined as
not to flip the bit from acceptable to offensive.

