
Life of a Data Labeler - ayw
https://scale.ai/blog/positive-externalities
======
b_tterc_p
I know nothing about this particular company. I also see no reason to assume
it’s particularly bad (it could very well be above average). But I do see a
lot of data around company engagement. There’s basically no chance this level
of positivity is ubiquitous for them, especially when the target workforce
appears to be people otherwise below the poverty line.

Although pointless tedium is not the most important factor in rating a job, I
think data labeling could well be along the most pointlessly tedious jobs ever
created.

~~~
cardigan
I'm a software engineer at Scale and the author of this blog post.

Let's talk about Venezuela for a second. ~75% of the population lost >19lb in
body weight in a year according to this survey:
[https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-
News/2017/02/19/Venezuela...](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-
News/2017/02/19/Venezuela-75-of-population-lost-19-pounds-amid-
crisis/2441487523377/) It's unbelievable that we haven't figured out how to
prevent people from living like that in the 21st century. I think it's totally
deplorable and honestly an affront to humanity.

You know what I think the most effective way to combat large scale poverty is?
Not by working for an aid agency (we've all heard the horror stories) -
instead, how about making those people economically valuable? The internet is
an amazing way to reach those people - and guess what - Scale is actually
doing that (evidence: these stories). If we continue to grow, we'll be doing
that even more.

To be clear, this isn't the main mission of the company - but I don't see how
anyone could think it isn't a great side effect. Hence the title of the blog
post - positive externalities.

~~~
irjustin
I believe the OP assumed, as a company, Scale means well and that the team is
potentially bringing better wages to people who don't traditionally have it.

The outright dismissal of OP's criticisms/comments doesn't allow for a
discussion in that data entry is a very tedious job along with maybe there are
people who are unhappy with the work but very happy with the pay (which I
think is perfectly okay).

The comment reads as "I'm going to tell you off" with the `- and guess what
-`.

~~~
cardigan
Sorry I should've explicitly said this, but I was responding to just this
part, not the part about the job being tedious:

    
    
      But I do see a lot of data around company engagement. 
      There’s basically no chance this level of positivity is ubiquitous for them
    
    

When a company hires many regular people in a place like Venezuela, why
wouldn't there be ubiquitous positivity? I'm not from the US; I've lived in a
few places with extreme poverty; maybe this is based too much off of personal
experience. i.e, I don't think the data the OP is referring to applies here.
Getting money for basic needs (if you wouldn't have it otherwise) likely
dominates most other concerns, including the work being tedious. From another
comment, it looks like the OP's other experience with labelers is in the US -
where the next best alternatives they can imagine are a lot better - so it
makes sense that those labelers aren't as happy.

I guess what you're asking is - how many of these people find their job
tedious? I will say it's a lot less tedious than you might imagine as a first
impression - e.g, if you see something weird in some data, you talk to other
people about it; if you get good, you train people; when doing a new project,
you're learning from your coworkers; if you get really good, you might be
asked to help develop training materials, etc. So there's a lot of interacting
with other people, and a sense of community. For me personally, I honestly
find it meditative to label a lot of data - it feels kind of like tending to a
large garden, maybe even fulfilling some deep OCD/obsessiveness desire. Some
of our labelers find it meaningful that they're contributing to robotics /
self driving cars - e.g, the last interviewee in the blog post.

Back to your question though - how many of these people find their job
tedious? I'm not sure how to ask the question to them in a way which gives a
satisfactory answer. e.g, I'd expect if we just asked "do you feel like your
work is tedious?" the answer would be dominated by people's realistic
alternatives, and wouldn't have much to do with the job itself. (so we'd get
similarly positive responses) If you can think of a better way to frame that
question, I'm happy to ask it and post the responses here :-)

------
DevKoala
I don’t feel that the pat in the back is necessary when highlighting these
realities of the world economic inequality. The whole article could have been
published without the intense PR focus.

To clarify, there is no hard numbers around the quantity of people performing
this task, for how long they are employed, their average working hours per
day, the median satisfaction rating, the median pay per employee, etc. It
feels as if only some happy examples were picked.

~~~
lopmotr
If they don't like it, why are they doing it? For every rational labeller, it
must be better than every other option available to them. Perhaps you're
saying the workers are irrational and need some outside for to stop them doing
this job? Like it's an unhealthy addiction or is limiting their future
opportunities?

------
xkcd-sucks
It seems present-future "AI" will encode the implicit bias of the global
underclass. Which is interesting

~~~
tastroder
I'm not familiar with the process of this particular company but in general
that's unlikely to have that much impact. While labelling itself might have an
effect, lots of biases happen earlier, namely in the selection of samples to
be labelled in the first place.

If you think about bias in ML models that we've seen in recent years for
example: if you let people label 980 images of old white people and 20 diverse
ones that's still a heavy bias, even if they spot and label the 2% outliers
correctly.

------
lawrenceyan
Similar sort of thing with an autonomous food delivery startup from my
university:

[https://medium.com/kiwicampus/how-kiwi-empowers-students-
in-...](https://medium.com/kiwicampus/how-kiwi-empowers-students-in-colombia-
fe99cf1bbc8d)

------
redstone08
There are many laboratories that hire part-time data labelers to secure their
own verified dataset. In fact, many global companies actually create values
and earn money from their own various datasets. I think the value will be
created from the data itself, less focus on data-processing skills. Of course,
modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would
rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, elastic
search are becoming more and more popular. I personally recommend Metatron
Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen
scientists. Link : [https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-
discovery](https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery)

------
Causality1
"Life of a data labeler" is a wildly inaccurate description for "we asked some
of our labelers for times when working for Scale made a positive difference in
their lives."

What's the median hourly pay for a Scale data labeler? What fraction of their
employees enjoy working for Scale? What's their six month retention rate?
Amazon's Mechanical Turk has a reputation for grinding people up and burning
them out; what makes Scale better?

~~~
biofunsf
Specifics are intentionally hidden, but it seems like the median hourly wage
is somewhere around $1-$2.50 an hour.

The labeler side of scale is hosted at "remotasks.com" and they run IP checks
to try and ensure that only people from certain countries can sign up to label
data. Also a Facebook account is required for signup...

------
UweSchmidt
A similar opportunity (and maybe a step up) would be 'crowd tester'; if a
Dollar or Euro goes a little farther in your country than in the west, then 1€
for a bug reproduction up to 10€ for a major bug could be an attractive
additional income ...

... while of course not providing with a stable regular job, and not
necessarily doing much to strengthen the local economy in a fundamental sense.

------
sars1996
And how am I supposed to know if the attractive, well-educated, contented
folks chosen by this company's PR department are actually representative of
its workforce?

~~~
cardigan
Check out my other comment on this thread. I interviewed these folks and wrote
the blog post (got lots of feedback from friends and design help from our
awesome designers) - I'm a software engineer, not a PR department, lol :P

I tried to pick the answers which were most well written, not the ones which
were most positive/negative. Personally I do think this is representative of
the labelers who've stuck with us, but at this point don't have the energy to
argue this; hopefully my other comment is convincing (i.e, there isn't a high
bar to making people happy when their next best alternative is a lot worse)

------
AFascistWorld
Do they hire them directly or through other platforms? Can't find any info on
their website.

~~~
_1tan
They operate under a different brand:
[https://www.remotasks.com/](https://www.remotasks.com/).

