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.
Mental tedium is a relative luxury: it's still clean indoor work with a predictable income, and thus far preferable compared to many other options like planting rice (literally backbreaking), working in a factory repeating exactly the same physical motion over and over, scavenging through garbage, etc.
The broader point, though, is while people in the West bemoan outsourcing to poor countries as exploitative etc (and it can be!), even these "shit" jobs can be transformational. BPO has propelled literally millions of people into the middle class in both India and the Philippines.
Yeah, I mean I sort of get it. But if I really had to choose between the mental tedium of labeling data (which I end up doing quite a bit of myself) vs. backbreaking outdoor work, or something like repetitive food service prep... I’d pick the latter every single time.
At least for me, data labeling is just brutally mind numbing and draining.
> But if I really had to choose between the mental tedium of labeling data (which I end up doing quite a bit of myself) vs. backbreaking outdoor work, or something like repetitive food service prep... I’d pick the latter every single time.
In developing countries, status is an important element which people in developed nations may not think about. For example, how many derogative terms can you rattle off for people who labor in the heat of the sun all day? In the U.S. we have "redneck." There are worse terms for people of other races and nationalities in the region. In the U.S. these terms are a bad joke, in the Philippines, this is life. In the Philippines, skin whitening products are a big seller because dark skin is associated with the poor and laborers (the "Mestizo" has light skin which traces back to relatively well off Spanish heritage.)
You might choose outdoor work, but you have to understand the culture to understand why their choices might be different than yours.
Interestingly, in the US the skin color status has switched when most jobs went indoors (both white and blue color work). Tanning became a status for people with lots of leisure time.
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... 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.
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 -`.
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 :-)
I heard a talk by Edward James Olmos in which he made the point that if US companies think of themselves as socially responsible then they should pay non-US workers the same wage as they pay their US workers.
Given that all of Scale's open positions, and current FT employees presumably, are in San Francisco (and not remote), a pessimistic view would be that the data labelers are subsidizing Scale's lifestyle choices.
One interesting side to this is citizen science; websites like Zooniverse where you can get random members of the public to do your labelling. Technically there's little difference to what Scale does, just that it might be pictures of Pelicans or galaxies rather than cars on the road. In my experience what you're paying for with Scale is consistency. Zooniverse relies on the public being... Gaussian in quality - we needed something like twenty annotations per image I think.
People spend hours going through data and they don't get paid. On Zooniverse most of the data is boring, but the fun is the prospect of finding an unusual image. Some of the datasets are genuinely interesting (like the old ship logs). Many people say they enjoy the idea that they're contributing to science.
> 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.
I don't want to pass judgement either way, but it's an interesting debate. These jobs have been around forever - data entry, for example, used to be (still is?) a fairly common unskilled job in first world countries. And tedium aside, you can at least work from home if you have a computer.
But where is the line? A lot of work I've seen on MTurk is transcription, for example. What about translation/subtitling services? These are labelling tasks in some way or another.
Are you saying that the tedium itself is engineered to be present? I mean, the work is definitely not pointless. It is as pointed as it gets, as significant as a miner in a mine, a farmer in the field. Monotonous, tedious, yes. Pointless? No.
Now, the idea that the tedium is engineered in would be interesting. That would suggest it could be engineered out. Which is very interesting. You solve that problem, I submit there are some HR folks who would like your contact info.
No I don’t it’s intentional. I suppose I should have written “pointless, tedious” instead.
I’m not sure how I would compare it to traditional blue collar low skilled labor jobs. Farm hand work, for instance, in addition to being physically difficult, is also surprisingly tedious contrary to what some people may imagine. But I think it is easier to understand why it is important work. If you don’t pick the berries, the berries die and nobody gets to eat them. If you’re a machine learning data labeler, you may believe that it’s creating a path to super intelligent computers. Or you may believe it’s a big waste of time. My acquaintances who did Alexa data labeling tended to lean towards the latter.
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.