The new broker type hits for firm sales people ?

Once they start lowering their pay, I leave them alone. Before you know it, you'll be doing it for .03. Be careful

 

Hi, this is Tom Moyer, and I am the requester who puts out the hits you are talking about.

First of all, thank you very much for the kind words. We try to be fair and pay a decent reward for the amount of work we request from Turkers, of course all given the fact that we have to stay in a budget ourselves, especially in these difficult economic times. We always try to remember that there are people behind the computers doing this work, as anonymous as it might seem sometimes. We also try to remember that even though we offer what amounts to a few nickels per hit, well, some people are actually dependent on that work to put food on the table for themselves and their families. There are a lot of laid-off people out there. So, we take this arrangement with you guys very seriously. Not to get too dramatic, but every time I release a batch, I consider the fact that three months down the road, it could be me sitting at home Turking to try to clothe the kids, if I get laid off from my full-time job.

I wanted to respond to/expand upon a couple of points the original poster brought up:

1. We release at least one daily file every work day, usually in the morning, Eastern U.S. time. We ask that Turkers look up broker CRD numbers and correct the data (like names, addresses) etc. that we give them (in other words, fix typos). These hits go for a rate of .15 reward each.

2. Sometimes--and, recently, very often--we release a second file in the afternoon, for again $0.15 each. These files are usually smaller. This second file release is a temporary arrangement, but will last for a couple months at least.

3. Every so often, we release "special" files. Basically someone in our company comes to me and says, "Tom, we need this information, do you think that the Turks can find it for us?" And I say, "I don't know, let's put it out there and we'll see." This was the case for the "find phone numbers for sales people" that the OP mentioned. Since this task seemed to require a lot of work, and Turkers were reporting that they actually had to call companies in some cases to find the info, we offered first fifty cents a hit, and then later seventy-five cents when it became apparent that an extra quarter might be in order, given that some people were spending quite some time on each hit. $0.75 is generous compared to the 1-cent hits that some people release; not so much compared to the $4 per hit jobs that some release. Of course, you can do a $4 hit and it takes forever, making it not worth the time after all, and/or you can spend all that time and then a requester rejects it for some reason you never know. So, we try to be fair in what we offer while at the same time managing to stay solvent on our end.

4. Turkers are sometimes emailing me to ask how they can find the info we are asking for. Unfortunately, we don't know! If we knew, we would do this ourselves! We have some ideas based on what Turkers have told us in the past, but we don't make a point of recording this information. It suits us just to put the work out there and have you Turks figure it out for us. So far this arrangement has worked well for us, and, hopefully, for the Turkers as well. So, this is why when asked, I typically direct the questioner to ask other veteran Turkers of our hits for tips. They are much more expert than we are!

5. At least fifteen minutes before I release any batch of hits, I email my distribution list of Turkers to inform them that a release is imminent. If you'd like to sign up for this list, please email me at t.moyer6@gmail.com , and I will add you. I try to give as much head's up as possible.

6. Just in case you're curious, for each of our "records" that we need looked up, we actually release it 3 times (3 "assignments"), so three different Turks look up the same information for each piece of information. This way, when we get the results back, if all three searches match, we know it's probably correct. If all three return different results, we know we have a problem.

7. We don't review each and every file to make sure people aren't trying to rip us off, but we do review the files frequently, enough so that if someone is trying to make a habit of ripping us off by entering bad info, they will be caught relatively quickly, and we ban them. We've only had to do this maybe four or five times in the past four months or so.

8. If you can't see our hits, it's probably because we require that a Turker have a 95% approval rating before they can see them.

9. The daily files are set to auto-approve after one day, in case we don't get to them before then.

10. In order to stay in touch with what it's like to be a worker, I have a separate account that I log into sometimes and perform other requesters' hits, now and then. I bought myself a nice insulated hoodie (via Amazon) with the hits I did! I gotta tell you, I sure am proud of that hoodie, 'cause I worked my &*# off for it.

That's all for now. Again, thank you to all who work on our hits! And good day to everyone else.

-tm

 

So what do you do in that case? Reject all 3 of them or approve all of them? Or do you verify the info and then approve the correct one, rejecting the remaining two?

 

"$0.75 is generous compared to the 1-cent hits that some people release; not so much compared to the $4 per hit jobs that some release. Of course, you can do a $4 hit and it takes forever, making it not worth the time after all, and/or you can spend all that time and then a requester rejects it for some reason you never know. So, we try to be fair in what we offer while at the same time managing to stay solvent on our end."


With due respect, I understand that the economy is going through a bad phase making it important to save money. I have not worked on your hits, but will surely check them out. I wish to tell you that I regularly work on $4 hits, and if I am writing an article on something with which I am familiar, than I can complete it within 30 minutes. That makes my hourly rate at $8.

If a requestor rejects my work, I communicate with him/her and try to understand the reason behind the rejection. If I have made a mistake, I deserve that rejection, if not I try to communicate with the requestor and explain my point.

I have had unfair rejections at times, but the requestors have been great at correcting their mistakes and paying me my reward through bonuses. I just wish to draw attention to these facts. Nothing personal, but these are some facts.

 

We approve them all, and they go into a storage place where we can review them later. Some of these hits can be ambiguous, and a person can make a fair attempt at getting good information but ultimately be in disagreement with the other two Turkers working on that hit.

The only time we formally reject hits is when a worker gives us nonsense information--like, for instance, putting in "JJJKKKKKKJJJJJ" for a name or phone number or whatever. And even then, what has happened in those cases is that that worker typically was doing this over and over again, obviously trying to game the system, and so we banned him, nipping the problem in the bud.

Yep. I hear you. Thanks for your thoughts.

 

That's really great, for not all the Requesters do that. I can only wish that we've more Requesters like you.

 

Scammer

Yesterday I was receiving groundless rejects one by one just until he was suspended (my guess). Today he was more sophisticated and approved all remaining pending HITs. Result: 90 approved, 22 rejected with reason a.k.a "didn't provide something he wasn't asked". I recommend YOU DO NOT DO these HITs.