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Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.
I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.
So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.
Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.
It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.
The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.
The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.
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Do some Kaggle (or maybe Topcoder if they still have good DS comps?) and call yourself a data scientist, start sending out resumes -- you've already got a PhD (from a Western university?) and published papers, so you are honestly probably a better hire than at least half of the candidate pool that I've seen.
Lack of direct experience might have you applying to moderately lowend DS jobs -- but that would be in the $100-130K USD range rather than $40/hr and scammy (again assuming you are in the US) and WFH is still common.
If your medium sized town is south of the Mason-Dixon line and you don't mind occasional travel I might even be interested -- I need to hire somebody in the next couple of months. Feel free to send a PM.
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If you’re smart enough to get a math PhD then you’re smart enough to code. Might take some time but you can do it if you want.
That’s… the majority of what awaits you outside of academia. Especially if you’re restricting yourself to opportunities of the form “trading my STEM skills for financial compensation received at regular, reliable intervals”. Are you sure you want to leave academia? The grass ain’t always greener.
There are always people on LessWrong from bespoke AI research institutes posting about their work and sometimes even advertising open positions, maybe you could explore something like that? (They tend to recruit from within their own social circles but it’s worth looking into…)
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No, run. Treat those “opportunities” as lava. They’re but rebranded and/or higher class Mechanical Turk.
Know Your Worth is a cliche, but for a PhD in Math, $40 an hour is an insult. For an hourly position with no benefits, it should be deep into three figures an hour before a conversation even begins.
I and many of my acquaintances get regularly hit up with Exciting! AI! Opportunities! From LinkedIn-and-the-like thots—or excuse me—professional women with photos where they feel most confident to best position themselves for marketing purposes.
We used to chuckle at them like “hot girls in your zip code,” but we don’t anymore given the lack of novelty.
How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.
And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.
I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.
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