[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... 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 :-)

[itronitron]

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.