[DoreenMichele]

I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling conflicts from a second job, additional time taken away from family, etc.

Mechanical Turk generally sucks as a substitute for a regular job, but can make sense as supplemental income, even at nominally very low hourly pay. If you work 8 hours at $10/hour but have a 30 minute commute, you are really getting $80 for 9 hours of your time. That actually puts you below $9/hour to think of it that way.

If you do freelance work, iirc, freelancers chase their pay about 40% of the time. That also drives their real wages down. Plus, there is time involved in getting each assignment.

I have read that you can expect to do one unbillable hour for every billable hour, so you need to charge at least twice as much to make the same wage. Plus, for jobs with benefits, roughly half your compensation can be in the form of benefits.

So freelancers should charge four times as much as the hourly rate they would accept at a salaried job with benefits.

But if you already have benefits and just want to supplement your income, you can accept half as much. If you can eliminate some of the time burden of freelancing, you can halve it again.

Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of time.

[ptero]

Fair enough, but there are risks there, too. Not claiming that it is necessarily the case, but when one has a fixed income job and a variable income one, effort and attention tends to skew to a variable one (you get soame $$ from the other one regardless). So your main job (promotions, etc.) can suffer.

And for a long game one will likely get much further by investing in primary job or developing new skills (teaching math to kids, home improvements, whatever) that gets them out of competing with millions of unskilled, low wage participants in MTurk.

I view MTurk as temporary fix for desperate times only. My 2c.

[ABCLAW]

"Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of time."

No. $2/hr is potentially the same as freelancing at $8/hr under your comparison.

That's completely different. Because no one freelances at $8/hr.

[DoreenMichele]

I don't do Mechanical Turk, but I've worked online for years and had a corporate job previously.

I made about $100/day at my corporate job and at least $20/day went towards costs involved in having the job. I don't have that kind of overhead with the work I do currently.

Freelancers don't charge $8/hour, but it's not at all hard to google up "client from hell" stories where they spent so many hours trying to get their pay that it was only like $2/hour by the time they were done or they didn't get paid at all etc.

I don't really want to argue this. Someone asked a question and I answered it based on first-hand experience making often nominally low hourly pay. And now people are nitpicking my reply, presumably because they've got relatively cushy lives and this type of assessment is alien to their experience.

If you make $100/hr at a salaried position, like a lot of programmers do, you probably don't need to think too hard about "But after my commute, etc, what's my real hourly wage?" If you make a lot less than that and want to survive, you absolutely need to think about "But what am I really making after x, y and z?" And the counterintuitive answer turns out to be that a nominally low hourly rate without a whole lot of unbillable time burden, like a commute or chasing your pay or looking for work, can be far better in real terms than a nominally higher hourly rate with a lot of hidden time burden or other costs.

Something I wrote a while back:

http://writepay.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-value-of-not-chasin...

If your life works just fine, good for you. But there are clearly many people willing to work for Mechanical Turk for nominally low wages. I'm sure every single one of them would love to have a higher hourly wage. I'm just trying to cast a little light on why people do this.

Everyone on HN can sneer at it all they want as stupid and not making sense etc. That doesn't change the fact that lots of people are working for nominally low pay via various online services. At best, it will just discourage me and others like me from bothering to answer questions here about it.

[wccrawford]

No, but there are plenty of people who sell hand-made crafts that end up only getting that much in the end.

The difference (IMO) is that the hand-made crafts are a labor of love, and the M Turk stuff is just labor.

[JamesBarney]

I've only ever freelanced as a developer but you could never charge 4x your billable rate. Good Sr. Devs make ~140k with benefits and there is no way you could charge out at 280/hr without a very sophisticated business model.

I could see how this could be different at lower hourly rates though. Clients are less likely to pay, they are less price sensitive to 16-32$/hr.

[DoreenMichele]

Yeah, I hear that "4x as much" figure a lot but few people seem to actually charge that. Instead, what actually happens for most people is that (for example) they are covered under their spouse's healthcare policy, so they don't need to cover the cost of benefits.

Historically, a full-time job with benefits was designed to be held by a married man who was worth that kind of compensation because he gave his all at work, went home, collapsed into a chair and said "Woman, get me a beer!" and "What's for dinner?" Then he slept like the dead.

Research shows women with children typically cannot give their all to a job like that. They get stuck in Pink Collar jobs that preserve time and energy for the "second shift" of cooking dinner, doing housework, etc. They need to be able to get up in the middle of the night if their kid is sick and so forth.

People are marrying later, having fewer kids and so on. I routinely see comments online about the downsides to that, for example how it's impossible to work full-time and cook from scratch to feed yourself properly as a single person. Cooking for one is too time consuming and labor intensive. Home cooking makes the most sense when one person is cooking for an entire family. This leaves a lot of people living on takeout and the like, which amounts to overpriced junk food in most cases.

Employers need to get enough value out of the transaction to make their business viable. They can't pay a living wage with benefits out of the goodness of their hearts. And we no longer de facto expect the wife's labor in taking care of her man to be a hidden part of the deal for ensuring that the employer gets enough value out of the deal.

I think these social changes are major driving factors in the gig economy trend. It puts the onus on the worker to figure out how to accomplish enough to pay their bills at a price that makes sense to the employer.

And part of the answer is that supplementing your income with low paid, small tasks using scraps of time that you previously could not have used to try to make money helps that equation make sense for both parties.

[GordonS]

> If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks

Surely a better way would be to stop smoking?

[DoreenMichele]

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times. -- Mark Twain

(Also, I don't know where my 3am mental math went wrong, but $5/day is not $180/mo.)