Mechanical Turk – Is it for you?

this week’s Tech Tip is about the Amazon website,Mechanical Turk. Basically, Mechanical Turk is a website that offers to pay a fixed amount for a specific job (HIT) done.

To highlight some of the main pros and cons of the website, I’d like to present this week’s Tip in the form of a story.

7:00 AM. The city. The alarms blares and you reach to hit the snooze button, but you think better of it. It’s your first week on the new job; true it doesn’t pay much, but it’s work, and you’re just happy to have it. So you drag yourself out of bed and get ready for the day. While riding a bus to work you think about the day ahead, wondering what kind of assignment that you have today. Will it be verifying search results?Looking up veterinarian addresses? Or perhaps correctly categorizing products? True, the work is easy, but it is truly tedious. At least in the city the minimum wage is $9.92 an hour, and today is the day you get your first paycheck!An honest week’s wages for an honest week’s work. You quickly run through the calculations in your head. $9.92 times 40 hours – that should give you about $396. Of course, minus Uncle Sam’s bite, you’ll be left with maybe $300 to work with, but $300 is enough to get groceries, pay the rent and maybe keep the inner-web running. It’s not much, but better than nothing.

You get to work and spend the day verifying the results of various search phrases on Google. Your mind blurs after a while because the work is a bit monotonous – but you keep telling yourself that it’s work – and today’s payday. Around quitting time your boss, Mr. Goldsmith, appears at your cubicle – check in hand. You look up startled since you were expecting maybe someone HR in to be handing out the checks so you fear the worse.

“Um, what can I do for you Mr. Goldsmith?” you nervously ask.

“Um, yeah. How are you doing? I was just here to hand off your paycheck and also to let you know that there are some changes starting next week. ” He states.

Your mouth is dry and you manage to croak out, “Um, changes?”

“Yeah,” and then he goes on to explain, “we’re going to go to a more home-based work model. I believe that you have Internet access on yourlaptop computer at home?” You nod yes that you do, and he goes on, “Good. That makes it easier. What we want you to do is log on from home and perform these jobs from there. We are going to post the work on a third party website. The first time you’re in, you then register as a worker and then you’re set! There’s really not much to it. All the jobs for the day will be there, and as a bonus, there are a lot of other companies like ours that will be posting jobs on that website. But here’s the best part – there’s plenty of work to go around, and you are paid per job, not per hour!It’s a win-win for everyone!The faster you can get the job done, the more you make. ”

“Sounds great,” you reply, and then ask, “um, what’s the website?”

“Why, it’s a terrific website that is actually run by Amazon – you’ve heard of them of course. The actual website is calledMechanical Turk. ”With that, he hands you your paycheck with a note stapled to it giving the website. You also noticed that they are switching you over to an independent contractor, not an employee. Stunned, you get up and leave for home.

It’s the weekend, but you figure that since you are now an independent contractor you may as well get cracking on this new found work. You check out the Turk site and see that it is on the up and up. Plenty of work available and they pay you real money. It is named after a 18th century faked automaton that could supposedly play chess mechanically but really had a person hidden inside. Basically, the site lists many jobs (called HITS) that are easy to do, but require an actual human to do them. You sign up as a worker and also set up an Amazon Payments account (since that is where your pay would go) and then take a look at the HITS that are offered. Some HITS have numerous sub-HITS in them that allow you to keep doing the same simple job over and over until the full number of HITS for that job runs out.

You look at the top of the computer monitor screen and see that there are over 96,000 jobs, er, HITS available and you begin to feel better. You see that your former employer is right there at the top of the list offering the very same job that you did just yesterday morning for minimum wage at the office. The HIT they list has over 4300 HITS (sub-HITS?) available on the simple task of verifying Google search results. For each completed HIT, once it is approved, you’d be getting $0.05. You suddenly worry, since this website is open to workers around the world (though you did notice that only in the U.S. and India will they transfer money to your bank account – everywhere else only allows you to get your money in the form of Amazon gift cards), but then smile as you see that this HIT is only open to people in the U.S.

You roll up your sleeves, crack your knuckles, and get to work. You are fairly competent at this kind of work, so you work steadily for an hour. They do put in a 30-second lock for each HIT, and you find that kind of annoying since it is kind of obvious that some are good results while others are not. But, since they require that at least two of the search results be clicked on, you find that it actually takes a little longer than the 30 second allowance for each hit. In addition, they also toss in a captcha from time to time to be sure that you are not running some kind of script, but are a human really doing the actual work. After an hour, you click over to your account tab, happy at such a good arrangement that the company worked out. What could be easier? Then it hits you – in that hour you finished 57 jobs for a total payout of $2.85.You run the math again and it is right. You think that maybe you’ll switch it up and try another HIT, maybe that one will average out to paying a little better.

Feeling that there must be something wrong, you change the search results to show HITS that pay the most per HIT instead of having the most HITS per HIT (job). Ahh, here you quickly see some HITS that pay much better. One even offers $20 for a completed HIT. You click through and the HIT says that they are verifying the functionality of a website so they simply want you to fill in information for each page – but it all must be YOUR actual information. You feel a little uneasy since the terms and conditions that you read very carefully for Mechanical Turk stated that this was a violation – a requester (the person who posts jobs) isn’t supposed to ask for personal information. However, you figure that it must be legitimate, and this may be some kind of exception, since you figure that someone at Mechanical Turk MUST be checking the HITS...........

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