Pros
After several years as an independent contractor for Appen, they decided to hire a permanent team to work internally on some of the things/projects and to supplement the crowd when needed. I was Part of a team of 20 whose function was to swoop in and complete projects/tasks, tweak guidelines for the crowd, and other misc tasks. The team was close, and we were the company’s ’golden team’. It was sort of like being a regular contractor, but on a retainer. Amazing benefits, good pay, dream job. We were guaranteed 20 hrs. minimum work per week.
Cons
After 3 months, in anticipation of huge amounts of work coming in, they hired >80 folks. The work never materialized, the big guns (Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc.) just started to dry up. Then one day Hours were reduced significantly- we would sometimes have 10-15 hours. “Sit tight, the work is coming,” the leads would tell us. After 2-3 weeks of this, over half the team ~50+ folks were told on a Friday that our last day would be that Monday (Feb 17- paid holiday). We were given the rest of that week as paid. The system is broken, bc no one will tell any of the workers what’s actually going on. Our team leads were expected to handle everything, but they had extremely limited information that they could share. This wasn’t fair to them or us. What’s worse is that 15-20 of the new hires all came from another company who had just let them go without warning. They were hired at Appen, and many were laid off within just a couple months- the second time a company screwed them over without warning. These people now have PTSD from bad company management, and it’s just not right.
