Passive-aggressive - Online Tasker Outlier AI Employee Review

1.0
Mar 28, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They pay well, the work is interesting, even if you don't typically get enough of it and they change you from project to project pretty frequently. Liked the ability to log in anytime, log out anytime. Works around your schedule. Values intelligence even if they get it wrong sometimes.

Cons

At remotasks/outlier/scale-AI (same company) they don't so much value their employees as they do value the fact that they're expendable. I never got the feeling once in my interactions with staff or team leaders that I was anything other than another cog in the (highly defective) works. When improvements were suggested, or bugs reported, these were generally ignored, or if you persisted you got labelled as negative and kicked off projects. It was not a hospitable workplace. From what I saw, team leaders were also expendable and came and went fairly quickly. In a good company there is a way for those at the bottom of the chain to suggest and/or make improvements, and those at the top listen, although don't always agree. The setup with remotasks is "shut up and do the work"- even if it's stupid, even if things don't make sense. And they frequently don't make sense. For the coding projects, you get "challenge" tasks occasionally - that is, non-work tasks that are put in there to check on your abilities. These are checked by AI, not humans. But the AI isn't good enough yet to make those kinds of assessments (that's why we're training it). It sometimes marks down correct tasks which are worded slightly differently to what it expects, and unfortunately gives the tasker no clue as to what they did wrong, if anything. So learning from mistakes is non-existent. Likewise the task linters themselves are AI-based, and suck. Hard. They don't work 90% of the time, but despite frequent calls from many taskers to team leaders to make them bypassable, they typically weren't, and they blocked 90% of all good work. When someone else reviews your task, and finds fault with it, there is no method by which you can correct them if they're wrong in their thinking. You just get marked down. In short, nothing in this setup resembles anything like an IT company - it's more like a sweatshop. And that's how it makes you feel. If you are intelligent, this is not the company for you. Find somewhere that you can have your skills and thoughts treated with basic humanity and respect. If you're desperate for money, go ahead and do it. I guess I wasn't that desperate and had too much self-respect.

Explore other reviews about Outlier AI

5.0
Apr 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

part-time work, flexible, and you have a lot of autonomy

Cons

difficult to get assigned to projects

3.0
Apr 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The short time that I had consistent work was very good. Never had a problem with pay. Paid fairly for work. Plus, I really enjoyed learning all the different tasks. With the "Cons" issues made clear upfront, I would recommend this platform to a friend.

Cons

Applied as a specialist. Only offered generalist work. And haven't had any new projects for a while. The projects I was invited to earlier this year were poorly designed and involved long onboarding processes. They were all iterations of the same poorly-designed project. Since then, nothing. It's frustrating to see job listings from them in my field of expertise and not be able to apply to them. And yes, I've kept my resume and LI updated. It doesn't seem to matter. Also, comparing the community chat platform, monitoring, and ease of use to other (similar) platforms I work with, Outlier's is the worst one. I've found that there are far more people who use Reddit to get their project questions answered and to try to find out what is happening than use and actually get answers from Outlier's own discussion platform.

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