Might be a good fit for certain people - Staff Writer WordCandy Employee Review

Overall, my experience with WordCandy wasn't horrible, for me it was just a bad fit. Objectively, your task as a staff writer is to write a certain amount of words per week. Subjectively, for me it got incredibly monotonous. You are writing the same kind of article over and over and are expected to perform a lot of technical tasks and coding in order to take screenshots. I felt very much "like a mere cog in the machine, tirelessly performing repetitive tasks." Lots of rules around writing style. They also use a performance graph spreadsheet, and you can see everyone on the team's word count and productivity levels so you know who is performing up to par and who isn't. I understand that it wasn't meant to be cruel, but it seemed pretty effed up - to me, like those stories you hear of Amazon workers getting timed for bathroom breaks. From my perspective, this component contradicted my personal values around worker dignity. They market the job as getting four weeks of vacation, but this is four weeks TOTAL, which means that you have to use vacation days for holidays such as Christmas, Labor Day, New Years, etc. Where the company is based in the UK, "all people classed as workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday per year." There are no other benefits besides upward mobility based off of performance. My starting salary was 33k, which was the same salary I received when I graduated college 9 years ago. It averages out to be a little over $15/hour. This is compared to a $12.70 average hourly income you get working at McDonald's, which doesn't require experience or a degree. Of course, I still took the job because I had no other option at the time. I eventually had to quit because I was hospitalized and could no longer work, and they were very, very kind and understanding about my departure. Leaving turned out to be a big blessing because it truly was just not a good fit for me. I am not interested in e-commerce, WordPress, coding, or SEO, though I see the importance these things play in our society. Though I am an incredibly hard worker (graduated top of my class, self-taught bilingual in French), I ended up not performing well because of how uninterested I was in the work. If I had to sum up my experience - very kind and welcoming staff, awful compensation, Draconian measures of gauging productivity, not enough vacation time. Could be a good fit for people who don't need much stimulation or contact with other humans. Not a good fit for people who value communication, community, and what it means to be human.