Vantaggi
Paid weekly as per company dicta.
Svantaggi
Too many to list, but the glaring problem with this decentralized, remote set up is a complete lack of organization or transparency. Elements and conditions change without notice or explanation, and are inconsistant and mysterious. You don't know what projects they offer or have any input as to which you are best suited for...once you're onboarded they just drop you in a group and you test the modules for the project, which when you pass, you may get into that task or may not. Once there were groups and team leaders, but they got rid of those so you don't know who you report to directly. Queue Managers come and go, and you're only able to contact them within the Slack project group, and the moment you get shifted to a different project, they cut your access to your prior group, including any and all past communications and threads you had so there is no archive or access whatsoever to your associates or alleged superiors. Most of the time you are piecing information together from whatever Slack threads you are in and other people's comments and situations. They just switched to Discourse as the community workspace and it's every man for themselves to figure out how it works and where things are in it, which is on-brand for Outlier. If you're qualified to work on multiple projects, you can find yourself out of work one day, and then days or weeks later suddenly in another project group. Were you working on a project and suddenly got recategorized to have a pay cut for the same work, and given no reason for why? Better get used to that. If you get low ratings from peer-reviews, can you speak to anyone about that? No. Do those low ratings affect getting additional work? Yes. So, if you disagree or want clarification, do you have a forum to discuss it? Absolutely not. How long will you be on a project? You will never know and never be told, because work will be continuous until it isn't. Every task you finish may be your last, and the gap between continuing that project could be a few minutes before you're onto the next one, or hours or days. The biggest joke and flaw is Outlier uses AI to man it's support desk, so any attempt to get help is an exercise in futility. The feedback loops and canned responses are frustrating and unhelpful, and lead to unanswered questions and no accountability. Prepare to see the phrase "Your performance in the screening, assessment, or previous projects indicates areas where we see potential for improvement, which may affect how soon we can allocate new projects to you" a lot, and get no specification as to what they're referring to. And the AI bots love to throw that general response out for any and all occasions when they are without work but can't provide a reason. If you reword and rephrase it enough different ways that you don't get one of the regular auto-replies, they will make zero sense - I was told to talk to a Queue Manager but the AI support about issues, even though I had no access to a group or a QM due to their constant disabling of Slack access and a previous QM telling me to contact the support desk. If you ask the AI help desk to speak to an actual human, you won't be able to. If you ask the AI who your supervisor is or to talk to someone in the HR department, you won't be able to. It is impossible to get any help about increasing your pay, finding opportunities, understanding how you can be promoted, or add more fields to your areas of ability. Outlier does not give AF about you or your work experience. They do not care if you are having difficulty performing tasks or getting help or answers about your employment with them. They figure that in return for the flexibility to work from home, that they advertise high hourly rates and then offer much lower ones for the tasks, and drop you even lower so they can make more off your work. They leverage your desire to work without providing any reasonable expectation of stability or congruity. The concept of training AI and helping it develop is tainted by the garbage implementation and execution by the company of their workflow and employee management. In the 35 years of working for corporations and chains, large and small private businesses, and even owning my own company for several years, I have never seen a more disorganized, poorly managed, uncaring, underprepared, disjointed, demoralizing, idiosyncratic, and maliciously incompetent business than Outlier.