I used freelancer.com to get some linguistic data collection done at work. With the recession in the US at the moment, the market rate for someone with a BA to do tempwork from home seems to be about $5usd per hour. Tasks can be for as little as $30, and you can expect to be able to talk to the person and instruct them one-on-one. The rate for developing country labour is $2/h or less, but these have a high management cost as it’s more difficult to find reliable people.
That looks really interesting, thanks. I’d love to hear more about your experience with this kind of service. Are there non-obvious pitfalls? Was the work quality good?
The only real mistake I made was trying to over-invest in planning for it. I dithered around trying to make a perfect screencast video showing how to use our web-based data entry tool, etc, write perfect decision notes, etc. This was all a waste of time. It would’ve been better to just jump in sooner.
You’ll meet a lot of people who can’t do what you want, and as soon as you post a project you’ll get a lot of bid-spam. One trick I had was to make the instructions on how to bid slightly non-trivial. We had 2,000 documents to get done, and didn’t want to give it all to one person. So I instructed bidders to bid for a number of documents and a price per document. This meant that if someone posted “I will do it for $100”, their bid was meaningless, and they could be excluded from consideration.
I used freelancer.com to get some linguistic data collection done at work. With the recession in the US at the moment, the market rate for someone with a BA to do tempwork from home seems to be about $5usd per hour. Tasks can be for as little as $30, and you can expect to be able to talk to the person and instruct them one-on-one. The rate for developing country labour is $2/h or less, but these have a high management cost as it’s more difficult to find reliable people.
That looks really interesting, thanks. I’d love to hear more about your experience with this kind of service. Are there non-obvious pitfalls? Was the work quality good?
The only real mistake I made was trying to over-invest in planning for it. I dithered around trying to make a perfect screencast video showing how to use our web-based data entry tool, etc, write perfect decision notes, etc. This was all a waste of time. It would’ve been better to just jump in sooner.
You’ll meet a lot of people who can’t do what you want, and as soon as you post a project you’ll get a lot of bid-spam. One trick I had was to make the instructions on how to bid slightly non-trivial. We had 2,000 documents to get done, and didn’t want to give it all to one person. So I instructed bidders to bid for a number of documents and a price per document. This meant that if someone posted “I will do it for $100”, their bid was meaningless, and they could be excluded from consideration.
Very useful, thanks. :)