The Mercor, micro1, Outlier, DataAnnotation, etc, listings are obviously fake, because when you see them on LinkedIn it's always in waves. When you come across one there is 30+ others exactly like it on the next few pages. I am more interested in seeing if all of listings by more real companies were actually hiring people in their funnel.
With regards to AI training, It's pretty saddening how many companies ("companies"?) ask me to have a video chat with an AI as a first interview. There isn't a world where I can have a serious verbal conversation with a computer. Job searching is truly miserable right now.
I would refuse to do any AI interview, and refuse early-stage coding exercises. I require the base salary range and the number of in-office days/week upfront. I add a 10 to 20% premium for each onsite day per week.
It saves me three hours of commuting, plus an hour of dressing up and down, so that's a +50% time burden, meaning I should add or subtract at least 10% per day. To make it worse, I don't get to nap during my lunch hour, and I have to subject myself to high office CO2, contagiously sick coworkers, and significant pollution while commuting. All this makes me twice as exhausted, so adding or subtracting 20% feels justified.
I got tricked into doing this once, for Mercor. didn't have much else going on, and I'd never actually talked to an AI before. what struck me as very odd is that instead of being obsequious, the AI would ask me an involved question, I would start digging in, and it would very rudely interrupt me to ask something completely different.
after 1 30 minute session I'd had enough, and didn't complete the remaining sessions. the even nastier part is that for the next few weeks I would occasionally receive messages from Mercor thanking me for doing the interview, but saying that the format had been changed and it was necessary for me to go through the process again.
1. How well can they write a requirements spec for an AI? How well can they eliminate and disambiguate points of confusion? How well can they iterate upon the requirements by considering the AI's plan?
2. How well can they review the AI's output against the requirements? Can they identify and communicate what was missed, and translate it into updates to the requirements, fix the code via continued chat, otherwise by hand?
3. Can they avoid under-engineering, over-engineering, and unnecessary bloat?
The point is that if an interview is not assessing these things, it likely is wasting everyone's time.
With regards to AI training, It's pretty saddening how many companies ("companies"?) ask me to have a video chat with an AI as a first interview. There isn't a world where I can have a serious verbal conversation with a computer. Job searching is truly miserable right now.
after 1 30 minute session I'd had enough, and didn't complete the remaining sessions. the even nastier part is that for the next few weeks I would occasionally receive messages from Mercor thanking me for doing the interview, but saying that the format had been changed and it was necessary for me to go through the process again.
LLM’s love that one weird trick to get hits.
1. How well can they write a requirements spec for an AI? How well can they eliminate and disambiguate points of confusion? How well can they iterate upon the requirements by considering the AI's plan?
2. How well can they review the AI's output against the requirements? Can they identify and communicate what was missed, and translate it into updates to the requirements, fix the code via continued chat, otherwise by hand?
3. Can they avoid under-engineering, over-engineering, and unnecessary bloat?
The point is that if an interview is not assessing these things, it likely is wasting everyone's time.