Appen reviews

Managers were generally very petty about every tiny little thing and more than a few managers were strongly led around by their emotions, which led you to walk on eggshells around management and hope they weren't having a bad day. Employees, in general, dehumanized the contractors we were in charge of. It was rare that we knew the names of any of the workers we were in charge of. We just referred to them with the disembodied term: "the workers", not Anna, or Stephen, or Paul - just "the workers". There is a mountain of technical debt to yet be paid off. The code base is a scary place to see. The pay is the same if you live in Oklahoma or LA, so if you live in a high COL area, please find employment elsewhere, because they will not pay you enough to live on. Management is not trained on how to be good or even competent managers. Either they will use borderline unethical and outright creepy methods to micromanage you into the ground, or they will treat you like we treated "the workers" - we were just faceless numbers providing data. When they are done with you, you are unceremoniously tossed out in the sloppiest, most unprofessional fashion. It would be understandable if your mental health suffered as a result of being under this kind of toxicity. The whole company is a disorganized mess. Yes my review is heavily biased, but it really truly is a mess.

Unpaid training Confusing guidelines Very slow customer support Very confusing rating system Boring, repetitive and low pay Let me start by clarifying the job title, I was hired to be a Web Search Evaluator - thinking I was going to perform various search related tasks, turns out my real role was Ads Evaluator. If you ask me, the first one sounds way less boring but they still gave me the latter without any explanation. After i spent over 20 hours going through all possible documents, guidelines, quizzes and videos, i finally got hired. Oh, and one of the requirements to get this job was to find a stranger and have him/her sign and put contact information on an Immigration and Customs form under the threat of jail and fine for false information (they recommended ANY random Ups or FedEx manager which is just ridiculous!). I wish i could describe the face a local FedEx manager made when i brought the form and politely asked him to sign... Soon after I got the job, I did a little search and found out most people with the same exact job at Appen were making between $12-14/hr. How come they only offered $10/hr to me (i live in US)? Majority of tasks are really boring. I'm supposed to read the boring ads and rate them according to specified guidelines. Only... the guidelines are subjective and what to me seems like totally bad and annoying ad - to them is perfectly fine! So, in the end I had to lie to myself, because that's the only way of being 90% accurate. Plenty can go wrong with the rating system they invented. Reading some of the reviews for Appen here I am puzzled by all 5-star reviews by ecstatic workers. What is so glamorous about making $7/hr (after taxes) for working 4 hours a day rating these boring ads (that don't make any sense)? Oh, great job, i've just made $107 for sitting for 20 hours on my computer this week, but I will only get paid for 15 hrs because reading instructions and doing parallel web search to get a better understanding does not count towards working hours! I make more than twice the amount after just one 8 hr day at my day job compare to what i make at Appen struggling for almost 2 weeks!!! I'd like to have a job that pays for ALL my time spent working not just SOME.