TranscribeMe - just signed up, initial thoughts and questions
I've only been at it for two days, but I've done 27 transcriptions thus far, and I have some thoughts and questions.
Comments
1. We all know the pay is pathetic. I'm currently looking for a job so I don't have anything better to do outside of submitting endless applications though, and I haven't found any other online income options that appear usable. After 27 transcriptions I've spent just over 7 hours and earned $15.29 (assuming the one pending job gets accepted), a rate of $2.17/hr.
2. My audio-minute to work-minute ratio currently sits at an average of 7:1. There's wide variance based on audio quality, distractions, research, re-listens, and whether a job already has some text populated. My best rate was 3.5:1, and my worst was 13:1. Median is 6:1.
3. Work availablity is sparse. I can go 2+ hours without jobs, then I'll get 5 or 6 in the span of the next 2 hours. For example, I've had it open for about an hour and a half this morning, zero work so far. I'm just watching Youtube or listening to podcasts or looking through job listings while I wait though.
4. I've only encountered one job so far that was so unintelligible that I had to reject it. Maybe I'm just lucky.
5. This early on I find it at least mildly interesting work, since you never know what you're going to hear when the audio suddenly starts playing. I don't expect that feeling of novelty to last, but at least I don't hate it, yet (as long as I don't think about the pay).
6. The style guide seems mostly reasonable, but man, some parts of it are difficult to apply in practice. You never really realize, especially when you've mostly communicated in text over the last few years like I have, how meandering and grammatically nonsensical most human speech is. Trying to wrangle a massive run-on sentence with a dozen false starts into something the style guide will like is a chore, and often feels like a roll of the dice.
7. The qualifying exam took a few hours of seriously reading the style guide and doing the test itself, but I passed first try and they activated my account approx 2 days later.
Questions
1. What is a safe Changed %?
I've averaged 4.1%, all green except for one orange. I'm curious about this because I see minimal consistency in the QA team's work. Nearly every change is dependent upon whether the QA you get likes commas or periods more, because that makes up at least 80% of all the changes. Sometimes they just flat out change a correct transcription to a blatantly wrong one, which is frustrating, but I told myself I'm not going to fret too much about this until I start seeing rejections. So far 26 of 26 reviewed were accepted.
2. Would you put TranscribeMe on a resume? If so, after how long?
Curious about this because I have a two year (and growing, the longer it takes to find a job) gap on my resume right now (health-related, initially), and it'd be nice to have something on my resume more recent than that. Of course I'm not putting it on there after two days of work, but if I keep at this for at least three solid months, I could maybe see adding it.
On the other hand, it seems rather embarrassing and dangerous to advertise to potential employers that I willingly debased myself for a small fraction of minimum wage, which makes me not want to list it.
(If you're wondering why it's taken me a few months so far to find a job in a market where it's supposedly so easy to get one, it's because I'm aiming for a remote job. Remote feels virtually impossible to get in my industry though, so my hopes are sinking. But I'm not in a dire financial position right now, and can hold out for a few more months before giving up and looking for on-site positions.)
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/10l2mqq/transcribeme_just_signed_up_initial_thoughts_and/
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