Copyright 2011 Kurtis Heimerl Do Not Reproduce/Republish without expressed written consent from Kurtis Heimerl Interviewer: The first questions we have are basic questions about you. How old are you? Interviewee: I'm 36. Interviewer: You're 36. and What's your background? What did you do for education? Interviewee: I have my diploma. I have 14 years of experience in various fields that I have worked so far. Interviewer: I missed the university, what was that again? Interviewee: Sorry, I have my diploma in computers. Interviewer: Computers, Ok is that computer IT? Interviewee: Yes. Interviewer: How much does this job require you to work? How many hours? What's your schedule? Interviewee: I work from about 9 o'clock Indian standard time until 6 in the morning. Then again from 4 o'clock in the evening to 6. So that's about 95 hours of work in a week. Interviewer: Wow. Why so many? That's a very long week. Interviewee: Yeah, the problem is we work in the night and we have to prepare a report for the clients in the morning. Get them on the servers. Monitor all the agents who come on the morning shift. These are the kind of works we do. Interviewer: I suppose. That makes sense. Why is it that you have to work at night? Interviewee: We work with the US clients. (inaudible..support for other time zones) Interviewer: So, Ok. What is your role in the office? Are you the manager? Interviewee: I manage the complete operations here. I take care of the operations. I interact with the clients. Get new updates. Update the sims, (my supervisor) so we can get them to the agents so we can get the system up and running. Interviewer: So, Do you own the center or are you an employee of someone who owns the center? Interviewee: I own the center. Interviewer: Oh, awesome. What was involved in setting up the center? Interviewee: It was a lot of paperwork. (inaudible)find appropriate agents to work..new agents. A lot of interviews. Campus interviews to find agents for the departments. We had to set up systems. We have 25 systems here, which work day and night. So, networking, all those things. Took us around 2&1/2 months to set up the whole thing. Then we were ready to go. Interviewer: So, if you don't mind me asking. How much did it cost for you to go through that process? Interviewee: This set up completely costed somewhere around 600,000 Indian rufees. Interviewer: Ok. Good thing you didn't use crore. I would have been confused. Interviewee: No no. Interviewer: Everytime I go back, I see it on the news and have to do the math. Ok. So when did you set this up? When did you start? Interviewee: We started the service in last November. We started going live on November. So it was like 3 months before, we started the complete setup. Interviewer: I see. How many employees do you have? Interviewee: I have 25 working in the night. 25 working in the day plus 2 system administrators. Plus 2 floor supervisors. Plus an accountant and a front office assistant. That makes a total of 60 people. Interviewer: I see. Do your workers work 12 hours? or what is their down time? Interviewee: There is down time. We work 8 hour shifts. (inaudible) Interviewer: So what made you start this business? Interviewee: I was employed by ANONFIRM for a long time. So that was the time when I learned, yes we could do it individually as well. Then I wanted to start/open this place which is very far from where I worked. That is the only reason why we did it. This place has a lot of potential. There are a lot of universities and colleges. There are people who really need work. So we were thinking to provide them an opportunity to export, to international arena. Like speaking to foreign customers. Getting to know what is the style of their work. Getting export to international arena. Like speaking to foreign customers. Getting to know how, what is the style of their work, what timings do they work, how strict they are work wise, and how they organize the things and all the things. This is the right stage that we can set and uh, we can go ahead and start off. Mean, I mean, and uh, about all uh, the budget was within our reach so uh, we thought that we [inaudible] started. Interviewer: Okay, is, is this a common thing? Are there other shops near you? Interviewee: Sorry? Interviewer: Is this a common business in, in the area or are you the first one? Interviewee: we are the first one in this town. Interviewer: I see, are there, are there any in any nearby towns? Or do you have to travel closer to BIGTOWN? Interviewee: After seeing our performance and how we work there are two more centers are coming up in the next two months, 60 that they are setting up in [inaudible]. We are quite far from BIGTOWN as well. We are roughly around 300 kilometers from BIGTOWN. Interviewer: Mm-hm. So the, the other two are coming up in the town? Interviewee: Yeah, in the town. They're very close by. Interviewer: Hm. so you said you have I think 50 workers, right? Interviewee: 60. Interviewer: 60, okay. how do you go about recruiting workers? Interviewee: see what happens is, when we sign, when we get [inaudible] process details, process requirements from some of our clients who contact us directly from U.S. or U.K. So what we do is we ask them as to what kind of agents they require. Basically it's like format. They will tell us this is the kind of experience they should have, as for English, what should be their standard for speaking English and what should be their standard in the education as to how they can understand the whole process [inaudible]. So based on those things we contact the human recruitment management offices here in BIGTOWN and here in [inaudible]. So they help us out in advertising for recruitment and then we do campus interviews and do the selections. Interviewer: I see, is it primarily students? Interviewee: Basically, yeah. Primarily it will be students and we will also be looking at people who have completed their education and who are looking for jobs. And because of cost of living most of them would like like to work in their own home towns. as compared to BIGTOWN. Interviewer: Yeah. Interviewee: The cost of living is very low, so they would prefer working here. So they are the kind of people who we will be targeting. So we'll be able to talk to them and get them opportunities. Interviewer: As far as your clients how, how have you gotten, gotten clients for your business? Interviewee: basically we follow two rules in finding a client. One would be a consultant would be in touch with the client so we acquire a process from them at a price. That is happening all the time in this country. Apart from that, yes I understand that the same kind of thing work in the U.S. as well. I have a few friends who were working [inaudible] in the U.S. as senior supervisors as well. So they tell me as to how it works in the U.S. I contact them usually on [inaudible]. I look for their addresses and their phone numbers or emails on the internet, and then try to contact them and give them my proposal stating that this is what we have, this is what we can deliver. Based on that we sometimes get the clients directly or sometimes just through a consultant at a fee, at a nominal fee we get the data consultant to get the contact details to the client. Interviewer: How much do you have to train your workers when they're coming from University? Interviewee: Yeah we check them for their spoken English skills, their soft skills, their marketing skills, what they have, and what they have exactly learned and are they qualified to take technical calls or are they just qualified to take customer service calls. Let me say we sort them out into different groups. Put them onto a schedule that they will be trained to speak in neutral English and there are course materials which I have designed myself. And some course materials which I have brought online. These are these are the things that we do here and train them at least 30 days before they can go on the floor and take calls. Interviewer: What's the difference between a technical call and a call service call? Interviewee: Sorry, can you can you come again please? Interviewer: I may have missed the, the phrase exactly. You said that you check if they can do customer service calls or technical calls. Interviewee: Mm-hm. Interviewer: What's the difference? Interviewee: Yeah the customer service calls would basically be an inbound call which would be, which would be to any of our numbers. They would be answer inquiries to the customers about the product we sell or service. And technical support calls would be like giving them technical support on their software. Interviewer: Oh, okay. Interviewee: Yeah, something like that. Interviewer: How do you track the performance of your workers? Interviewee: Yeah, we have the performance sheets that that can be printed out from their [inaudible] as to how [inaudible] the resources that we provide. And we monitor their calls, have separate quality teams. That's the monitoring. And then if any agent is found going away from what we have taught then we will log him off, tell him this is what the mistake is. We will play the recording of the whole call to him. Show him as to what mistakes he is making and then we'll ask him to correct that. And we also have certain quality parameters in place on the server itself. So, every time the call is routed in, it tracks down the time of the call routed and the agent uses. And on average we calibrate it for a week, and then we tell him this is the this is the time that you are doing. We set them a target as to how, how much they have to answer, or how much time they have to consume on each call so based on those things, we'll probably be able to monitor each employee. Interviewer: I see okay. What about Mechanical Turk? You said that you recently began using it. Interviewee: Yes. Interviewer: Do you have any tools that you use to measure performance on Mechanical Turk? Interviewee: see, Mechanical Turk itself is a tool. It's wide-open. It's very clear that whatever the agent does on the, the dashboard. Everything is monitored automatically by itself by the server. The hits that he accepts,the hits that are abandoned,the hits that get rejected, based on that the person, agent will be shown on each day on the daily performance, we monitor all those, rejected hits and find out as to why it was rejected. if it was abandoned we will also find out as to why it was abandoned, maybe because of the timing factor or, because the agent did not understand the question within the given time frame. things like that we analyze and we tell them this how you are coming through. Interviewer: I see. How much of your business is on Mechanical Turk now? Interviewee: As of now, Mechanical Turk is not giving us a lot of revenue, though each of our agents is able to make somewhere around 20 or 25$ a day. Interviewer: Wow that's a lot. Is that for the company or the worker? Interviewee: This is for each agent I'm speaking. Interviewer: They're able to make 20 or 25$ a day on Mechanical Turk? Interviewee: That's correct. Interviewer: And that's US dollars and that's for eight hours of work? Interviewee: Yeah, that's for eight hours of work. Interviewer: That's very good. That's much higher than the average, as I understand. Interviewee: Yeah. What we have learned from Mechanical Turk is abstaining from smaller questions for one cents, two cents and twenty-five cents. What we have done is trained our agents to take up questions that are like, article writing for 400 words, which, which almost takes the same time, but the revenue will still be high. We try to concentrate on those kinds of things and, there are certain cases where you answer ten questions and you will be awarded two dollars, and these questions are very simple questions. They still have to answer in just 100 words. These are things we concentrate on, so they will be putting minimum at work, but still make a handsome money, a handsome amount on their dashboard every day. Interviewer: Wow. That makes sense. Do you have workers that you think... let me think of the right way to say this. Are the Mechanical Turk workers in your office different than the call center workers, or do you mix them together? Interviewee: No, no. absolutely. They're a separate team of workers which we carefully choose. We conduct tests based on work questions, we usually get on mechanical Turk. We ask them do they know how to use Google, use search engines. Do they know how to use Wikipedia, do they know how to search for articles, do they have any memberships online with some article sites, where they can just look into the article section itself as to find out similar kind of article where they can take tips and then write their own articles, in their own words. So it's more like a lengthy process than what we do for the regular call agents. Interviewer: I see. Do you think it's harder to train a worker for Mechanical Turk than a call center? Interviewee: Yes, that is because see our client has a specification for a call, a call agent. They will have to stick to that specification and just do what the client requires. And here in Mechanical Turk it's, it's a wide open field. and there are many many people who pose many different kind of questions. Each question is not repeated or each person is not similar to one another. That is where they have to put in lot of effort or lot of thinking or lot comments also to understand the question itself and then have to do simultaneously searching by accepting the hit they will also be looking at the timing and rating itself and 60 second answer or within a to minute limit. They will have to keep that also on track. They will require special skills as well. Interviewee: I see. Interesting. As a related question. How much do you pay your workers in general? Interviewee: General? It's like okay about, do you want me to give it in Indian Rupees or do you want in Us dollars? Interviewer: I do. Rupees is fine. Interviewee: This is fine 5000 Indian rupees per agent. Interviewer: Is that per day, per week? Interviewee: Per month. Interviewer: Per month. Okay. Interviewer: That should be somewhere around 111$ Interviewer: Yeah, Mechanical Turk workers do much better than that. Interviewee: Yeah, they will see what happens here. The problem is (inaudible) for a long time. Those people who are very experienced who can work really well, they get really high service. It's not – this is the base salary that it pays. (Inaudible) again, we have a separate system which (inaudible) so we'll be able to monitor as to how many hits that they imported, how many hits are going to be accepted. On that ratio, we also announce some incentives (inaudible). Interviewer: OK. Do the workers prefer to do Mechanical Turk tests or do they prefer to do call center work? Interviewee: No, no. They love to do this work. What happens is they will have a lot of things to learn. First is - that is what they like, and it is like they can do a lot of experimentation by themselves. They will be looking at a lot of other things which they would have not looked at in a computer or on the Internet. Maybe they would have stuck to their emails or social networking, chat and all those things before. When they start working on Mechanical Turk, it's a whole new window so they feel (inaudible). On the other hand, they will also be looking at a lot of things. They'll be learning things. They will try to search where the (inaudible) are, which country has this kind of thing, which page gives us this kind of information. So they – like one (inaudible) less work or they will love to do it. Interviewer: That makes sense. What are the average demographics of your workers? Are they young? Are they male? Interviewee: Yeah, we don't – we actually employ people who are between the age of, let's say – (inaudible) we cannot employ anybody who is below 18, so we look for people who are about 18. That is the first thing. And we at least look for basic qualification of at least 12th grade, plus they should have at least 12 (inaudible) plus. They should have at least one or two years of experience of working on the Internet, like in a company or on by themselves or to any other home page or something like that. And then we do our own kind of test, so we put them into a lot of tests. We put simple questions like the Amazon (inaudible), so we give them a lot of simple questions and ask them to search for the information within a timeframe. Then we gauge as to how they would perform and then we would give them a 15-day trial. Once they do the trial successfully, then they would be – they'll start to work on it on a regular basis. Interviewer: OK. What do you think that the average age of a worker is for you? Are they mostly -- Interviewee: Age -- Interviewer: Sorry. Interviewee: Yeah, please. Interviewer: No, go ahead. You were answering it. Interviewee: Yeah. The average age would be any age between 21 and let's say 30, 35. Interviewer: OK. Do they often have jobs outside of the company or is this their only job? Interviewee: Most of them, yes. This is their only job so they come at nine o'clock Indian Standard time in the office. They work till about six o'clock. That's about eight hours and one (inaudible). Then they go back. Interviewer: OK. We were curious because Mechanical Turk is open and as such, the workers could leave your office and go work on Mechanical Turk on their own. Has that ever happened? Interviewee: Yeah. They do. They ask us if they can work from the house. Yes, some people are doing it for their personal IDs and passwords. They create their own IDs and they have their own (inaudible) on the dashboard as well. Yes, they find time in the evening or night, maybe some time when they want to chat with (inaudible). They have one or two hours so they can – they (inaudible) and work there. Apart from that, we will not share these IDs that we use here in the office. They make their own IDs and their personal names and personal account so they will be able to do it. Out of the 25 that I employ here, I think there are about 10 or 11 are doing it like that. Interviewer: Wow. Are you worried about any of them doing that full time instead of working at the office? Interviewee: As of now, no because they are in the process of learning and they would – they are much more comfortable coming to the office and working rather than staying home and just doing it part-time. So what they're doing is they're just trying it in the house as of now. I don't think as of now they will do it – they would decide to do it as full-time. Yeah, maybe later, after they understand the whole (inaudible). That is a chance we will have to take. Interviewer: OK, that makes sense. You said that there's a great need for jobs around the area. What did you mean by that? Interviewer: See, I'm not trying to blame anyone or I'm not trying to criticize something here. What happens here is these workers who come to work with us are average middle class families in India, so if you are aware of how their lifestyle goes - so it's very difficult for them to be very comfortable in situations like this. What happens here basically is we get their accounts on their names. We take there, I think the people to send, upload it to MTurk so that the account gets approved. And then we get them to work. The basic problem here is those people who come to work earn a very little salary, that is the first thing. The second thing is they do not have their own personal bank accounts, because they cannot afford it basically. What happens is since the Mechanical Turk has some conditions that they should have on their accounts. As per banking rules, they lack deposits and they will not be able to leave out as long as they close their accounts. This kind of salary -- transferring this to their account, and then taking back to the office, and then, redistributing this as a salary, that's what we're finding it difficult. There are a lot of people who want to work, who really want to utilize this and make at least, something out of what they have. But because of these restrictions, they're not able to do it. And we requested MTurk, I had personally sent mails to customer service saying that for example, shall I go ahead and give you an example on this? Interviewer: Absolutely. Interviewee: Yeah. What happens here is... and they usually charge $4 for distributing a check. So what I'd ask customers is let's say, my company's name is XYZ. What I said is I will open an account under XYZ for ten employees and since the Mechanical Turk has policy of taking hold [?] plus VCheck that we withdraw, is it okay with them to remove the $40 when they distribute that as 10... Instead of 10 checks, I want to uncheck the account. So that it will be coming to the office so we can acquire and distribute it as for their performance, or then, the Mechanical Turk customer service responded to me, saying that “No, it cannot be done. It has to be on the single accounts.” That is the only part that we're finding it difficult to make more people work on this MTurk as itself. Interviewer: Why don't you put multiple workers on one account? Interviewee: MTurk doesn't have a policy of putting multiple workers on a single account. Interviewer: Hmm. Interviewee: They say it's not in their policies. Interviewer: We are under the impression that you could do that. Interviewee: That is not allowed. In fact, we tried doing it and it blocked the whole account. Out of five accounts that we had made, they're blocked. After that, I had a very long conversation with the customer service. They have been saying that “No, this is still not done.” [laughs] I don't know if it can be done. If it can be done, we would really be able to use one account for ten IDs and then, we would really need a lot of people to work on this process itself. Interviewer: Mm. Okay. I'll look at that. We -- like there's a group of us who on Mechanical Turk research here and someone is convinced you can add every worker to the same company account. So I'll see what he's confused about. Anyway, that does seem like a very large problem. Interviewee: Yeah [laughs]. Interviewer: Where am I in writer, do you think? What are some of the tasks do you do on Mechanical Turk? You said there are the more expensive ones like writing essays. Is there anything else? Interviewee: Yeah. There are like tasks -- like it's like a maximum amount of tasks or the maximum number of reward that we see – these regions would be like $4 or $5 a task which would be like downloading some software and in the process of downloading, will have to answer some questions or maybe open a survey, and download some toolbars or software and things like that. These are the thing things that are usually done. There are a lot of people who also advertise or give us tasks to post advertisements on Craigslist. There are IDs we are asked to use on Craigslist post. We have those IDs that they give so we'll be able to post them and [unintelligible] for them that their ads are going live on the [unintelligible] of workers so they'll be able to paste that. These are the things that are most commonly we do. Interviewer: Interesting. I always assumed that the download this application was a scam. They wouldn't pay you, but they do? Interviewee: Yeah. They do, they do. Interviewer: Huh, interesting. Tell me more about this Craigslist business. They want you to post ads on Craigslist for them? Interviewee: Yes. Craigslist, as I understand, has a policy that they should – that they need to have an account which is a phone verified account to post any ad. We prepare those phone verified accounts with accounts on a daily basis for another client. That is the account that we are to make. We have certain bit of IDs that we keep as there. One we see this band of tasks getting upon MTurk. What we do is we use those IDs and post the required ads for that particular requester. So all we have to do is when we post it and it goes live on the Craigslist, we have to send them, these people link back to them where they can verify it. Once it's done, I think, they will approve the task and the amount is credited to the agent's account. Interviewer: Hmm. OK. I assume you're aware that most of these ads are spam or scams on Craigslist, right? Interviewee: Mm-hmm. Interviewer: Do you have any qualms about that or it's not a big deal to you? Interviewee: No, no. We certainly have a bit of… as to how scams are going on and like this… We also keep in touch with their customer support. We ask them if there are any updates and things like that. And we make registered accounts for customers who do not… I mean, who do not place the orders for more than very high number of accounts. They usually ask to submit it from 10 or 15 accounts which we usually do it on a US IP. We have a proxy server which we had bought so we do… and then do it for them Interviewer: That's super interesting. About this US proxy, is it important? When is it important to come from a US IP address? Interviewee: See what happens is, it states as a policy that it will block or it will completely… what's the word? …that kind of an IP if I do it from India. So what we do is we buy US proxy or using a credit card and what we do is check the ID that's already changed to a different place. Let's say, New York, California or any state. So once that is done, then, it's like the regular work that we do. We start posting it so Craigslist understands that this ad is posted from California. So it is going live. That's what the client wants. Once that is done, they'll be able to see that link and verify if it's a live one. If that's live, they get to pay us. Interviewer: All right. I understand the technology. I have a computer science degree myself. I'm just curious of when you have to use this proxy. Do you use it on Mechanical Turk in general and tell the employees? Interviewee: No. We do not use this proxy at all to MTurk. We do it on an Indian IP itself, only when we're getting the accounts for Craigslist. We use this. We use it only for a certain period of time, let's say, for about 30 minutes or 35 minutes. Interviewer: Why not on MTurk in general, I know that many requesters block Indians from completing their tasks? Interviewee: Yeah, we wanted to do that but we were afraid these accounts might get blocked. So, we are not doing that. Interviewer: I see. That's a good point. Amazon is definitely better at that than Craigslist. Interviewee: Yeah. Interviewer: Who picks the jobs for the workers, is it you, or is it the workers? Interviewee: I also supervise it basically who takes care for the whole staff. And once the agent comes in… So we have identified a few agents who are early prelentor [sp] so we usually see the tasks in the morning as to what tasks have been posted. So we ask them to pick those tasks in the beginning and try to finish it off before anybody can pick them, finish it so... Like that they keep reminding us to refresh the page every now and then and see as to any task that's been administered once. Once it is posted, they will be able to identify that particular agent who would be able to work in that so that is how it goes. Interviewer: Okay, do you know…? You said there is a price is very important. You want $2 a task. Do you have any special tools for using Mechanical Turk? Interviewee: Not really. We usually depend on Google or Bing to search for the similar kind of articles. We study them and then try to make some more articles of our own, try to compare them as to whether they are coming into the rules of what the requester wants, the grammar, the spelling mistakes, and the word count, all body of the article itself. And then, once we are convinced, yeah, this article can go to the requester, then we will go ahead and accept the task and then we try to do that. Interviewer: OK. Have you heard of or do you use any of the Turk requester websites like Turkopticon? Interviewee: No. I have not come across any of that so far. We are just new to this, so I'm really not… Interviewer: Ah, okay. You should look at it. I'll email it to you. It's a website for workers and then mostly, they rank requesters so that they know who is a scam artist and who is not. Where am I now? Are you trying to transition to different type of Turk work than the writing and the Craigslist? Interviewee: Yeah, we are. We are… This happens on a daily basis. And when the requesters post the request, we look into it and then, it's a really transition you can say. We not only stick to those ads or requests which are paying as high. We are also looking at into, which likely look into ads or requesters who post other things as well like normal interviews, or normal lot of things which starts from the range of $0.30 to $0.50, maybe $0.75. We're looking to translations things also. We have people who can understand a few languages, Tamil, Hindi and English. So we look for that. And there are people who use other languages as translation also. We have some translating tools that we use, to translate, let's say, German to English, or some French to English. So I would use that, and translate. People are giving it back to the requester. What I have is I have a few friends who speak French or speak German, so on the whole I will ask them verify that it is correct. Then I would [xx]. We just make sure that the requester feels comfortable and accepts the task. We don't want the requester to reject it, because once it gets rejected it affects my score as well. Interviewer: Yeah. Interviewee: I make sure that my tasks... We actually have a formula. We keep the [xx] at about 95 so that always we get the maximum number of HITs to be shown on the HITs page. I also understand that if I come down below 85 or 80, the seller will not show me that many tasks as the person who has 95. So that is one thing that we always keep in mind. Interviewer: I know that you emailed me directly about my transcription tasks. How often do you email requesters directly? Interviewee: If we are able to do the task successfully, we wait for the requester to accept the task. And once it is accepted...there are some requesters who send us compliments or send us an email stating that this work was done good, and they would also give us some bonuses. And they would ask us to come back and do the second part or the third part of their work. So that is when we understand that a requester is happy, so we will go ahead and mail them directly and tell them, yeah, this is what we can do, this is what we can deliver. So if you would be interested, then we able to give you those service. That is how we do it. Interviewer: All right. Do you know if this is a common strategy--when did you think to start this? Interviewee: I was having this in mind for a long time, but we wanted to understand what MTurk is all about. We were just concentrating on doing the tasks and understanding the whole thing itself. When I understood this, I said, "OK, yeah. I can just step ahead and start contacting the requesters, maybe I can find them to do work directly. So that will in fact help me and help them as well." I started doing this maybe a month ago. Interviewer: OK. And would you say it's been successful in general? Interviewee: Mostly, yes. We have so many contacts, such as yourself, there are quite a few people who have contacted us, asking can you do this, or can you do that. We have done the work and then given it back to them. Maybe because of some reasons. Because December just went by, I understand there was a very long holiday. So maybe they're taking their time in regards to them getting back to me. I'm just keeping up my hopes that they will respond to me, and yeah, things will move further ahead. Interviewer: OK. How many of your tasks come from India versus the U.S.? I assume the vast majority are from the U.S.? Interviewee: Yeah. And as far as I see MTurk, I don't think an Indian requester can post a request, because it's only to the U.S. When we tried to post something or when we tried to post a request, it was restricted for us. They said only, as of now, the requests are being taken from the U.S. Interviewer: Really? Interviewee: Yeah. Interviewer: What request did you try to post? Interviewee: I wanted to give an article and see how many people can really attend it. It was a typical old-style Kannada language, which I wanted to get translated. So I had split that into a three-minute clip, so I wanted to see whether people could really attempt this. When I wanted to post it, I had all the tools. But when I tried to post it said no, this request can't be done. Requests can be done, as of now, from the U.S. region only. So, I just kept quiet. Interviewer: Oh, that's very unfortunate. Did you think about using a proxy, or...? Interviewee: Not really. I didn't want to take a chance. Interviewer: Yeah. OK. How often are you cheated on Mechanical Turk? Interviewee: As of today, we've been working for more than four months on Mechanical Turk. Me, personally, I've worked on Mechanical Turk for almost a year now, on my personal accounts. My wife and relatives, they all work on their personal accounts. As of now, no, we have not come across anything like that. Yeah, requesters have rejected our articles sometimes because of specific reasons which they have mentioned. And there was maybe one or two requesters who did not pay us at all. Apart from that, yeah, everything else was fine. Interviewer: That's so strange. The work that I've done on Mechanical Turk, there were many scams. Like one of the downloading ones, they didn't pay me. Do you think you do anything special to keep yourself from being scammed, or are you lucky, or...? Interviewee: You could say that we're lucky. Probably, we'll look into the task very carefully before even attempting. And we have identified one or two requesters who have rejected very often. So we keep a list of them so we do not go ahead and attempt any questions they post. Interviewer: Got it, got it. Aside from the bank account issue, what other complaints do you have about Mechanical Turk? Interviewee: Most of the time it's that when you accept, there is something called a link that is given on the MTurk... Interviewer: Slow down, slow down. Say that again? There's something called a what? Interviewee: There's something called a link. Interviewer: OK. Interviewee: That needs to be pushed to go to a new page to attempt the task itself. So what happens is even if the browser is updated with the latest updates, we will not be able to see the Accept button or the Submit button. And at that time we contact the requester and tell them, "The task that you posted, we were not able to see the Submit button at all." Even if we try to open it in different browsers. So even if it doesn't work, we may want to tell them. And there are cases where the requester has sent us separate mails. They have said it was probably because of a bug when they posted it. And they've re-posted it, and then we have attempted the same questions. Interviewer: OK. It's hard for you to speak for your workers, but what complaints do you feel like they have? Interviewee: Most of the things...we in India are not exposed to the culture for the questions. Usually what happens is they take a lot of time to understand it, they at first fall on their faces. And most of the time the supervisor has to stand on the back and explain as to what this is all about. In many cases what the agents do is they simply skip the HIT, and then leave it and go. So you ask them, they say, "No, No. I was not able to understand it, so I just left it. And I didn't want to waste time, so I took the next task." So these are the common things that we face. You should also understand that there are several number of questions posted in a single task. Let's say for one example of a 100-word article, there are different topics that are given. We usually get somewhere around 50 or 55 topics being given as 100-word article, each article being paid at 75 cents. So there are certain words or certain phrases which these people do not understand. These are like, let's say, some law restrictions in the U.S., or some about marriage in California, or about marriage in certain places, or the holidaying hotels and stuff like that. So these are the things which they find it really difficult to answer. So they would rather skip them and take the next one. So we also make them understand, we also give them articles; we show them the pages where the information is. Yeah, it is difficult work. And it's like educating them every day. So when the same similar tasks pop up next time, they will be able to understand it. Interviewer: Interesting. I may have asked this, but I want to make sure I understand: what made you start doing Mechanical Turk tasks at the beginning? Interviewee: What I learned about Mechanical Turk, a year ago, it was interesting. It was very fun. I was home, so I had a lot of spare time. So I was doing it on my personal account. So then later on when I started to understand slowly, then I thought why not widen the opportunity to many people who really don't know what a Mechanical Turker is requesting. The second thing is this can be work from anywhere, so why not make a common place where they can come, sit and work, and have the time. And when they are sitting together, it's like exchange of ideas about Mechanical Turk work. They also exchange a lot of things on the floor. They say, yeah, this task was like this, I did it like this--why don't you try to do it? And this task was like this, this requester is good, he pays me immediately--so why don't you try to do his tasks? There are a lot of things that are exchanged on the floor when you sit in a group. This might not happen when they sit alone in their house and do it. Because they will be all alone, they will have to search and everything. Their work totally depends on their individual ability. Here, they can share a lot of things; one or the other will be benefited with what they share, so they can perform much better. Interviewer: Interesting. OK. I think that's most of my questions. I'd like to ask a favor: is there any way that I could get photographs of your office? Interviewee: Not really. I do not have photographs as of now. I will take a snap and then get it to you. Will that be fine? Interviewer: Awesome. Thank you very, very much for your time. It's been very interesting. Good luck on your business as well, all right? Interviewee: OK. Interviewer: All right, bye. Interviewee: Bye-bye.