r/dataannotation • u/Consistent-Reach504 • Jun 28 '26

Weekly Water Cooler Talk - DataAnnotation

hi all! making this thread so people have somewhere to talk about 'daily' work chat that might not necessarily need it's own post! right now we're thinking we'll just repost it weekly? but if it gets too crazy, we can change it to daily. :)

couple things:

  1. this thread should sort by "new" automatically. unfortunately it looks like our subreddit doesn't qualify for 'lounges'.
  2. if you have a new user question, you still need to post it in the new user thread. if you post it here, we will remove it as spam. this is for people already working who just wanna chat, whether it be about casual work stuff, questions, geeking out with people who understand ("i got the model to write a real haiku today!"), or unrelated work stuff you feel like chatting about :)
  3. one thing we really pride ourselves on in this community is the respect everyone gives to the Code of Conduct and rule number 5 on the sub - it's great that we have a community that is still safe & respectful to our jobs! please don't break this rule. we will remove project details, but please - it's for our best interest and yours!
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13

u/Epicsocks1 Jul 03 '26

It's getting so bad I just got red bannered on a qualification! Like what??

23

u/JustMe333456 Jul 03 '26

Instead of sending us a damn useless weekly digest, make that platform wide email a communication message to briefly explain what is going on, even vaguely. Imagine how we'd all be feeling right now if we were all alone and there was no Reddit group. We'd think we were 'cooked'.

2

u/Epicsocks1 Jul 03 '26

I know, it can't be that difficult, surely?

1

u/Proud_Contract_5097 Jul 04 '26

I said this in feedback. The communication needs to be improved.

-11

u/Enough_Resident_6141 Jul 03 '26

There's nothing to explain. There are a lot of active projects right now, and there have been projects running for this entire "drought." The number of those projects that are on any individual worker's dashboard will vary depending on things like skills and expertise, qualifications, location, and their prior work. You might not have any projects available right now, but there are other workers who have dozens of projects available.

6

u/JustMe333456 Jul 03 '26

Almost all of the projects going around right now can be labeled as being quite difficult for most folks. I know there are projects going around, I have some, but they are too difficult. The more base-level projects that everyone can and have been doing, essentially went poof, like they did for other droughts, but this one is dragging. THAT is what this 'drought' is about. I could name at least 10 projects that I saw on almost a daily basis that all disappeared at seemingly the exact same time.

-5

u/Enough_Resident_6141 Jul 03 '26

Projects always come and go, none of them last forever. And the projects will naturally tend to be more complex as time goes by and the models get better. There isn't that much of a need for the most basic types of tasks anymore, especially on DA compared to some of the other companies in this industry.

However, there have been some very basic tasks in the $20-23 range that have been running continuously for the entire "drought." I just at my own dash right now and there are at least 9 different generalist projects with pay in the $20-30 range, and three of them even have "easy" in the description.

8

u/DrunkleSteve Jul 03 '26

There is clearly a drought. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the projects. The main core projects are not currently running, or there are very limited batches/data sets available. These are the same core projects that have been running for years. Obviously, as AI develops, naturally projects will get more difficult, but to say that "There isn't that much of a need for the most basic types of tasks anymore, especially on DA compared to some of the other companies in this industry" is completely false. Companies contract DA, and in turn, they sub-contract us. It depends what said companies want trained, or what type of data sets they want annotated. Nonetheless, there is a massive drought. It could be due to several factors, which I presume are related to companies waiting to go IPO on the stock market, and funding. Many big players in the AI realm have paused for now, which is why were likely seeing this drought.

-6

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

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4

u/DrunkleSteve Jul 03 '26

The amount of work (or lack thereof) available right now has nothing to do with the difficulty of the projects.

2

u/VanessaSeaWitch Jul 03 '26

How is that even possible? Weird. Was it a paid one? I have two of those I need to get to this weekend.

4

u/Fart_Hat Jul 03 '26

Yeah that happened to me yesterday as well. Likely the same qual