The Apprentice: Sixteen budding entrepreneurs.. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard candidates claiming to have grown their own business "from nothing", pointing out how young they were when they started, what exceptionally hard workers they are, etc.
Yet when it comes down to the tasks, these supposedly intelligent, talented professionals fail to plan their tasks, wasting time arguing instead of trying to come up with more ideas or improve the ones they have. They conduct market research and then completely ignore it, and turn up to meetings with prospective clients without even sorting their figures out first!
I couldn't do what these people do: I'm not a salesperson, and I hate approaching strangers, especially if it is to push a product or pester them with a list of questions. I also hate arguing with people, and that seems to be one of the biggest parts of "business" as seen on The Apprentice. Arguing and shouting to be heard.. or shouting to drown out the other's voice.
If you have to shout at people to make them listen to your idea, they aren't actually interested in listening at all. They've either made their mind up already, or won't listen because you're not in their clique.
The bitching and shouting was the reason I wouldn't watch The Apprentice at first. I only ended up watching because I caught an episode towards the end of a series, when the most disruptive candidates had been kicked out, and the focus was brought more to the tasks.
This week's task was Household Gadget, and the teams ended up with a futuristic-looking kitchen compost compressor (a bin!) and a rather ineffective splash screen for the bath.
The girls took ages to come up with ideas during their planning stage, and eventually came up with a tap cosy and a splash screen for the bath. While the project manager, Jane, was quick to criticise the tap cosy, there was no real discussion of the pros and cons of the splash screen. Instead, the girls allowed themselves to get excited about their new product, instead of thinking about whether it was a good product..
My first thought about the splash screen was that it would make it much harder to reach and support a small child in the bath.. and a larger child should be starting to learn not to splash the entire bathroom anyway!
Another problem was raised later, during the pitches, when the man from Lakeland pointed out that children would likely draw on the bath as well as the screen.. something the team might have realised if they had discussed it a little more.
During the market research, the tap cosy came out as the better product. However, Jane did not want to make this product.. she hadn't liked the idea to begin with. She ignored the market research and pushed through the splash screen instead. When the prototype actually came out.. well.. it looked cheap, and from the girls quick test, it didn't stick properly to the side of the bath, and it certainly didn't prevent splashing!
Azhar, PM of the boys' team, disregarded both market research and his entire sub-team, and was also completely unapologetic at having wasted their time and efforts. Ignoring team members, or devaluing them like this, is stupid. It discourages effort and thought, because who wants to work hard on something that's going to be ignored anyway?
I wasn't really keen on either of the boys' ideas: gloves with scouring elements might be useful, but not really inspiring. As for the bin.. I couldn't imagine that it'd smell any better than a normal kitchen waste bin after a week or two, and quickly be hidden out of sight! Again, I heard no mention of how they might deal with problems with their product..
I'm getting used to seeing PMs ignore the research, or ignore an idea in favour of their own. Lately I watch them do it, and hope to see them put firmly in their place when they fail because of those bad decisions.
I think the PM assumes they'll win favour by claiming to have single-handedly come up with an idea, designed it and pitched it. None of these candidates are in it for anyone other than themselves, of course. I would imagine Lord Sugar sees past that, though.. a good leader should make use of their team's strengths, rather than try to undermine or compete with them.
So.. the teams make a mess of planning and researching their products. What else could they get wrong?
The figures.
Asking Amazon to place an order for a million units may not sound like a bad thing to most people.. but these candidates are already in business for themselves, so somebody amongst the team should have had an idea of a reasonable starting order.
The figures were worked out in the back of a car by a member of the team who admitted that she struggled with them. Why was she doing the figures when she wasn't capable, and when they are so important to the task? Why did nobody else check them?
These supposed professionals walked into a meeting with bad figures, and ended up looking stupid.. like so many teams before them.
Next week's episode is all about condiments.. the teams are to make their own, and from the clips I see we can expect to see at least one burnt mess!
Friday, March 30, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Reviewing Amazon Mechanical Turk
I saw Amazon's Mechanical Turk a little while ago, and figured I might as well give it a try and see whether you really can make money at home.
I tried several of the tasks out: if you're going to judge something you should give it a fair try. Overall, I wasn't impressed.. unless you're able to get at the really well paid tasks (audio transcription seems to be the place) you're only going to earn pennies per hour.. and being in the UK, I ran into problems with the payment side.
What is Mechanical Turk?
For businesses, Mechanical Turk gives access to a global workforce of people, on-demand. For workers, it's a way of making money online, doing a variety of tasks in your own time.
Tasks include adding comments on somebody else's blog, rewriting text, searching for videos, transcribing audio or video, or completing surveys for university research. Payment is made when the requester is satisfied.. so this weeds out the sort of person who would enter rubbish and expect to get paid for it, though it does add the risk that a requester might just take the work and reject payment to get it for free. I assume Amazon has something in place to check that requesters don't cheat, though.
Working..
The first thing I noticed once I'd signed up is that the pay for some of the tasks is abysmal.
I bugtested websites in my last job. I liked testing, so thought I'd check these tasks out first. The HITs I found for website testing here were more about feedback than actual testing.
I took one anyway.. a website selling cards and a variety of gifts. The questions were about the look of the page, colours, whether you could find things easily.. easy enough. However, it also expected you to compare price and availability of items on similar websites. This part was unclear.. was I expected to check one or two items, or be thorough and check something from each category.. and there was quite a range of products.
Doing a "non-thorough" job might just lead to your work being rejected, but when they're paying $0.30, do they really expect you to do their pricing research for them too?
Getting what I thought was a reasonable answer to these questions took around half an hour. Doing more of these tasks would work out (in pounds) as 40p an hour.. assuming the requester didn't reject your work because you hadn't been thorough enough in comparing their prices vs competitors.
Forty pence an hour: the National Minimum Wage in the UK is £6.08.. I know this is a "make money at home" deal, but that's a serious difference there.
Moving on..
I found a task to transcribe business cards.. you're provided with scanned images of cards, and the task is to copy the info into a form: name, address line 1, 2, phone number, etc. Low pay again.. these were around $0.02.. but I figured these would be easy enough to do while listening to music, as well as being the kind of thing you could spend 15 mins on here or there.
The first two were training cards, which checked your input against their records.. fine. I went for the next one.. the first "real" one.. and it was upside-down and horribly blurred. Rotating and zooming this made no difference at all to the readability, and I couldn't even guess at what it said!
One of Mechanical Turk's features is being able to take or leave tasks as you please. I skipped the HIT for the blurred image.. I guess over time, requesters will see that some HITs always get skipped, and check or remove them.
I squinted my way through one after that which was justabout legible, then skipped more.. then gave up. At $0.02 per HIT, these would be okay if they popped up on screen and you were able to just copy them quickly and move on to the next. Low pay.. but low effort. However, squinting at text, and zooming and rotating slows you down, and therefore lowers the hourly pay. Worse, any time spent on a HIT that you end up unable to complete is completely unpaid. I think I submitted one good HIT while skipping five.. I spent more time on unpaid skipping than I did on low-paid typing.
I saw, but didn't even touch, tasks such as "find a piece of jewellery like this one worn by somebody like Snooki in whatever show", or "find the address for this generically-named-business". These tasks typically paid only 1 cent per hit.. wearing out their worth by the time you've finished reading the full instructions! I wouldn't even like to hazard a guess at how long it would take to track down suitable results for some of these.. and what if you can't actually find something, or something the requester likes? No pay.
The well paid jobs in the system seem to be audio transcription, which require a qualification test before you can do them, but pay between $8 and $16 per HIT. I applied for a test for one of them, but heard nothing back.. so couldn't even try them.
The next best paying HITs are surveys.. mostly surveys from some university research department, but also the odd bit of market research. These pay around $0.50 to $1, with some getting up towards $2.. and weren't too bad to do.. some of the psychology experiments were even interesting.
Payment..
Payment is made after the requester has approved it, and once you've earned more than $10 you can get it cashed out in the form of a gift voucher - to your Amazon.com account.
When I signed up, it created an Amazon.com account with all the same details as my Amazon.co.uk account. Mechanical Turk is global.. so they advertise. But the payment.. the whole reason you'd actually bother to work for the site.. seemingly only works out for the Americans, or those with a US postal address.
This is where Mechanical Turk falls flat on its face for me. Here's why..
I earned about $16, so I decided to cash it and buy some pretty nail polishes.. it'd be guilt-free spending in a way, as it wouldn't be asking my boyfriend to pay. However, I discovered that many companies on Amazon.com won't ship a .com order to my address in the UK.
I eventually found a company that would ship.. and then got hit with the horror that is shipping and handling. Two bottles of nail polish: about $8. With P&P: about $15. On top of that, they wanted to charge an additional $20 in shipping and handling. Obviously I'm not going to pay that!
I had a quick look at other items, but they all had the same issues.. extortionate shipping and handling. I'd be better of spending the shipping and handling fee on buying the item itself from the UK, and not bothering with my Amazon.com voucher in the first place!
Right now, what this means is that I can't spend the money I earned via Mechanical Turk.. and so there is simply no point me doing any more work for the site.
I tried several of the tasks out: if you're going to judge something you should give it a fair try. Overall, I wasn't impressed.. unless you're able to get at the really well paid tasks (audio transcription seems to be the place) you're only going to earn pennies per hour.. and being in the UK, I ran into problems with the payment side.
What is Mechanical Turk?
For businesses, Mechanical Turk gives access to a global workforce of people, on-demand. For workers, it's a way of making money online, doing a variety of tasks in your own time.
Tasks include adding comments on somebody else's blog, rewriting text, searching for videos, transcribing audio or video, or completing surveys for university research. Payment is made when the requester is satisfied.. so this weeds out the sort of person who would enter rubbish and expect to get paid for it, though it does add the risk that a requester might just take the work and reject payment to get it for free. I assume Amazon has something in place to check that requesters don't cheat, though.
Working..
The first thing I noticed once I'd signed up is that the pay for some of the tasks is abysmal.
I bugtested websites in my last job. I liked testing, so thought I'd check these tasks out first. The HITs I found for website testing here were more about feedback than actual testing.
I took one anyway.. a website selling cards and a variety of gifts. The questions were about the look of the page, colours, whether you could find things easily.. easy enough. However, it also expected you to compare price and availability of items on similar websites. This part was unclear.. was I expected to check one or two items, or be thorough and check something from each category.. and there was quite a range of products.
Doing a "non-thorough" job might just lead to your work being rejected, but when they're paying $0.30, do they really expect you to do their pricing research for them too?
Getting what I thought was a reasonable answer to these questions took around half an hour. Doing more of these tasks would work out (in pounds) as 40p an hour.. assuming the requester didn't reject your work because you hadn't been thorough enough in comparing their prices vs competitors.
Forty pence an hour: the National Minimum Wage in the UK is £6.08.. I know this is a "make money at home" deal, but that's a serious difference there.
Moving on..
I found a task to transcribe business cards.. you're provided with scanned images of cards, and the task is to copy the info into a form: name, address line 1, 2, phone number, etc. Low pay again.. these were around $0.02.. but I figured these would be easy enough to do while listening to music, as well as being the kind of thing you could spend 15 mins on here or there.
The first two were training cards, which checked your input against their records.. fine. I went for the next one.. the first "real" one.. and it was upside-down and horribly blurred. Rotating and zooming this made no difference at all to the readability, and I couldn't even guess at what it said!
One of Mechanical Turk's features is being able to take or leave tasks as you please. I skipped the HIT for the blurred image.. I guess over time, requesters will see that some HITs always get skipped, and check or remove them.
I squinted my way through one after that which was justabout legible, then skipped more.. then gave up. At $0.02 per HIT, these would be okay if they popped up on screen and you were able to just copy them quickly and move on to the next. Low pay.. but low effort. However, squinting at text, and zooming and rotating slows you down, and therefore lowers the hourly pay. Worse, any time spent on a HIT that you end up unable to complete is completely unpaid. I think I submitted one good HIT while skipping five.. I spent more time on unpaid skipping than I did on low-paid typing.
I saw, but didn't even touch, tasks such as "find a piece of jewellery like this one worn by somebody like Snooki in whatever show", or "find the address for this generically-named-business". These tasks typically paid only 1 cent per hit.. wearing out their worth by the time you've finished reading the full instructions! I wouldn't even like to hazard a guess at how long it would take to track down suitable results for some of these.. and what if you can't actually find something, or something the requester likes? No pay.
The well paid jobs in the system seem to be audio transcription, which require a qualification test before you can do them, but pay between $8 and $16 per HIT. I applied for a test for one of them, but heard nothing back.. so couldn't even try them.
The next best paying HITs are surveys.. mostly surveys from some university research department, but also the odd bit of market research. These pay around $0.50 to $1, with some getting up towards $2.. and weren't too bad to do.. some of the psychology experiments were even interesting.
Payment..
Payment is made after the requester has approved it, and once you've earned more than $10 you can get it cashed out in the form of a gift voucher - to your Amazon.com account.
When I signed up, it created an Amazon.com account with all the same details as my Amazon.co.uk account. Mechanical Turk is global.. so they advertise. But the payment.. the whole reason you'd actually bother to work for the site.. seemingly only works out for the Americans, or those with a US postal address.
This is where Mechanical Turk falls flat on its face for me. Here's why..
I earned about $16, so I decided to cash it and buy some pretty nail polishes.. it'd be guilt-free spending in a way, as it wouldn't be asking my boyfriend to pay. However, I discovered that many companies on Amazon.com won't ship a .com order to my address in the UK.
I eventually found a company that would ship.. and then got hit with the horror that is shipping and handling. Two bottles of nail polish: about $8. With P&P: about $15. On top of that, they wanted to charge an additional $20 in shipping and handling. Obviously I'm not going to pay that!
I had a quick look at other items, but they all had the same issues.. extortionate shipping and handling. I'd be better of spending the shipping and handling fee on buying the item itself from the UK, and not bothering with my Amazon.com voucher in the first place!
Right now, what this means is that I can't spend the money I earned via Mechanical Turk.. and so there is simply no point me doing any more work for the site.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Setting Up
So, I've fiddled with the themes and multitude of options, ranging from eye-bleeding to boring as hell.. in the end, this simple template type seems to work best.. at least for now!
Just updating my links now..
May Contain Spoilers is my primary site, almost completely gaming or games industry related. Over time it's become way too focused for the non-gaming stuff, and that's really the reason I've set up this blog.
The next three links are sites by friends.. Kovah's Art is a blog and art portfolio, 15 mins Walk with a Camera is a photography blog, and My General Hate for Red 20 is all about bingo.. it's not just for the oldies, apparently!
Just updating my links now..
May Contain Spoilers is my primary site, almost completely gaming or games industry related. Over time it's become way too focused for the non-gaming stuff, and that's really the reason I've set up this blog.
The next three links are sites by friends.. Kovah's Art is a blog and art portfolio, 15 mins Walk with a Camera is a photography blog, and My General Hate for Red 20 is all about bingo.. it's not just for the oldies, apparently!
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