People who had previously felt paralyzed by their NDA’s began to talk. Helena, the conflict-avoidant moderator of the Mercor subreddit, worked overtime deleting furious rants from aggrieved workers who delighted in dropping names of the “secret projects”—something explicitly banned by the non-disclosure agreement every tasker must sign before being hired as an Independent Contractor.
Elsewhere, on another project, Handsome Swede was not faring well. Felled by Covid, he told his team leaders he could not make the minimum weekly requirement and was swiftly fired. He entered the melee once again to find yet another project.
The wages were dropping week by week. When I first started scrolling the contractor jobs in early 2025, companies like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Task-ify and Outlier were offering $150 an hour for “experts,” $35 to $75 an hour for “generalists.” Today, Mercor says the average hourly rate on its platform is $105. But in my searches across the industry near the start of 2026, the experts were often getting $50 an hour, and the entry-level grunt workers were getting as low as $16 —less than California minimum wage. Contracts were now referred to as “sprints.” The work had to be done, asap, as fast as possible, for employment that might last 24 hours. The urgency was paramount, self-important, and annoying as fuck.
The burnout has led many taskers to turn to the courts. Several lawsuits have alleged that Mercor is misclassifying its workers as independent contractors, pointing out that the demands of the job—frequent onboarding, infinite retraining, the need to check email and Slack several times a day, to be on call and perform at very short notice, the expectation that taskers will complete a certain number of hours every week—are indications of employment. But compared to regular employees, contractors receive almost no workplace protections against unpredictable scheduling, prohibitive work hours, denial of breaks, or retaliation from employers. Which feels like a big risk if, like me, you are tired of the bullshit and complain. Loudly. Often.
Christmas day came. I had not earned the additional $3-5K I thought Project Dead Language would have netted, and my bank account hovered around $14. Mired in existential panic and with only enough money to live off cereal, I accepted two different invites to work on an enormous $16-an-hour project that was in its final stages. It employed several thousand annotators across multiple platforms to perform incredibly boring objectives. The entire enterprise had the feeling of a bustling refugee camp that had been functioning long enough to cover essential needs, but not to be, like, comfortable. I’d already completed most of the onboarding steps. The most important thing, they emphasized in the literature, is to get on Slack.
I couldn’t locate the Slack.
I called the Zoom helpline.
“Do you just hang out here all day?” I asked a faceless man while, in another square, an elderly woman peered suspiciously into her camera wearing a nasal cannula attached to an oxygen tank, set against a background of palm trees. “Pretty much,” snorted the faceless man. “I hope they pay you well,” I said sincerely. “They don’t,” he responded, before informing me that I was already a member of the Slack channel I had spent two days waiting to join, and that I had missed five essential onboarding quizzes in a document I had failed to read.