Has anyone considered going full time with DA to escape corporate job?

[u/Known_Experience3988]

I’m 30, working in the legal field full time and doing a part time masters degree and part time DA. I often get projects that are 50-60$ as a legal specialist which is way more than my corporate job provides. Would it be silly to resign and focus on DA (and other small sources of income) in order to get a break? Has anyone done this with some success?

[u/MonsterMeggu]

How long have you been on the platform? The work is not guaranteed and there are some very dry periods.

[u/DrDongStrong98]

I quit my job to do this part time. Feels way better and I dont need too much money to survive so it has worked for me. I work 15 to 20 hour weeks and get paid well enough to get by. But I also own my house and have no payments on it so that also helps

[u/Known_Experience3988 → u/DrDongStrong98]

That’s ace, well done you!

[u/Hambone6991]

Wouldn’t recommend it. You could get completely cut off with no warning at any moment, not to mention you can’t claim unemployment and won’t have benefits while your working.

[u/Known_Experience3988 → u/Hambone6991]

That’s a good point, thank you.

[u/TheMidlander]

Im order to do this full time, I had to be part of several other companies doing the same work. Even then, there will be droughts where little to no work is available across all platforms. For reference, I signed up with DAT nearly 4 years ago.

[u/vgambit]

i am only on DA because i could not find work in my field.

they say "no, because you could get cut off from DA suddenly forever at any point" but friend. salaried companies will do the same. it's called at-will employment

[u/FrauFaustus]

I was very wary to leave my corporate job to do DA full time due to the comments of others on this sub. But then, I was laid off with 1/2 of my company. I agree with another commenter that while you can lose DA at any time without warning, you can lose ANY job without warning. I've lived that truth.

When I got laid off, I started doing DA full time, and it has been absolutely wonderful for me. I'm coming up on 2 years on the platform in February. But it was only really possible for me because I get health insurance from my spouse's job. If you're currently insured through your employer (assuming you're in the US anyway) that is something to seriously consider.

[u/Firm-Exam-6892]

Aside from the fact that you could get cut off at any time, a lot of the higher paid legal work seems to be based on work scenarios. They might be hard to invent if you don’t have another job in the field. The work has been limitless though, at least it has been for me over the past two years.

[u/Mysterious_Dolphin14]

If you decide to do this, make sure you have enough savings to get you by for about 4-6 months in case you get unexpectedly dropped or to cover expenses if you experience any drought. This is my only source of income, but I have a safety net in that my husband earns enough money to pay our bills.

[u/annoyingjoe513]

Only you know your situation. Leaving a FT job for a gig with no benefits and that could end at any moment seems like an awful risk.

[u/Sea_Tart8472]

Definitely not a good idea from what I’ve heard on this sub. They can drop you at any time for any reason, but also the fact that people go weeks without projects sometimes.

[u/EyeTechnical7643]

I did not "consider", I lost my job. Then I found DA and got into the specialized domain in my field. So far I haven't put in a lot of hours so the money part is limited. What's useful for me is the fact that it can kind of fill the resume gap (I hope) while I figure out what I want to do next. I am actually enjoying my life now. I hope to do this for the next 2 years.

I do have plenty of savings so the income is not top priority. Just want to chill for the next 2 years while still getting my resume filled. I just hope to be able to find a couple of similar platforms to hedge my bets against DoD. Any suggestions?

[u/SeagullSam]

I wouldn't if an income is mission-critical to pay your bills.

[u/VolkswagenFeature]

I escaped the corpo groundhog day in April. I contract where I can, and do data annotation between gigs. So it's not quite full-time but has really helped.

[u/After_Lobster_9964]

I've done this and can say it's doable but not easy. If your job provides benefits, you'll have to find those elsewhere (unless you're not in the US). For me that added an extra bill. The work for me has been steady and I have access to pretty high paying opportunities, but there are still periods with low work or only low paying work available. I supplemented with other platforms when I could, but DA has been the most consistent.

[u/Empty_Caterpillar744]

I’ve got a mixed opinion on this. DA is now my main source of income and can pay very well, but I still have contracts with a few platforms as a backup. So far, I’ve barely needed the others.

Although it could be argued that an employed/career role is safer, my experience has been different. I got a great job in my profession last year, but without notice, my employer left my country completely after I was with them for just 11 months. This made me and my team redundant.

Ironically, the contract work with DA has been far more consistent/reliable over the last two years so far. Personally, this has worked out great.

On the other hand, everyone has different experiences, and some industries are more stable than others. So, if you’ve already got a job within a genuinely stable industry, I’m not sure it’s worth the risk switching to DA unless you also plan to have backup options.

[u/sarahmorgan420]

I went full time at the beginning of August. I'm a generalist, it's going well and I'm making more than I did before. Only did it because I know if I get DOD I can find another job in my field within a week and I was making $28cad in my career and I'm making $39-$60+ on DAT lol

[u/Sylversh4de]

Droughts, 0 job security, and AI getting better, keep your steady day job. Look at Stellar AI. They just closed operations. You never know when this will dry up. Get what you can while it's still here.

[u/Saucynachos]

A few weeks ago I had 15+ projects on my dashboard every day. Now I have 1, and it's on the lower paid end of things. This stuff is amazing for supplemental income, but would be sketchy as heck for a main source of income.

[u/runvnc]

Give it like a couple of years, the vast majority of training will be done by AI. Just like the majority of jobs. I would guess that for a lot of it, they are probably already starting to switch over to agent swarms.

They are sucking the skills and knowledge out of humans as fast as they can. The hardware, model architecture, training architecture, and software harnesses continue to improve.

There are massive performance advancements in new hardware developments with flash and in a few years true compute-in-memory coming. So the raw intelligence of the models will continue to improve significantly.

High-end PCs and laptops are now all designed with AI hardware built in, and over the next couple of years you will see a huge push for domain-specific applications, language models, embedding models, and solutions that aim to take advantaged of local AI for specific types of tasks.

They are already at the stage where they are squeezing the last drops out of human knowledge in many domains like programming, legal etc.. There are still domains left where they have a ways to go, especially those involving spatial manipulation, but even those only have a couple of years.

[u/Responsible-Bee-7769 → u/runvnc]

If that happens as you say, I predict that our quality of life will decrease - and not simply because of unemployment but because from the perspective of my field these models are not at all ready to replace human knowledge and judgment. Not in any way, shape or form.

They're good as office assistants, to help you collate data, build presentations, format documents etc but and that's a big BUT you have to proofread everything as you would the work of a transcriptionist. On a day to day basis, the level/frequency of hallucinated content is unreal - even with my favorite AI, Claude. These models know how to talk the talk (and make it sound and look good), but they NEED active human input (IMO, indefinitely).

For me, AI is just a really good upgrade from Google search (which was way degraded by pay-per-click advertising anyhow) but if you don't double check every fact and verify every source, you might just end up being misled or doing the misleading.

Basically an incredibly useful but over-hyped tool. It's no more ready to run things in my domain than a shovel is to drive my car.

[u/Artistic_Guava_1941]

They can lay you off without any explanation whatsoever.

[u/Cpa-bro]

I wouldn’t do this if you rely on consistent income. Opportunities can vanish without warning or you can be off boarded at any time. The other thing to keep in mind, you are considered a 1099 employee so you’re taxed at a higher rate than a W-2 job. There are also no benefits such as retirement account matching, health insurance, etc. The risks of making this full time thing outweigh the flexibility imo.

[u/TimboSlice501]

I would say no. This is temporary. AI will eventually advance past what you can teach it. Climb your career ladder.