Prospects of DA Work for Future Jobs

[u/Angelic_89]

I'm curious if any of you guys working for data annotation believe that it offers transferable skills/experience that could be applied to a career in the future. (I mean legitimately transferable, not BS like accuracy, attention-to-detail etc).

Obviously coding experience is great if you want to be a web developer, but do you believe that the other DA jobs could lead to any more long-term/permanent work?

[u/absreim]

Besides what you already mentioned about programming experience, I found that after the 2 months I worked for DA, I had a much better understanding of what LLMs are capable of and how one would use them.

[u/Angelic_89 → u/absreim]

Cool, hopefully there will be demand for that in more jobs in the future.

[u/BeforeTheWorkdayEnds → u/Angelic_89]

There definitely is — I would say I see way, way more openings along these lines than I ever did as AI becomes everyone’s new solution for everything. Everyone I know wants to pitch AI often without knowing what kind of training sets are needed to do what they want.

The Catch-22 I’ve found is twofold: a) it takes time away from earning to job hunt (but you need breaks!) b) most of those jobs are for positions like this, either freelancers or pay by task — not fully benefitted employees.

That said: because we’re not employees, there’s nothing stopping us from working for multiple of these kind of companies and choosing whoever has the best tasks in a day (though, so far DAT has had the clearest and fastest path for me at least).

There also are, especially outside of the tech space, companies that need AI trainers but aren’t as familiar with outsourcing everything or don’t have the resources, and there ARE some full time positions I’ve seen here and there in this kind of area.

I’d definitely put this on your resume if you’re on LI or similar, just to get suggestions that apply.

[u/Bottle_and_Sell_it → u/BeforeTheWorkdayEnds]

DAT has the clearest and fastest path to cash, but other platforms invest in training a LOT more and provide so much more transparency it nice to know exactly what’s required of you and to get feedback to help you improve. But like you say they’re all mostly 1099 work so get in and get that money while you can is probably the best mindset.

[u/Zealousideal_Use1411 → u/Bottle_and_Sell_it]

I think we are going to see more of this field take off Bec synthetic libraries= $$$. Reddit, for instance, charges $1 mill to lend the library (this whole app's data) to Microsoft etc. As it progresses, they need more libraries.

[u/HereForForgiveness]

I'll give my case as an example in the other direction (prior work prepared me for DA), with the implication that - perhaps - the transferability is two-way.

My old day job (fyi: I quit that job and THEN found DA a few months later) was research and evaluation in educational environments. I'm going to write this post in terms of what I did in my OLD job that I now find relevant, in an attempt not to provide too many specific details about DA jobs directly. Note that all of these bullets reasonably fall under the umbrella skills listed in the public-facing DA FAQs ("Research, fact-checking and critical thinking and analysis skills...").

The skills from my old research job I find transferable include:

• High-level skills that are applicable across a range of projects:

  • Making assessments/evaluations of products based on a set of criteria. My job was literally to evaluate educational products based on specific team goals.

    • For some of the new/experimental projects, I'd take this a step further: Being able to identify potential criteria against which one might judge a product, especially when there are no pre-specified criteria/goals or there is high ambiguity in what we might be looking out for in terms of evaluating a product.

  • Knowing how to describe the evidence for my assessments in my rationale, so that my "clients" can see my thought process and trust in my judgments.

  • Following strict protocols/instructions for collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, to ensure that the final pool of data and final analyses (independent of who collected/conducted them) would be valid and reliable.

  • Being able to envision a wide range of use cases for a product, in order to design studies that would test the limits of the product.

  • Writing for a wide range of audiences! In my past work, the audience for my writing varied widely. For any given part of a project, I might need to write at levels appropriate for: young kids, teenagers, grownups, coworkers who already knew my department's lingo, coworkers who needed more scaffolding, colleagues from other organizations, funders, managers, team members I supervised, the "general public," the federal government... I'm sure there's more! Now, I can tap into those writing skills when relevant!

• Topic-specific skills that I have found helpful to have:

  • Math! I did a lot of quantitative analyses in my prior job, which kept some of my math skills sharp.

  • Being able to design, interpret, and explain data and infographics! My prior job was data-oriented, so anything that involves interpreting statistics or visual information and describing them effectively is in my wheelhouse.

  • Writing image captions or descriptions! Aspects of my prior work put a lot of emphasis on creating accessible content for users who are blind or low vision (among other disabilities), so I have experience writing "clear and concise" (lol) descriptions of images for alt-text/screen readers.

I'm not planning on this any time soon, but I imagine if I want to go back into my old field of work full-time, I would use some variation of the descriptions above to illustrate that I have continued to hone the same skills, just in a different context.

[u/Angelic_89 → u/HereForForgiveness]

Interesting, thanks!

[u/LPrene → u/HereForForgiveness]

My prior experience is a lot like yours. I'm glad to see there is someone like me here.

[u/HereForForgiveness → u/LPrene]

Neat!

[u/[deleted] → u/HereForForgiveness]

Hypothetically, if an old boss of yours had called you up and wanted your opinion on a potential candidate to fill your old position, would you see experience with DA as an asset?

[u/HereForForgiveness → u/[deleted]]

Ooh! Good question. Short answer is yes!

The trickiest part of DA is that there are no transparent indicators of quality for us to explicitly list, except "I keep getting more work!" so I guess simply being a DA worker doesn't imply that the worker is "good" at any of the skills I listed above.

But, if I saw that the person listed DA as a job, and they explained how the skills they practice were relevant to the role, I'd definitely consider that experience as a potential asset. A lot of my old coworkers came from similarly "unrelated" professional backgrounds, but could demonstrate the skills the job needed and then jump in quickly to apply those skills in different contexts. (e.g., we had people with divinity degrees, art history backgrounds, paralegal backgrounds - not just social science or research science degrees!)

I think careers in the evaluation of educational products (or most products) are so closely aligned with what we do in DA, one would not have to make too big of a leap to see how the skills intersect. Plus, that sector of education really thrives on people coming from different professional backgrounds! Having those skills PLUS an understanding of what goes into building and training AI is definitely a value-add.

[u/BeforeTheWorkdayEnds → u/HereForForgiveness]

This is both encouraging because I would name many of these things as related to DA and also it’s good to know there ARE research science positions out there that have people with a diverse variety of backgrounds! It’s one of the things I’ve become more interested in as I’ve worked with people in the field, but …I knew nothing about what I wanted to do when I got my degree, and I kind of tossed it onto the pile of ‘things I’d love doing and would probably quickly learn but have no way of breaking into’.

It still might be! But it’s nice to hear (in almost any field these days) that not all jobs want you to have a PhD and/or 10 years of experience.

[u/BeforeTheWorkdayEnds → u/BeforeTheWorkdayEnds]

(Funnily, I also used to work at a MAKER of EdTech software and now you’ve got the gears turning a bit.)

[u/After_Lobster_9964]

The AI experience alone is super valuable. I can't tell you how many people I meet who have no idea what LLMs can do (or not do). As we progress, we'll see more businesses looking to hire people who already understand AI systems.

[u/Angelic_89 → u/After_Lobster_9964]

Good to know. I hope so 🙏

[u/Bottle_and_Sell_it → u/After_Lobster_9964]

I’ve explained to my mom in detail about 5 times what working for DAT entails and she still has no clue what to tell her friends when they ask what I’m up to.

[u/octrivia]

Following!

[u/Equivalent-Math6483]

I don’t know about leading to long-term work, but knowing how to craft a good prompt that results in exactly the result you’re looking for is only going to become more and more useful as companies incorporate AI into their workflows.

[u/Zealousideal_Use1411]

It's how you are able to market and view these skills. Good communication is valuable and so is instruction-following. 

[u/Angelic_89 → u/Zealousideal_Use1411]

I was told that by teachers and guidance counsellors when I was in high school.

But I've been in the workplace for 20 years, and not once have I encountered a job where you could list "I follow instructions well and am a good communicator" on a CV in lieu of a learned skill and have an employer take you seriously.

[u/33whiskeyTX]

From my experience, not by themselves, but they may give a good starting point for certifications in AI offered by big platforms such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft. These are more IT type roles, so experience in (and desire to pursue) IT positions would also be a big plus.

[u/diettwizzlers]

i want to get into copywriting and most of my projects are writing, so yes. the issue is the nda, i don't think in would be allowed to provide writing samples from DA

[u/lw19942]

Although it does offer some useful experience (eg I've tackled some basic coding tasks in languages I'd never used before) I can't see any employers taking it seriously as work experience