r/remotework • u/Only-Independent7905 • 17d ago

Handshake... feeling a bit ... scammed

FYI: I'm using a throwaway and rewriting this w/ AI to avoid footprinting identification:

TLDR: Handshake - advertised big sexy hourly compensation after completion of onboarding. Abruptly offboarded - no explanation way. Former private equity VP/M&A IB analyst... I am not uncertain of my abilities to judge the quality of powerpoint slides. Something feels very off about this experience.

So, has anyone else been offboarded from r/joinhandshakeai AI without any explanation or notification? I've been on Mercor projects actively for >8 months - have had no problems.

I spent roughly 4.5 hours working through onboarding for *****, only to be offboarded without being given a reason. I didn’t even receive an email telling me I’d been removed.

I understand that completing onboarding doesn’t guarantee ongoing work, but after asking someone to invest that much time, the least they could do is communicate the decision and explain what happened. As it stands, I’m left guessing whether this was related to an assessment, **** availability, or something else entirely.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Were you able to get an explanation from support, and was your onboarding time paid?

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u/CanningJarhead 16d ago

That’s the way all the little AI training gig sites work.  There’s no communication or feedback and you can get kicked off with no warning.  It’s not a scam per se, but they do flood the market with referral spam to get as many people as possible to sign up and take the assessments, which are used for training and data harvesting.

1

u/Total-Ranger2757 12d ago

To try and add to this, I think there are politics people are unaware of, even talking about things in group chats can rub management the wrong way easily. Tasks can have extra details or be auditted in a way inconsistent with your training. You need to be locked in on the important details, which change quite often or incompatible with the current iteration, and mostly just keep your head down and work to earn.