Lionbridge Smart Crowd Review

You may recall Lionbridge as one of the longtime "quality rating" contractors for Google - basically, a massive underpaid workforce of thousands that combs through websites deciding whether they should be updooted or downdooted in the search results.

"Smart Crowd" is Lionbridge's attempt to branch out into the microwork space, offering a site roughly comparable to Mechanical Turk. This is a world fraught with peril and shitty-paying jobs meant for the third world. Is Lionbridge offering anything better?

Welp ... honestly I'm not the best person in the world to ask as I didn't make it past their testing phase. But this is another one of those cases where the testing process plus some follow-up research told me all I need to know about the operation - in other words, AVOID.

TYPES OF WORK

Lionbridge Smart Crowd appears to offer tasks in the following categories at present:

• Language translation
• UI testing
• Some sort of tax classification task
• Transcription

There may be more, or they may vary over time, but these appear to be the bread-and-butter tasks of the platform.

Your first hoop to jump through is a reading comprehension test, which is offered in about a dozen languages. The English test has only 10 questions and is far from demanding.

You then have to pass a test to qualify for each individual task category. The site doesn't tell you this, but you get only one shot at each test.

At the time that I signed up, there were two tests available - one for some sort of unspecified tax classification task, and one for data entry.

The tax classification test was composed of 100 questions, each of which involved digging through some sprawling, poorly-written and poorly-formatted manual. It takes a long time to dig up an answer to each question, and even then it's impossible to be sure you're interpreting it correctly. The test is unpaid. I got through about four questions before deciding this was a massive waste of my time.

The data entry test is also unpaid, and asks you to key in handwritten numerical amounts. 160 of them. Why are 160 necessary? Who the hell knows. Another massive waste of time.

At this point, my impression was that if the company is run this way and thinks this is an acceptable screening method, they are going to be impossible to work with. They would have to pay way more than the usual microwork site to be worth putting up with all this, which I just can't see happening.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Granted, quitting on some tests is hardly a thorough assessment of a platform. I felt it was enough for me, but I have a comfortable freelance writing career and can turn my nose up at this sort of treatment. What about the Hongry Hustler with fewer options available to them?

Well, fear not my impoverished friend. I did my usual pokings into the forums and dark corners of the internet to get the Straight Poop from other workers who have actually been there and done that. These notes help to flesh out the picture of what Lionbridge Smart Crowd has to offer.

Some interesting tidbits are available from the more recent Glassdoor reviews. Most notably, there seems to be a cap of 20 hours per week for all contractors. Presumably, this is to hedge Lionbridge against the patchwork of rules delineating employees from contractors in different localities.

Here's one super-creepy review from Glassdoor that should give one SERIOUS pause about working with them:

"Access to your social media, main email account, computer, and phone are part of the contract. Meaning they can see what you're doing when you aren't working. Because you sign a contract with Lionbridge that allows them to monitor your online/phone activity, its hard to find support groups to connect with other LB employees on social media, because people are understandably afraid of getting let go. Take my advise and don't give them your main email account like they request, create a second email that you use just for Lionbridge and give them that, reading your emails is honestly much too invasive."

That seems to be for the search engine evaluation gig, but do they try to do this with other types of work? Will they in the future?

Lionbridge search engine raters are making around $14 per hour, which is consistent with what we already knew about them. Certainly not nearly enough to consider giving up all of your online privacy.

The best claim I can find for the microwork data entry tasks is a rate that amounts to less than US federal minimum wage - about $5 per hour. Oof. Totally not unexpected for a microwork site, though.

FINAL VERDICT - NOT RECOMMENDED TO ANYONE

Honestly, I was going to file this one under "might work for you" until I got to the bit about the creepy Big Brother monitoring of your whole computer and online activity. Even if that's just for search raters, it demonstrates that you cannot trust this company. That is an absolutely unacceptable term for any job, let alone one that barely pays more than most fast food jobs in America now.




Between that and the insane amount of test questions, I get the feeling this company is screening for desperate slaves. That ain't how you wanna go through life.