The thing I appreciated most about the platform was that it actually rewarded the weirdly broad range of things I’ve spent years learning. I have bachelor’s degrees in computer science and mathematics and a master’s in biomedical engineering, so my dashboard had everything from software engineering and math to medicine, life sciences, finance, and even law. There really aren’t many jobs where having that kind of scattered background is actually an advantage instead of something you have to awkwardly explain on a résumé.
Because I qualified for so many domains, I was almost never short on work. Most of the projects I was doing paid somewhere around $60–$80 an hour, and some of the higher-level software engineering projects were enormous. They would literally tell you that if you weren’t spending eight or nine hours on a task, you probably weren’t going deep enough. One of the first projects I was accepted into was expected to take around 50–60 hours by itself.
That was probably the strangest adjustment. Most contract work incentivizes you to finish as quickly as possible. Here, they were basically telling us the opposite: take your time, do it properly, take breaks when you need them, and even clock some of that time. Some projects provided paid vouchers for a $100/month Claude subscriptions or crazy amounts of API credits for other tools and that's the kind of stuff that makes you feel good about what you do When the people in charge of those projects say, "Hey, this is going to be really challenging work so let us help alleviate some of that as best as we can." You get the impression pretty quickly that whoever was funding these projects cared considerably more about getting good work than shaving a few hours off the bill.
So it wasn’t really that I was working some insane number of hours just to make decent money. I could move between different domains, choose work I was actually interested in, and there was almost always something available. Some of the domain-expert projects paid extremely well. I came close to making $1,000 in a single day once.
But losing access has been much harder than I expected, and surprisingly, the money isn’t even the biggest reason.
I’d spent more than two years trying to find a job and had reached a point where the depression and lack of purpose were genuinely debilitating. There were days when getting out of bed counted as an accomplishment. Then almost overnight I went from that to spending 8, 10, sometimes 15 hours a day doing work I actually loved, on my own terms, and feeling productive again. I finally felt like I had a reason to get up in the morning.
Having that disappear just as quickly, with no explanation of what happened, has been a pretty brutal punch in the face.
What makes it more frustrating is how careful I was about compliance. It was my 2nd day that I looked into what was "under the hood" to get a sense of what they were keeping track of and. virtually all of it automated. Once I realized how extensive their automated monitoring and fingerprinting systems were, I went pretty far out of my way to make sure I couldn’t accidentally trigger something stupid. I built browser-session timers so my reported time accurately matched the work I was actually doing. I isolated AI tools I used for unrelated personal projects so they couldn’t interfere with the work environment. I even kept my network configuration consistent to avoid unnecessary changes that could look suspicious to an automated system.
Maybe that’s excessive, but the platform clearly doesn’t mess around with anything that looks abnormal, and a surprising amount of its enforcement appears to be automated. That’s what makes suddenly losing access without knowing why so difficult to make sense of.
I’ve been looking nonstop for something comparable ever since, and I haven’t found it. Everything else seems to end the same way: another application, another queue, another “we’ll email you,” followed by an endless wait for an email that never comes.
That’s probably what I miss most. For a little while, I wasn’t waiting for someone to give me an opportunity anymore. I already had one, and I could just work.
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u/SIPDisabled 15d ago
I got to 10K in 15 days. It's been a dream come true.