Appen Butler Hill

Associate Data Processor

June - September 2021 • Plano, TX

What I liked

The type of work being performed was rather simplistic by nature, it just required a good amount of mental focus to get through. The payment ultimately became decent for the work performed, when I first started it was pretty "meh", nothing special, but they were able to get a raise for all the workers there which was nice to see. The training was paid, since this was with Appen Corporate and not via their self-work Appen Connect/Crowd platform. The environment I was in there was very welcoming, even if it was simply cubicle work, people were more than happy to talk and collaborate when necessary or desired. There was also some good opportunity to expand past the basic workload given enough experience and hard work.

What I wish was different

During the training period, they gave me a week to get through all the corporate onboarding material and train me in the task at hand - though I believe they had been improving the onboarding experience since I had started. An extension of the time to get through the material and training by another week would have been ideal since it generally required staying over about an extra hour each day to be able to get done with the material on time. Also, the part-time job I was there for was not allowed to be remote, but was definitely possible given how all of our work was done via a web interface. A reduction of the desire to exceed minimums would have been nice, I was usually able to get 10-20 more tasks than what would be the minimum, but management would usually often request to excel even further than that (which was very difficult to do except on days where the evaluated data was super basic compared to normal days).

Advice

From my experience, it was part-time + in person and that honestly felt like the right amount of work. With the tasks at hand, it was easy to pick up the pace and get chugging along but most days were just mentally draining by the end of the four hours. Pretty mind-numbing work of clicking, reading and continuing but it was still engaging enough most of the time to keep my interest. I don't believe my position really exists anymore (since to my knowledge, everyone in my position was laid off since the project was terminated - and the Plano office has since closed down) but I'd assume if anyone were to work for corporate-based analysis work, and not the fully remote/virtual platform they offer, this review would apply. Basic advice would be to be sharp with logical processing and be good at multitasking and focusing.

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