I’ve hit rock bottom on this. I want a basic ~$20+ per hour job where I answer calls, chats, emails and help people with whatever they need from home. I don’t mind working nights, long hours, overtime, holidays, I have basically nothing to do.
I have experience, I have technical skills, customer support skills, I have led 2 teams, switched to data entry, but the last close to 100 applications have led me nowhere. I imagined it would be easy to get into Amazon support or something like that, but dang, I am not getting anywhere. All I see are bait and switch jobs to sell insurance, or travel agency stuff, or benefits or some sort of MLM.
I got into CloudWorkers with the hopes it is some sort of legit cause I am in deep crap.
I have 2 - 3 weeks where I need to figure this one out, and this in the end of the second month looking for work.
Seriously, why is it this hard?
Take this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Intersect it with this list: https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
And you get
- Philippines - 70m English Speakers - Average Hourly Income $1.44
- India - 228m English Speakers - Average Hourly Income $0.90
- Nigeria - 125m English Speakers - Average Hourly Income $0.66
- Pakistan - 108m English Speakers - Average Hourly Income $0.51
etc, etc
When you want a Entry level online only job, your now competing with the global workforce.
You can get paid more when geography matters (so in person, or for legal reasons), culture matters, language matters (we already narrowed down to English for this example), skills matter (more difficult the skill, higher the remuneration), relationships matter (people know you, so they trust you to work remotely)
What are you offering, able to do, that someone from one of the low cost countries can’t do in order to justify $20/hr? That’s what should be driving your job search.
Those sorts of jobs are filled from low-wage countries.
A foot and a half of Subway sandwiches and two bottles of pop is $29 in my country
Try charging more so people will take you more seriously. That works surprisingly well a lot of the time.
Try here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42017580
Wanna work in insurance?
I was offered $21/hr to remote work at some google outsourced company for one of their LLM projects. It was going to be grueling work, full-time, no benefits. It took about 120 applications (two responses) to even get there, and they ghosted me after a second interview. It’s awful out there and I feel for you 100%. Best of luck, genuinely.
There isn’t a single company in the country that’s going to pay you $20/hr to do something that entire offices are doing across the world for that same rate. You’re shooting way too high for that wage doing that kind of work
I got paid a lot more than that doing similar for a while before the pandemic. Since the pandemic companies got caught up in the forcing people back into offices for no reason. When you are assisting people across the nation and there is information that cannot be allowed to be accessed outside it, they have to keep the jobs in the country to keep government contracts. There is no point in hiring someone in the city and have them drive in when it costs more to live in the city, it’s cheaper to pay someone who lives further away.
Why pay someone $35 an hour in a city that they can barely afford to live in and are always looking for a way out the door to find a better rate, when you can hire someone elsewhere who can live comfortably off $35 an hour and considers themselves lucky.
I spent 3 years with a company that I never went into an office once.
What should I be aiming for? I’m simply going by what the job sites are stating.
