Is there a position available anywhere in the world where I can simply take an assessment to identify my skills and capabilities, receive assignments accordingly, complete them remotely, and submit them without the need for ongoing communication or visits? I prefer a role that allows for flexible, independent work hours.
I have ten years of experience as a paralegal but am seeking a different type of work that doesn’t require returning to school, interaction with others, or leaving my home. I am highly capable but uncertain about my next career steps and am looking for a more autonomous work arrangement.
In my experience, they work as engineers, engineers or engineers.
“I solve practical problems!”
Pretty easily; it’s keeping the job that’s the trick. I haven’t really figured that one out yet.
Depends on the flavor and intensity of ND.
Plenty of ND’s find and keep jobs. Just other varieties have different wiring and tolerances that don’t fit well with what most people do in normal jobs.
A lot of work has shifted to remote, even if some do have office days still, so maybe you can find one that suits your skills that allows that? Even school can be done remote and online, though I do expect that there would be mandatory class meetings.
I don’t know of any jobs off the top of my head that allow someone to be a complete hermit, but maybe someone else can chime in with one.
how do neurodivergent peeps get jobs?
In my world: in the same way as everybody else. HR departments are the most conservative of all departments in a company.
in my case: I don’t.
I think sadly the answer is “no”.
Or, this kind of site does exist in the form of fiver or upwork, but of course those platforms are super highly competitive. The harsh reality is that everyone wants the job you described.
I am sympathetic. I suspect im neurodivergent, mid 40s, super tapped out from waking up every day and trying to mask my oddness.
Do you have any special interests you might monetise? Even if its only peripherally related. The caveat is - there be dragons here… trying to monetise a hobby is a great way for a neurodivergent person to waste all their money.
wouldn’t it be great if our society would help you find a job. I would love some evaluation of skills and given something until you could find something else.
Look towards working in government in your jurisdiction. In ours, government still permits at least partial work from home arrangements, and has staff support networks, reasonable adjustments and management training for neurodivergence in the workforce. It doesn’t pay private sector salaries but risks are lower.
you could try talking to the people at your local courts or court records department to see if they have anything that might be a good fit for you.
I don’t think so. The shitty answer I can think of is Mechanical Turk.
I feel pretty lucky to have ended up in a SWE role where I can work remotely, relatively autonomously and with limited interactions with people. But a majority of my work is still interacting with people to figure out what problem to solve.
I’d recommend practicing those social skills. If you can find what you’re looking for, fantastic! Otherwise, going completely hermit is really going to limit the number of opportunities available to you.
This is coming from the guy who would rather sit at his desk for an hour than go for the free snacks at the employee gathering.
That’s exactly what my main income is these days. I signed up with DataAnnotation a couple of years ago, chipped away and started getting more access to a bigger pool of higher paying projects. I get online whenever it suits me, do work, claim time, get paid. No meetings or time wasting.
It’s not perfect, feedback is minimal, technical issues exist, but the flexibility is such a huge advantage that it’s hard to give up. It does mean you’re contributing to the whole AI… situation. My moral justification is that we’re actually making the models better at sticking with what they’re good at, and getting more efficient with it.
Specific professional skills like legal seem to be in high demand too. I’m a software engineering specialist, but they keep giving me finance projects just because I have that domain on my resume. They also gave me some referral codes specifically requesting legal, medical, and STEM pros. I don’t know if using my codes would give you an advantage in the application, but I guess it couldn’t hurt. DM me if you want one.
My moral justification is that we’re actually making the models better at sticking with what they’re good at, and getting more efficient with it.
My moral justification is that no matter how much work we seem to do for them, the models don’t seem to be getting any better and that General Purpose LLMs must be fundamentally broken and can’t be fixed because the way they come to correct answers is literally the same way they come to incorrect answers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When I started doing this work it was scary how fast they progressed. I thought I’d be redundant in a few months. Then they hit a wall very hard. The models might even be getting worse now. That could be my perception because a big part of the job is steering them toward failure and correcting the mistakes, so now I’m in the habit of exploiting their weaknesses.
They aren’t going away, but if we can figure out the niches where they’re actually useful, maybe the big AI companies will stop pretending LLMs are a digital panacea.
but if we can figure out the niches where they’re actually useful
Which is why I call out “General Purpose LLMs” as the real problem. When they are given very specific, very narrow guidelines and training, they are actually often exceptional tools! It’s the idea that they need to be an all-purpose-tool that does all jobs all the time that needs to be put to bed.
maybe the big AI companies will stop pretending LLMs are a digital panacea.
Gosh I hope so, because if we can get them to accept that as tools they’re only useful in very tightly specific scenarios, we might actually get some real use out of them!
I am actually pro-AI, but anti-corporate-AI and general purpose AI. I view them as tools like any other, it’s who is using them and how that makes the difference. A hammer can be used to build a house, it can also be used to crush someone’s skull. Currently, corporations want to use AI to crush all of our skulls.
Infinite monkey theorum?
where I can simply take an assessment to identify my skills and capabilities, receive assignments accordingly, complete them remotely, and submit them without the need for ongoing communication or visits?
All the sites I am about to talk about are exactly like this:
On one hand, you’re helping “train” AIs to replace human jobs (bad). On the other hand, the more work you do for them, the more you’ll feel like no matter how much work people like you do for these kind of shitty companies, there is no fixing AI through training like this, that LLM General Purpose AI is fundamentally broken at its core (good?). So, you’ve got that going for you.
Further, they definitely have higher paid gigs for people with specialized skills/knowledge such as paralegal work history and education. I’m not sure about the paralegal, but people with coding experience can get $40-$80/hr tasks, so the more specific your experience, the more you get paid. I was averaging about $28 an hour, since they didn’t have a lot of tasks for my skillset.
There’s a couple other companies like this as well, but I haven’t been able to get into them.
https://www.babel.audio/ - Similar but focused on audio-conversation AI training
Also, there’s a few dedicated to Market Research, but I have failed to get into those as well:
https://connect.cloudresearch.com/
https://www.prolific.com/participants
Data Annotation definitely has much better and higher paying projects than the market research gigs, but I don’t know about Babel’s payment schemes at all.
One nice thing about all these is that you really can make your own schedule and choose to work when you want (providing there is work available).
It is difficult to rely on these for consistent income because sometimes your dashboard is absolutely filled with work and other times there won’t be projects to work on for weeks at a time. You’re also “competing” to complete tasks with people all over the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so a project that opens up in the middle of the night while you’re asleep might be already out of tasks to do by the time you wake up because people on the other side of the planet finished all available tasks.
These all count as “gig work” where you are like an Uber/Lyft driver. You are essentially working for yourself and you will need to track your income and report it for tax purposes at the end of the year.
You will unfortunately be forced to use PayPal to get paid. I hadn’t used PayPal in a solid decade because of how shitty of a company they are, but there were no other options to receive payments.
WARNING:
Keep extremely well documented spreadsheets of your work history, what days you worked, for how long, how much you were being paid per hour, and your final payout for the specific task. I initially thought they would keep showing you all of that on their website but they do not! Once you take a payout, all prior information beyond one week to current date will disappear. It’s also helpful to compile screenshots of that data while it is available to cross-reference with your own spreadsheets, just make sure to take those screenshots before you take a payout.https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64040942
(Not a serious answer)
Wtf did Nero do to you?
burned rome
