u/Pharminter1

does getting matched to two projects after the AI interview mean anything? I'm still under review...

so i made an outlier account back in maybe late 2024 or late 2025. However, at the time, I was making so much pape from my W2 that i didnt bother to really dive deep and see if this was legit. Fast forward now, I had a major financial blow from a business investment that went sour.

I seemed to have somehow been invited to 16 projects over the course of the year and a half that i was not aware of...lol.

What got me interested was a random instant offer i got from the top dawg in the industry right now at 70/hr.

I just got an Aether project after updating my resume and it only pays 21/hr??

Respectfully, i live in arguably one of the top 3 most expensive cities in the country...are you at least able to finesse the clock?

Late night thoughts after hearing several folks failing assessments/quizzes…on several different platforms actually..

I feel like there was some strange shift in the late 90s to early 2000s where there was unnecessary push by parents to focus on raw computing prowess (I.e mental math, speed math drills etc)

Sure some folks might be more adept at pattern recognition, mental math, computational prowess…but they will struggle if their reading comprehension skills are poor especially after high school since most higher level mathematics involves problem solving questions where it is imperative that they understand the context behind formulas

I had an LLM dive into this…see below. My b for the chicken scratch writing my brain is fried…I’m dead tired from my W2 today

Here’s some slop that seems to confirm some of my thoughts above…

The late 1990s through the mid-2000s saw a massive, culturally reinforced pivot toward prioritizing math and "STEM readiness," often at the direct expense of deep reading comprehension and critical literacy.
Several major cultural, political, and economic drivers converged during those years to create that intense parental push:

1. The Dot-Com Boom & The "Silicon Valley Dream"
2. The late '90s saw the explosion of the commercial internet, software tech giants, and early tech billionaires. For parents watching the news, economic security suddenly looked completely different:
3. The New Golden Ticket: Software engineering, computer science, and quantitative finance emerged as the most lucrative, prestigious career paths.
4. The Parental Panic: Parents realized the manual/industrial economy was gone. The prevailing wisdom became: "If my kid doesn't know math and logic, they will be left behind in the digital age."
5. "No Child Left Behind" & High-Stakes Standardized Testing
6. Passed in late 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act fundamentally changed American education.
7. Measurability Bias: Math test scores are neat, discrete, and easily measured by multiple-choice bubbles. Reading comprehension, by contrast, is subtle and harder to quantify quickly on a standardized test.
8. Drill-and-Kill Math: Schools faced severe funding penalties for poor performance, triggering a system-wide pivot toward rote math drills, speed tests (like timed multiplication tables), and test-prep curricula. Parents internalised these metrics as the definitive measure of their child's intelligence.
9. The Math Wars & "Tiger Parenting" Culture
10. The turn of the millennium marked the peak of the Math Wars—a fierce debate between traditional computational fluency and modern "reform math."
11. Kumon & After-School Academies: Commercial tutoring franchises like Kumon, Russian School of Math, and Mathnasium experienced explosive growth during this exact window.
12. The Competition Era: Getting into top-tier universities became hyper-competitive. Accelerated math tracks (e.g., getting into Algebra in 7th grade to reach AP Calculus BC by senior year) became the primary marker of an "academic overachiever."
13. The Misunderstanding of "Reading"
14. During this era, reading was often treated by educational policy and parents as a binary skill: Can the child decode words on a page or not?
15. Once a child learned to read fluent prose around 3rd or 4th grade, many parents assumed reading was "unlocked" and stopped actively coaching it.
16. They overlooked that deep comprehension—extracting subtle logic, evaluating argument structures, recognizing tone, and identifying hidden assumptions—is an evolving cognitive skill that requires continuous, deliberate development well into adulthood.
17. The Long-Term Fallout
18. By treating math as the ultimate "smart kid" metric and reducing reading to simple literacy, a generation grew up with a noticeable imbalance

Anyone get a screening email from a Mercor recruiter for a grading project and get an instant offer after submitting the google form assessment?

Going to update this post with some free resources related to AI evaluation.

Let’s make this a collaborative effort. post lectures, resources

Inspiration came from someone suggesting IBM AI fundamentals through Coursera.

Happy start to the week all! 💰💸💨

-P

What is the benefit to joining the discord community if invited? Other platforms have instant offers and I was curious as to whether micro1 had a version of that

apparently a year ago folks on this project were making a killing, like 15k/week. How exactly did this work b/c apparently even scammers were getting a bag. If you produce quality work is it still possible to get paid this amount these days or are those days long gone?

Also was this a pay per task project or was everyone just getting an insane hourly rate?

Lately my days away from the hospital have been spent trying to get more cracked at AI evaluation. Does anyone have any resources that have helped them get better—YouTube/books/etc?

Anyone get instant offers this week?

Has anyone gotten an offer after getting the email a couple weeks back requesting to fill out additional info/screening

worth it? hourly rate is lowwww

Status has been this for almost a week now, had someone that works at micro look at my LinkedIn which is purposefully not updated b/c I hold two jobs and don’t want one to know of the other.

Am I cooked?

if you copy and paste answers to assessments do you auto fail?

I know B-money is busy raising $$ (and this is really more of an SPL responsibility) but the quality of training on other platforms does exceed that of Mercor, despite the sink or swim approach being constant throughout.

SPLs - i get that yall are working hard, but the experts are literally navigating constantly changing client demands, so i think creating tutorial videos and supplementary study material is critical for better quality outputs.

There are a lot of talented, cracked contractors, so it's in the company's best interest to either promote more contractors to W2 and have them report to SPLs to support them in creating this material...or hire more project leads/consultants upon project start

I propose the creation of a Mercor Fellowship Program. The top contractors would undergo a rigorous bootcamp, prior to project start to help support SPLs and project consultants. This would be ideal in the massive, long term projects.

This is of course just my opinion; you dont have to agree. Thoughts?

-Mr. P

Doctoral Candidate in Applied P Theory

anyone find it interesting that the matching engine is continuously matching and providing instant offers continuously? I've found that i dont get offers on weekends though...maybe coincidental?

Thoughts?

One thing to note...the dap up platform has much better training/upskilling for busy professionals, but sketchy pay.

the very small platform is harvesting interviews for data (obvi)...grimy! but rumors that they getting that money honey...

The only thing Mercor needs to improve...training talent.

Allot 15% of weekly cap hours to go to onboarding weekly to cater to clients' changing needs and the quality will increase significantly.

Pushin' P

-Mr. P

Fellow Mercorians, P pushers....

August -November will be deemed lock in szn. The duration is subject to indefinite extension if the boys secure the bag from VC firms. I have faith in B-money

Mercorian contractors lowkey the waviest of all AI training platforms. Good vibes throughout.

Pushin' P

Can u get offers on a weekend? My app is in Hiring manager reviewing which it auto updated to (highly doubt a hiring manager is actually reviewing it…yet)