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?
More demand than supply. IE more applicants, not enough positions.
Many have stated demand vs supply but, a lot of it is also because many jobs are scared to have entry level as remote. The ability to train on the go is more difficult then in house, so many entry level positions start as office jobs and move over to WFH, this causes a difficulty for people who can only do WFH
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
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.
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.
