Amazon research scientist salaries: Page Not Found | Glassdoor

Опубликовано: December 22, 2022 в 8:20 pm

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Amazon Data Scientist Salary|Interviewkickstart

One of the leading data-driven companies in the world, Amazon is a data generating and data gathering giant that is majorly dependent on data scientists. Knowing this, it’s hardly surprising that an Amazon data scientist’s salary is pretty great. 

The average Amazon data scientist salary is $164,114 per year (not to forget the perks and benefits that come with the job). Plus, you get to work on products and services that reach hundreds of millions of people globally. A lot of factors come into play when determining an Amazon data scientist’s salary. We’ll cover all that and more in this article. 

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To help you understand how salaries at different levels for Amazon data scientists are structured, in this article, we’ll be covering:

  • Factors on which Amazon data scientist salary depends
  • Average Amazon data scientist salary at different levels
  • Benefits of working as a data scientist at Amazon
  • FAQs on Amazon data scientist salary

Factors on Which Amazon Data Scientist Salary Depends

All Amazon data scientists have some commonalities, such as a background in computer science, mathematics, or some other related field. They’re also proficient in programming and scripting languages like Python, SQL, and Java, along with statistical and data analysis expertise.

An employee’s salary is usually determined by how valuable they are to the company and what they bring to the table. So, apart from the academic background, there are three major factors on which an Amazon data scientist salary depends:

1. Experience

Experience matters a lot and is one of the critical factors in determining the salary of a data scientist. For each year that gets added to your experience, a significant amount gets added to your salary. On average, you stand to make around $2,500 more for every year that gets added to your total experience.

2. Job Title

The demand for data scientists has significantly increased in the past few years, so you can make more than an average data scientist. If you get involved in a managerial role and identify business problems that can be resolved using analytics or lead team projects, your pay scale will increase further.  

This is true for every job out there. The more tasks you take up and increase your contribution to the company, the higher your salary will be.

3. Location

Location is another important factor since it directly correlates with the demand for data scientists in the area. The highest salaries are offered to data scientists in California.

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary at Different Levels

Similar to many other tech companies, Amazon also has a self-designed leveling system to figure out the compensation as well as promotions. But even though the company doesn’t disclose the specifics of this system, one thing is obvious — the “L” along with a number signifies a data scientist’s level in the company.

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary for Interns

Amazon interns are perhaps the most well-paid in the tech industry and can make as much as $7,725 per month during a summer internship. Apart from this, they also get additional benefits such as housing stipend and subsidized public transportation.

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary for L4

These are usually entry-level data scientists with less than 4 years of experience and pursuing advanced degrees. They need to be skilled in at least one scripting language and familiar with SQL.

The average Amazon data scientist salary for L4 is $164,000 per year, including the bonus. 

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary for L5

Mid-level data scientists have four to seven years of experience and might also have the title of Data Scientist II. The data scientists at this level usually have a Master’s degree with a good knowledge of coding as well.

The average Amazon data scientist salary for L5 is $225,000 per year, including the bonus. 

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary for L6

The role of a senior data scientist at Amazon is held by data scientists who have advanced degrees like Ph.D.s in machine learning, natural language processing, and so on based on their area of specialization. The level includes several managerial positions as well. 

The average Amazon data scientist salary for L6 is $336,000 per year, including the bonus. 

Average Amazon Data Scientist Salary for L7

At this level, data scientists are considered principal data scientists and have experience spanning at least a decade or more. These employees have several management responsibilities and essentially run the teams.

The average Amazon data scientist salary for L7 is $567,000 per year, including the bonus.

A Quick Look at Amazon Data Scientist Salary at Different Levels

To help you understand the salary breakdown at the different levels better, here is a summary:

Source: Levels.fyi

Benefits of Working as a Data Scientist at Amazon

Apart from some great base salaries and rewarding bonuses, Amazon also provides an array of benefits to its employees. Some of these benefits are:

  • A complete health insurance coverage
  • 401K plan along with matching contributions 
  • Parental leave of six weeks; birth mothers get an extra four weeks prepartum and also ten weeks postpartum
  • Adoption assistance that comes with a $5,000 reimbursement of child adoption costs
  • Employee discounts for Amazon
  • Free counseling services and referrals
  • Subsidized rates on home, renters, auto, and pet insurance
  • Infertility benefits

So as you can see, in addition to the generous Amazon data scientist salary, there are several other perks to being an Amazon employee. To understand the work culture at Amazon better, read Amazon Software Engineer Work-Life Balance.

FAQs on Amazon Data Scientist Salary

Some commonly asked questions on Amazon data scientist salary are:

Q1. What is the salary of a data scientist at Amazon?

On average, a typical Amazon data scientist’s salary is $164,114 per year. But based on various factors such as experience and location, the salary varies.

Q2. What does an Amazon data scientist do?

The role of a data scientist at Amazon varies, depending upon the project as well as the team. However, data scientists are basically expected to research, design, and work on models keeping the business in mind.

Q3. How much does an Amazon data scientist intern make?

Amazon probably provides the best compensation to interns. An Amazon data scientist intern can make as much as $7,725 per month during a summer internship.

Q4. How to become a data scientist at Amazon?

To become a data scientist at Amazon, you must have a Master’s or Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Data Analysis, Statistics, etc. Your mathematical skills matter as much as your programming skills.

Q5. Is data science a good career choice?

The answer is a big yes! According to Glassdoor, it is the third most desired career choice in the US and is a pretty sought-after job profile. 

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How Much Does Amazon Pay In Tennessee?

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Updated September 9, 2022

$51,404yearly

To create our salary estimates, Zippia starts with data published in publicly available sources such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Foreign Labor Certification Data Center (FLC) Show More

$24.71 hourly


Entry level Salary

$24,000

yearly

$24,000

10 %

$51,404

Median

$105,000

90 %

How Much Does Amazon Pay In Tennessee?

Amazon pays $25 per hour or $51,404 per year on average in Tennessee.
Salaries at Amazon range from an average of $24,000 to $105,000 a year.

Highest Paying Amazon Jobs In Tennessee

Amazon’s highest-paying job in Tennessee is Research Scientist, with an average salary of $156,575.In second place is Scientist, which makes $142,461 annually in Tennessee

Highest Paying Jobs At Amazon In Tennessee

Rank   Job Title   Avarage Amazon Salary   Hourly Pay  
1 Research Scientist $156,575 $75
2 Scientist $142,461 $68
3 Business Developer $139,855 $67
4 Senior Manager, Product Management $138,245 $66
5 Senior Technical Product Manager $135,815 $65
6 Director Of Professional Services $133,972 $64
7 Principal Product Manager $133,317 $64
8 Senior Manager, Program Management $133,006 $64
9 Infrastructure Architect $126,608 $61
10 Information Technology Project Manager $126,523 $61

Amazon Salaries In Tennessee By Department

Salaries By Department At Amazon In Tennessee

Rank   Department   Avarage Amazon Salary   Hourly Pay  
1 Research & Development $133,996 $64
2 Business Development $118,010 $57
3 IT $102,015 $49
4 Marketing $96,794 $47
5 Non Profit/Government $82,519 $40
6 Engineering $79,272 $38
7 Finance $77,042 $37
8 Plant/Manufacturing $51,040 $25
9 Supply Chain $41,762 $20
10 Customer Service $35,494 $17

How Much Does Amazon Pay By State

The states where Amazon pays the highest salary are California ($72,178), Washington ($72,005), Oregon ($66,299), Nevada ($62,981) And New York ($62,567).

Highest Paying States At Amazon

Rank   State   Avarage Amazon Salary   Hourly Pay  
1 California $72,178 $35
2 Washington $72,005 $35
3 Oregon $66,299 $32
4 Nevada $62,981 $30
5 New York $62,567 $30
6 Massachusetts $62,106 $30
7 Arizona $61,571 $30
8 Utah $60,903 $29
9 Connecticut $59,232 $28
10 Colorado $59,181 $28

Highest-Paying Amazon Competitors In Tennessee

The company that stands out for having the highest pay in Tennessee is eBay, which pays its workers an average salary of $156,575 Walmart is the company that pays the least, paying an average salary of $28,695 in Tennessee.

Rank   Company Name   Avarage Pay in Tennessee   Hourly Pay  
1 eBay $81,316 $39
2 Shopbop $38,177 $18
3 Best Buy $35,363 $17
4 Target $32,059 $15
5 Whole Foods Market $31,137 $15
6 Walmart $28,695 $14

Recently Added Amazon Salaries In Tennessee

Frequently asked questions about Amazon Pay In Tennessee

What is the starting pay at Amazon in Tennessee?

The starting pay at Amazon in Tennessee is around $24,000 per year, or $12 per hour.

How much does Amazon pay hourly in Tennessee?

Amazon pays $25 hourly in Tennessee, which is 21% below the national average.

How much does Amazon pay Research Scientists in Tennessee?

Amazon pays research scientists in Tennessee around $75 per hour, or $156,575 per year.

Have more questions? See all answers to common company questions.

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Updated September 9, 2022

What is batch processing? – Beginner’s Guide to Enterprise Cloud Computing – AWS

What is batch processing?

Batch processing is a technique used by computers to periodically perform large volumes of repetitive data jobs. Some data processing tasks, such as backup, filtering, and sorting, can be resource intensive and inefficient to complete individual data transactions. Instead, data systems process such tasks in batches, often at off-peak times when computing resources are more available, such as late in the day or at night. For example, consider an e-commerce system that receives orders throughout the day. Instead of processing each order as it occurs, the system can collect all orders at the end of each day and share them in one batch with the order fulfillment team.

Why is batch processing important?

Organizations use batch processing because it requires minimal human interaction and improves the efficiency of repetitive tasks. You can set up job batches of millions of records to be processed together when processing power is most available, reducing the load on your systems. Modern batch processing also requires minimal human oversight or management. When a problem occurs, the system automatically notifies the concerned team of its resolution. Managers take a laid-back approach by trusting their batch processing software to get the job done. The following are additional benefits of batch processing.

What is the batch history?

Batch processing has been around for over a hundred years, although the technicalities of how it works are constantly changing. The first case of batch processing dates back to 1890, when an electronic tabulator was used to record information for the US Census Bureau. The scribes marked data cards, called punched cards, and processed them in batches using an electromechanical device. By the 1960s, developers could schedule batch programs on tape to run computers sequentially throughout the day. Batch jobs also became commonplace as the mainframe improved and became more powerful and efficient. Today’s organizations use software packaged applications for common business processes such as creating reports, printing documents, or updating information at the end of the day.

Which examples of job batch processing can be automated?

Batch processing systems are used to process various types of data and queries. Some of the more common batch job types include:

  • Weekly/Monthly Billing
  • Salary
  • Stock handling
  • Reporting
  • Data conversion
  • Subscription cycles
  • Execution of the supply chain

What are the options for using batch processing systems?

There are many ways in which batch processing systems can be used. Below are key examples.

Financial Services

Financial services organizations ranging from fintech agile to legacy enterprises use batch processing in areas such as high performance computing for risk management, end-of-day transaction processing, and fraud surveillance. They use batch processing to minimize human error, increase speed and accuracy, and reduce costs through automation.

Software as a Service

Enterprises that provide software as a service (SaaS) applications often face scalability issues. Using batch processing, you can scale customer demand and automate job scheduling. Creating containerized application environments to scale out demand for high-volume processing is a project that can take months or even years to complete, but batch processing systems can help achieve the same result in a much shorter time frame.

Medical research

Big data analysis – or big data – is a common research requirement. Batch processing can be applied to data analytics applications such as computational chemistry, clinical modeling, molecular dynamics, and genomic sequencing testing and analysis. For example, scientists are using batch processing to collect better data to start drug development and gain a deeper understanding of the role of a particular biochemical process.

Digital Media

Multimedia and entertainment businesses require scalable batch processing systems to automatically process data such as files, graphics, and visual effects for high definition video content. You can use batch processing to accelerate content creation, dynamically scale media packaging, and automate your media workload.

How does batch processing work?

Although batch processing applications vary depending on the type of task that needs to be performed, the basics of any batch job remain the same. The user can run batch jobs by providing the following details.

  • Name of the person submitting the job
  • Batch processes or programs to run
  • System data entry location
  • System location for output of processed data
  • Time or batch window when the batch job should be started

The user also specifies the batch size or the number of work units that the system is to process in one complete batch operation. Here are some examples of batch sizes:

  • Number of batch file lines to read and store in database
  • Number of messages to read and process from the queue
  • Number of transactions to sort and send to the next application

In the batch processing window, the batch processing system uses the batch size information to allocate the resources needed to run the batch job efficiently. Modern systems can run hundreds of thousands of batch jobs locally or in the cloud.

Dependencies

Batch job tasks can run sequentially or simultaneously. The sequences may differ depending on whether the previous task completed successfully. Examples of dependencies include a customer placing an order in an online store or paying an invoice. A dependency can also be configured to run a job processing loop.

Cron commands

The cron command is a batch job that runs regularly. You can set up recurrence templates for batch jobs, such as setting up a job to bill subscriptions at the end of each month.

How to control batch processing?

Although batch processing systems operate with minimal staff involvement, they still need some control. To monitor batch processes, you can configure alerts or exceptions that are sent when a batch job succeeds, fails, or completes.

Monitors

Monitors in batch processes look for anomalies, such as a job taking longer than it should. In this case, it will stop the start of the next job and notify the appropriate personnel of the exception.

Post-processing analysis

You can view the history of a batch job after it has been processed. Most batch processes include log files that write messages to while the job is running.

What is the difference between batch and stream processing?

While batch systems process large volumes of data and requests in a serial fashion, streaming constantly analyzes data passing through the system or between devices. Streaming monitors data in real time and streams it continuously over the network. Monitoring large amounts of data requires a lot of computing power.

When the size of the transferred data is unknown or infinite, streaming data may be preferred over batch processing. As a result, streaming processing is commonly used for business functions such as cybersecurity, the Internet of Things (IoT), personalized marketing services, and log monitoring.

Given their added value, some businesses have adopted a hybrid system that incorporates batch processing and streaming into their day-to-day operations.

How does AWS help with batch processing?

You can save up to 90% on fully managed batch processing with AWS Bundle. AWS Suite dynamically allocates the optimal number and type of compute resources, such as CPU or memory optimized instances, and eliminates the need to install and manage batch system infrastructure. You can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time analyzing results and solving problems.

Batch workloads can also be run on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are unused Amazon EC2 resources available at up to 90% off on-demand prices. Spot Instances are ideal for batch applications because you can run highly scalable workloads while dramatically reducing costs or accelerating workloads with parallel workloads.

Start batch processing by creating an AWS account.

a new look at the behavioral sciences

One of the most complex and most common cognitive biases is the so-called biased or unrepresentative sampling (sampling bias).

In statistics, an unrepresentative sample is a sample that reflects the characteristics of only a certain part of the population from which it was selected.

Imagine that 20 yellow table tennis balls are dropped into a vase, followed by 20 blue table tennis balls. If you immediately take 10 balls out of the vase, you may get the erroneous opinion that all the balls in the vase are blue. If the vase is shaken well before removing the balls, the sample will include both yellow and blue objects, which will significantly reduce its unrepresentativeness.

In the same way, if only American students who are in need of money or, worse, were invited by the same professors to participate in such experiments, are selected for research in the field of human psychology, it may be misleading that most people like students of American universities.

In a study titled The Wierdest People in the World, Joseph Henrich and Steven Heine, professors of psychology at the University of British Columbia, audited studies that were exclusively selected for U.S. students. universities. Among other things, each of them had to belong to a society that has the following characteristics: Western (Western), educated (Educated), industrialized (Industrialized), rich (Rich) and democratic (Democratic) – WEIRD.

“Analysis of top psychology journals from 2003 to 2007 found that 68% of participants in the various experiments were from the United States, and a total of 96% of participants were from Western industrialized countries. As it turned out, the structure of each sample in most cases indicated the country of residence of the researcher himself, since the authors of 73% of the experiments were Americans, and in general, 99% of the experiments were conducted by professors from Western universities.

This means that 96% of the samples for psychological experiments included representatives of countries whose population is only 12% of the world’s population.

The typical method of selecting participants in the experiment is very difficult to call representative. An analysis of the 2008 editions of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that 67% of the experiments conducted by Americans were exclusively psychology students.

In other words, a randomly selected American student is 4,000 times more likely to be a participant in some kind of research than any other person who does not live in a Western industrialized country.”

The scientists then compared the results of studies in which students from the WEIRD group were participants with similar experiments in which people from other social groups were selected to participate.

“We analyzed a number of characteristics of each of the groups of subjects: visual perception, honesty, spatial thinking, self-esteem, IQ heredity, ability to cooperate, categorization. The results show that members of WEIRD-compliant societies can be found even among the least represented populations.”

The problem is that it is very easy to attract students to participate in any experiments: firstly, it is cheap, secondly, they are ready to “sacrifice” themselves for the sake of science – in other words, students are on top of the conditional “vase”.

The sample formed from the respondents available for research is a kind of biased sample and is called “convenience sampling”.

So how can researchers shake the vase and get a representative sample? Many scientists think that the Internet can optimize the sample structure, and a growing number of them believe that the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform is used for this.

  • How to use qualitative research methods for conversion optimization?

What is a Mechanical Turk?

Mechanical Turk is a virtual job market created by Amazon in 2005. The platform gives employers the ability to offer a variety of mostly simple jobs to a wide range of users. As a rule, the payment for completing such a task does not exceed $1, and the time required to complete it is several minutes.

Initially, the Mechanical Turk was intended for internal use at Amazon, namely to perform work that is not difficult for humans, but at the same time beyond the control of computers. To be more precise, there are certain tasks that a person can easily handle on his own, but still not able to get the computer to do this work for himself.

“In November 2005, with millions of product landing pages already in place, Amazon was having trouble recognizing duplicates. On the one hand, this task required writing intricate cumbersome algorithms, and on the other hand, it took only a few seconds for an ordinary person. If a computer can’t do a job, why not hire people to do it, acting as part of the program and doing small, discrete tasks?

People pretending to be machines that behave like humans are aptly labeled by Bezos as “artificial artificial intelligence,” Ellen Cushing, East Bay Express article “The Dawn of the Virtual Sweatshop” .

The mechanical Turk integrates the decisions made by workers—the “Turks”—into an automated process that allows the program to query their results. Thus, instead of scanning two images and comparing the results, the program only needs to ask the Mechanical Turk what percentage of the “Turks” decided that the pictures depicted the same objects.

Bezos named his invention after the famous “illusion device” constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen in the 18th century. The Mechanical Turk was introduced to the general public as the world’s first chess machine. It got its name thanks to the turban and Turkish clothes, in which the wax figure of a genius, as it seemed to the audience, a chess player who was able to beat Napoleon himself, was dressed.

So it was until 30 years after Kempelen’s death, the automaton was exposed by Edgar Allan Poe. As it turned out, a strong chess player was hiding inside the “Turk”, who moved the chess pieces with the help of magnets built into them and metal balls attached to the inside of the board. After the death of the second owner of the machine gun, the Austrian mechanic Melzel, the “Mechanical Turk” was transferred to the Philadelphia Chinese Museum, where it was destroyed by fire in 1854.

The mechanical Turk, invented by Amazon, can be used for a wide variety of tasks: categorization, data verification, tagging, transcription, or translation. Porn sites use this platform to write the titles of videos, and many other sites to mark inappropriate content with special “flags”.

Well, you, for example, can pay $200 for a collection of 10,000 drawings of sheep that look to the left. 🙂

“The Sheep Market is a collection of 10,000 drawings created by the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. Each worker earned $0.02 for a lamb they drew that looks to the left.” – Aaron Koblin, author of the Sheep Market project.

  • 12 valuable business lessons from Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)

crowdsourcing as the nature of man

In 2008, the American blogger Andndi Baio (Andy Baio) invited employees of the mechanical Turk ,5 for a selfie explaining why they became “Turks”.

The mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, but the first mention of it in the scientific literature appeared only after a few years. Then, slowly but surely, scientists began to realize that people who perform tasks that are literally beyond the power of a computer in a few minutes can be participants in scientific experiments.

The scientists noted that involving platform workers to participate in a variety of scientific studies will make it possible to significantly increase the representativeness of samples and save a lot of money, since even in comparison with students, the work of “Turks” is much cheaper.

The very first studies involving “Turks” were carried out with the aim of comparing “artificial artificial intelligence” with artificial intelligence. In other words, comparing the abilities of platform workers with computer programs.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) as one of the general areas of artificial intelligence involves comparing the performance of a program with similar human abilities.

Consider, for example, the sentence “I feel depressed.” A person can easily characterize this sentence as associated with negative emotions, while the analysis of the tone of the text by the program will be based on comparing the correspondence of each individual word with the “pessimistic” and “optimistic” dictionaries previously compiled by the person.

In 2008, a team of researchers at Stanford University conducted a study comparing the quality of annotations written by “Turks” with annotations written by specially invited experts. As it turned out, the annotations of the “Turks” in most cases met all standards. The article in which the results of the study were published was called “Cheap and fast, but is it effective?”.

In 2009, Yahoo researchers studied the reaction of “Turks” to material incentives. The scientists concluded that involving Mechanical Turk workers in the experiment significantly increased the representativeness of their results (with increasing material incentives, people work more and faster, but the quality of their work does not improve).

Since then, scientists have begun to actively involve “Turks” in various online surveys and build their hypotheses based on the data obtained.

  • 15 psychological studies that will increase the effectiveness of your Internet marketing

Testing “turks”
While Turks are a cheap way to collect large amounts of data, there are still a few risks to watch out for. We are talking about the internal and external inconsistency of the information received.

The internal discrepancy is primarily due to the anonymity of the participants. Since the researcher has no control over how the “Turks” answer the questions, there is no guarantee that they even read the question before answering it. In addition, there is a possibility that some of them participate in the same experiment several times.

In the study “Assessing the Virtual Job Market: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk”, scientists checked the IP addresses of respondents who participated in one of these surveys and found only 7 duplicates, which is 2. 5% of the total number of questionnaires (14 out of 551).

According to the authors of the study, this indicator does not necessarily indicate the re-passing of the survey. It is possible that the same IP addresses were simply assigned to different users. Also, one cannot exclude the possibility that different people took the survey from the same computer at work or in some cafe.

While the identities of the “Turks” in the real world remain anonymous, each of them has their own online reputation. After completing the task, the employer evaluates the work of the “Turk”, and if it is not performed up to the mark, he has every right to refuse payment. This rating affects the future prospects of the “Turk”, since many tasks are available only to those users whose “approval rating” exceeds 95%.

The external discrepancy , in turn, is related to the representativeness of the sample. Who exactly is involved in sociological research? Who is “inside” the Mechanical Turk?

For the most part, users of the Mechanical Turk are representatives of two countries – the United States and India. This is primarily due to the fact that American and Indian “Turks” can receive money from the company in the form of bank transfers, while the work of representatives of other countries is paid for with Amazon gift certificates.

Geographic distribution of Mechanical Turk users

Today, 46.8% of Mechanical Turk users live in the US, 34% in India. The attitude of Americans and Indians to work is strikingly different: Americans and representatives of other Western countries consider working on the platform just a good way to pass the time and, accordingly, earn much less than Indians.

Blue marker – “Making money on MTurk doesn’t matter to me.”
Green marker – “Earning on MTurk does not affect my financial situation.”
Purple marker – “Earning on MTurk is a source of payment for additional expenses.”
Orange marker – “Making money on MTurk sometimes helps me make ends meet.”
Red marker – “Making money on MTurk always helps me make ends meet. ” 90,142 90,005 90,004 90,005 90,004 90,141 Annual income of Mechanical Turk users in the US (top chart) and India (bottom chart), 2010

According to these data, the fair pay for working on the platform should be $0.1 per minute, or $6 per hour. The average monthly salary in India in 2012 was in the range of $1006-3975. This means that at a rate of $0.1 per minute, an Indian user of the Mechanical Turk could earn the same amount in a few months.

In the study “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Accessible and Trusted Data?” scientists defend the position that the participation of users of the Mechanical Turk in the experiment does not guarantee the representativeness of the results.

However, even assuming that this assumption is correct, scientists can divide the “Turks” into demographically clean samples. In the same way that they set limits on the ability of a user to complete a task based on their approval rating, they can allow residents of a certain country to complete sociological surveys.

One way to reduce external data inconsistencies is to compare the results of nationwide demographic surveys with similar surveys conducted with users of the Mechanical Turk.

The authors of Evaluating the Virtual Job Market: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk sampled 551 American users of the Mechanical Turk and compared the results of their survey with those conducted by the American National Center for Electoral Research (ANESP).

Scientists noted that the average age of the surveyed “Turks” is much less than the respondents of other surveys, which could not but affect the deviations of such indicators as education, marital status, average income.

However, in comparison with “convenience samples” – as in the case of students – the advantages of the Mechanical Turk are obvious. Firstly, the average age of platform users is much higher than the age of students, and secondly, the condition and qualitative composition of randomly selected “Turks” are close to those for a single country.

Instead of a conclusion

So, the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform is an excellent springboard for conducting a variety of research. Its main advantages are the low cost and speed of experiments (especially when compared with laboratory ones).

You do not need to look for and train assistants, rent premises, pay students $20, and then analyze the results for several months. All you need for successful scientific research is an internet connection. And it only takes $200 and a couple of days to get 10,000 surveys… as long as your survey isn’t too boring. 🙂

Mechanical Turk provides access to two culturally, economically and politically different peoples who are active users of the platform and speak excellent English, which greatly simplifies the conduct of international studies, the main purpose of which is to compare the manifestation of various effects. According to scientists, this is what can significantly reduce the unrepresentativeness of the results of scientific research.