What's worthwhile in the gig economy?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I haven’t had a real, full time job in quite a long time, and I’m not looking forward to doing that again. I’ve mostly supported myself through playing poker for over a decade, and for various reasons, that era is ending for me.

The Gig Economy is being sold to us as a win for worker freedom and a positive thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. It’s a further erosion of worker rights and status - workers become even more disposable, companies have even less obligations to them, “independent contractors” don’t cost them anything and can trivially be replaced. The pay sucks when you’re realistic about it, and no one gives a shit about you.

But I’m in a transitional period in my life. I may need a baby steps job, and a gig job may fit. Rushing right into a full time job right now would not be good for my mental health. And part time jobs are almost all low paying and miserable. So a gig job for a while, while I try either try to retrain myself to be able to work a real job, or for some extra money while I go through school may be a fit for me.

And I know the numbers that gig jobs try to sell you on are bullshit. A lot of people buy into the bullshit for a while and way overestimate their own pay. They want to convince themselves it’s working for them, so they ignore uncompensated downtime as part of their work, and underestimate things like depreciation and maintenance costs for something like driving uber or lyft. They don’t count all the time they spent driving around doing nothing as part of their hourly, and they’re not factoring in replacing their brakes every year instead of every 3 years as part of the costs of doing business. As well as taxes, lack of benefits, etc. Very often people working gig jobs are working for under minimum wage, or even losing money. They may not understand it right away, but eventually they do, and they give up on it, but there are people to replace them so no one (but themselves) care.

Edit: Crap, I submitted this OP by accident. I’m going to have to finish in my second post.

2

So I’m trying to be realistic about it. If you take the right job, in the right city, with the right strategy, it can potentially give you okay pay. Better than most part time jobs. And choosing your own hours, not having some boss making your life miserable really is a benefit.

I’m looking into car-based gig jobs now, because I really don’t mind driving around. Unfortunately, my car right now is a 16 year old car, which disqualifies me for rideshare. It’s been a very reliable and nice car for me, so I’ve had no compelling reason to replace it, but it won’t do for rideshare, which is probably the best of the gig jobs. I can do delivery jobs with it - grubhub, postmates, doordash, Amazon flex, that sort of thing. But from my research it seems that those jobs pay even worse than rideshare. And with more downtime that’s out of your control.

Restaurant doesn’t start making your order on time, so you show up and then they start making it and you have to wait another 15 minutes? You, the driver, eats that time, uncompensated. You’re delivering to someone, but they fail to give you the gate code for their apartment complex. You call them, but they don’t answer. They get back to you 10 minutes later. You just eat that time. The amount of pay you get is lower than you get in rideshare in the first place, and there are a lot more problems that aren’t under your control that you have to eat the cost/downtime for.

The jobs themselves don’t pay that much, and you’re reliant on tips to make any sort of income, but the tips are wildly variable. Almost everyone will tip a pizza delivery guy, but that’s not true of gig food delivery. Grubhub has the highest tipping rate with around 50-60% of customers giving some kind of tip, but UberEats on the other end with 10% at most giving a tip.

Grubhub is apparently the best of the companies to work for, but it’s not a true gig job - you can’t just drop in and drop out when you feel like working. Instead, you have to reserve scheduled blocks at the beginning of the scheduling week. At some point you get a text saying that the next week is open, and then it’s a mad dash where everyone tries to log into the scheduling website at the same time and hope you can snatch up some of the premium shifts before everyone else does. Which significantly affects your pay - your hourly rate working the friday night dinner shift may be way better than getting stuck with the tuesday morning shift.

UberEATs is pretty much garbage, everyone I’ve seen says to stay away from them. Their reimbursement rates are the worst of any of them, hardly anyone that uses ubereats tips, and ubereats won’t show you where you’re delivering to, so you can’t even make good strategic decisions about what jobs are profitable to take and what aren’t. It’s more of a scam than a gig job.

Doordash and postmates are somewhere in between, and there are smaller services like caviar and instacart I haven’t really looked into much yet.

Rideshare is more appealing, but I’d have to get a new car for it. I actually have almost no credit - I lived my life thinking that the responsible thing to do was to save up for things and then buy them in cash, but I realize now that this leaves me with no credit history, which is in some ways a bigger problem than having bad credit. People that got credit cards out and were irresponsible with them are probably in a better place than me, credit wise, because I saved and bought everything.

But it doesn’t have to be a fancy, expensive car. Car choice is super important for Uber though. Picking a car that’s low maintenance, cheap to repair, and gets good gas milage can be the difference between making $4 an hour and $14. I figure something like a used Japanese hybrid is the ideal uber car. Something like a 2012 Prius or Camry Hybrid or something along those lines can be had for under $10,000, and that seems like the way to go. Hybrids aren’t that much more expensive than non-hybrid cars these days, and they easily make up the difference for this sort of thing.

But, like I said, I have a perfectly good, reliable car now, so if I’m going to get a new car (which is actually a bit difficult for me now as I don’t have the credit or the spare $10,000 right now) I’d want to make sure this is something that would end up being worthwhile for a while, and that I wouldn’t give up on it pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, I live in Las Vegas, which seems to be uniquely bad for gig jobs. There are too many people here who are underemployed or for whatever reason do gig jobs - so the number of gig job drivers to population is very unfavorable to drivers. That leads to very few surge prices for rideshare, extreme competition for grubhub shifts, etc. I’ve heard other people coming from better cities say that their real earn rate halved when they moved to Vegas, so maybe this is a really shitty place to even try this sort of thing.

Amazon flex isn’t a bad deal - you go pick up a bunch of packages and deliver them, and you make somewhere like $15/hr if you’re efficient. Unfortunately, it’s already 100 in Vegas and it’s just going to climb - there’s no way I’m going to be out delivering packages in the Vegas summer. It’s something I’d think about when it cools down later in the year.

And of course there are non-car gig jobs. I really haven’t looked into them very much yet. But I’m open to other ideas. The keys are that I can set my own schedule to a large degree, particularly appealing if I can decide to work and stop at arbitrary points, and that I don’t have to work under a boss. I’d give some consideration to anything like that.

So I guess I’m curious to see what you guys think of the whole idea, and what your experiences are trying various forms of gigs, and what you’ve learned, what your recommendations might be.

3

If I wasn’t in the US and in that position I’d take delivery cycling ahead of driving. Same bullshit pay but at least you’ll be fit and not suffer slow-murder-by-chair each day. Most US cities don’t understand cycling, though, so it might not be a safe work environment if you were new to it. Don’t know what Las Vegas is like in that regard, it’s probably too sprawled out I guess.

Is there anything to be learnt from your poker colleagues / enemies, who might be in similar situations? You must share a common analytical mindset, and similar commitment to sitting on your arse all day, so perhaps there is inspiration to be found there.

4

A lot of them got into some kind of trading, actually. Day trading, arbitrage trading, financial stuff. I’m not sure if that’s a viable path for me, I don’t really have a sense for that sort of stuff, but it seems like a lot of the same skill set transfers over. Of course I’ve also read that because our use of algorithms and models to understand how the markets work, there’s very little room for random independent traders to make any money doing it. I’ve actually lost contact with most of the guys that went that route - they did it a few years ago when online poker was banned and the whole scene started drying up and getting a lot tougher.

5

Arbitrage sports betting perhaps - patient, methodical, systems approach that you can do on your own? This would be a completely ludicrous suggestion as a career move for 99.99999% of people, but you do seem to have a singular sort of background for it (and location). The few people who actually make a living at this seem to have a semi-comfortable life framework in place already so have some emotional distance, ie they’re not betting the rent money.

Although that perhaps more of the same, or at least along the same lines of what you have been doing. Maybe a change is needed.

6

I’ve read about some Uber/Lyft drivers actually hiring a car for a week or more at a time to do their driving. Not sure if that would work economically speaking. I would imagine being Vegas you could get some good deals on hire cars. Removes the issue of no credit history, and having to find a cash sum upfront.

You might want to check out fiverr as well, (or perhaps a local equivalent) it’s a gig economy website, with people offering an amazing variety of services. If you can think about what skills/knowledge/abilities you have that could be sought be other people. I’ve occasionally looked through that site and asked myself “People pay money for that?” Apparently they do.

7

I appreciate the ideas, but I’m trying to steer away from any sort of gambling stuff. It’s funny - I hate gambling. I’ve never enjoyed the randomness that came with playing poker. If I could’ve ground out $30-35/hr exactly playing poker (roughly my overall career earn rate), rather than winning $1000 one night then losing $800 then winning $600 the next day, I totally would have. But of course you need that short term randomness - bad players need to win sometimes and convince themselves that they’re really winning players that got unlucky. I never had a losing year, but I’ve had losing months, or several months, before. There are very few jobs where you can do your best, do everything well, and still come home on a really bad day having lost your last month’s of earnings in a few hours. Overall it worked out for me, but the gut-punch of the swings of it made it very difficult. If you let that affect you, then it turns into an even bigger loss, and it can spiral out of control. I’ve had that happen a few times. It’s a challenging job - you have to be perfect no matter what you’re feeling or what you’re dealing with.

I ended up going the boring, almost cowardly route because of that. Back when I started with poker and I had some success with it, I wanted to strive to be among the best. Climb stakes, beat better players, keep going up, live the baller lifestyle. But as I tried to do that, I realized that it became hard as fuck, that the skill edge you had on other incredibly smart people were small, and yet the stakes were higher (and other players playing more aggressively) so the swings were bigger, in both relative and absolute terms. The higher you go, you’re chasing a smaller edge and eating bigger swings, which is a recipe for stress.

I ended up settling on small to medium stakes games I knew I could beat reliably, where I almost never encountered people who were better or smarter than me, where my potential earn rate wasn’t as high but the edge was bigger and the swings were smaller. I’m not proud of that, but it allowed it to become a more sustainable job. I ended up going the direction of living frugally and minimizing my hours, because even at games I could beat the discipline and focus and emotional costs were still pretty high.

In any case, to be a big sports bettor you need a bankroll in the hundreds of thousands of range and unfortunately I’m nowhere near that now. I don’t think it would be a financially viable choice and probably not a mentally/emotional one either. If I was going to go that route, I’d probably go back into poker, since that’s something I know I’m capable of doing. But I don’t think it’s something I can do anymore in terms of mental health.

8

Consider looking into taskrabbit.com. They allow you to take on odd jobs and set your own rates and hours. You’d be able to use your own car for jobs that require it. Some people move furniture or assemble Ikea furniture. If you have any real skills, like plumbing or carpentry, you can command higher rates. You probably won’t make anywhere near $35/hour after Task Rabbit takes their cut and you account for down time but it might get you started on working in the gig economy. I haven’t used Task Rabbit myself but my friends who have been customers like the service. You can supplement Task Rabbit earnings with posts on Craigslist offering to do odd jobs.

9

Is the “gig economy” actually a real, unitary thing? Isn’t it just a lazy meme of public discourse to describe a hodgepodge of attempts to use online communications as a way to repackage and disguise some of the same old services?

I think the term itself is kind of vapid and self-delusional.

10

Do you have a college degree? I work occasionally scoring standardized test essays from home. It’s very hit or miss though, this is the busy time of the year and then again in late fall/early winter.

It helps pay for an annual European trip and it is enjoyable. Driving Uber sounds awful, at least in Chicago.

11

This is such a bizarre thing to be elitist and sneer over.

Is working for Uber the same thing as being a cab driver? You don’t work shifts, you choose when and where and how much to work. There are mutual rating systems which filter out bad players out of the system. You own your own vehicle.

If you say yes, it’s the exact same thing, it’s ridiculous. If you say no, it’s different, then why shouldn’t someone be able to go online and ask about other people’s experience with a new type of job?

What did you want me to do, title this “so, those of you who work for companies that are trying to use the internet to change traditional business models and as a result
created new ways for workers to interact with their work, what’s your experience?”

Vapid and self delusional. Ha.

12

Not in the slightest. I was essentially agreeing with everything you said in your OP–specifically, to quote you, that “the numbers that gig jobs try to sell you on are bullshit.” And of course I realize you don’t have much choice but to use that term; it’s the term everyone uses.

My point is that for all practical purposes, it’s not a new “economy” per se. (And that’s why you’re right–the numbers are “bullshit.”) Many cab drivers own their own cab, so they theoretically choose their own shifts, and they often are Uber drivers at the same time, in fact. But the fact that people order a ride with their smart phone doesn’t change the global economics of paid car service. People aren’t going to spend more now, or use the service more now, just because they can order it with a special app. When I drove I cab I had a weekly lease–so in theory I could pick and choose my hours, yada yada yada. In the end, I still had to put in the same total hours, and work the same shifts (when rides were in demand), as any other driver, if I was going to make it pay off and make a living. That’s what I mean. It doesn’t make it a different “economy,” in the true sense of that word, just because you can order it by typing on your phone instead of speaking into it. That’s all.

I wasn’t referencing you at all, (except to agree with your opening premise), and more was referring to people in the media who talk about these different services as though it were fundamentally a different economy. It’s not. True, using an app to get clients is different, but in terms of economics, it’s a superficial difference. Unfortunately, I think that superficial difference makes some people think there’s more money to be made than actually is out there. I’ve worked with newly arrived refugees who thought that they could get rich with Uber, and pooled all the cash they could gather from extended family to buy a new car, but it wasn’t the kind of earnings they thought it would be. They get stuck with payments on a highly depreciated car, and not any more then they could have earned from another job–specially one that they had training for in their country. The vapid ones are the media who have created this term; the delusional ones are those who think the technology itself is going to make them rich. In the end, we’re providing the same services as before, whether its by app or not, so the potential earnings are going to be the same.

13

Well, yes and no.

As SenorBeef pointed out, while taxis and car services have been around forever, Uber and Lyft are a similar, but slightly different business model.

I’m not sure how I feel about the “gig economy”. Keep in mind it includes more than just Uber drivers. While temping and contract work has been around forever, there does seem to be a fundamental shift towards businesses outsourcing any tasks or services that can be commoditized. And the idea that you are “CEO of your own career” is bullshit. It’s generally not scalable. That is to say you can only work so many hours a day at whatever the rate is for your service. It also tends to commoditize people. I feel like early on in my career, companies hired smart people with diverse backgrounds who they could then “wear many hats”. Now it seems like everyone has to fit a very specific profile.

14

If driving is what you want to do, maybe consider getting a passenger van and advertise a shuttle service. Las Vegas has a ton of non-gambler visitors who want to get out of town for a day trip to Red Rock, Hoover dam, etc. You could advertise on something like Tripadvisor and offer a morning shuttle to Red Rock Canyon for a 1/2 day trip, drop off your customers, and then pick up at noon. You might offer an afternoon trip so you can take customers out at noon on your way to pick up your morning customers. That way you would be limited to three trips from the Strip to Red Rock and back, with a set schedule, and pricing that you set. You might know of other trips that may be better, but I’m just throwing out Red Rock Canyon as an idea. Maybe Mt Charleston, Hoover dam, Death Valley?

I’ve used Tripadvisor for walking tours in some cities, and they are fun. People who bring non-gambling family members to Vegas would probably be happy to find something for them to do. You know the area, you could probably design a shuttle or day tour that would be appealing to them.

Or get a gig playing Jeopardy! There is some dude currently doing pretty well with that gig.

15

While outsourcing has been around for a while, the model has been to outsource to a company which deals with employees you don’t want to hire, for instance to clean your building. The gig economy is more like finding some poor person with a mop and hiring her.

The two closest things to the gig economy in the past were acting (which is a mess without strong unions) and freelance writing. Lots of people don’t make money in those areas, but at least that was known.

There was an article in the NY Times not long ago analyzing how screwed an Uber driver in New York was, in terms of doing lots of driving but not making much money for it.

16

Its a polite way of saying that due to lack of job stability and increased income inequality people are forced to perform a wide range of odd jobs where they have no benefits, no job security and a higher tax rate.

17

It certainly is a real thing and it has served to get me through some tough times.

You can also find the term “crowdsourcing” for some of this. News teams crowdsource video of events like floods or fires that they can use for their coverage. Directors also crowdsource background images for videos and films. As a writer, I can go to Craigslist, fiverr, or another source to try to find business writing for small companies.

These companies can’t afford to pay someone full time, but they want their stuff to look professional so they hire someone like me to buff up website content or edit their company policies. When the work is done and paid, I’m off to find another project.

People really do make a living this way. It’s not enough to retire on, but if it helps pay bills when the chips are down.

18

Sure, but that wasn’t the question. The question was: “Is it a real, unitary thing?” In a later post I clarified. (See post 12.)

Of course. Again, I never questioned that. I’m questioning whether there really is some kind of new “economy” that would merit this new title. (See post 12.) People have been providing these services in this way for a long time. It’s called “freelancing,” “independent contracting,” etc. It’s not a new “economy,” but the way the media use this term I think promulgates that idea, and misleads people. It’s an attention-grabbing phrase which focuses on the use of online communication as something different, but that’s just superficial and doesn’t change the fundamental economics. As mentioned above, it may be a slightly different business model for the big players, but for the workers themselves, it’s nothing really new.

And to be clear, this point doesn’t question what the OP is asking, either, which is a valid and interesting question.

In many countries this is–and has always been–the way a large portion of the population gets by.

19

The second has been in place for a lot longer than the first, for that particular type of service.

20

Also, if you’re concerned about mental health issues - I’m not saying you are but you mentioned something similar - there are real concerns about the effect of the growing gig economy on mental health outcomes.