Good while it lasted - Anonymous employee Needle Employee Review

You had to wake up at 12am pacific time to set the schedule every Friday morning.. which was no good because it was 2am in my time zone. The schedule filled up within 2-3 minutes for the week, so if you don't wake up, you'll miss an opportunity to get good hours. Another issue I came in touch with a lot, was forgetting I had hours to work because of the inconsistent scheduling. We'd be out with friends or we'd make plans, and I'd get an alert that I had to log on in 5 mins to start my hour. If you miss a commit, you are docked a good amount of points, which knocks your standing down in the community, and doesn't allow you the chance for earlier schedule picks. We had a lot of issues with chat routing. There would be 2 or 3 people that would DOMINATE the chats. They would be full to capacity the whole time, while there would be one or two people with one chat, and everyone else at zero. Since we get paid for chats, you can sit there for an hour, and get 1 or 2 chats--- at $1.09 per chat for adidas, it didn't add up to a whole lot. There would be weeks where I worked over 20 hours and barely made $100. Each community had different pay scales too. I used to work for another company with Needle and they got paid $1.30 for committed chats, and $1.10 for freeskate chats. Adidas was $1.09 for committed and under $1.00 for freeskate chats. This being said, you get paid through Paypal and are an independent contractor. So you have to put aside money for your taxes from the paychecks, since it's not automatically deducted. Starting October 2016, Needle is moving to an all points based pay system. Advocates will no longer get paid in cash, but rather, they will only be paid in points. So you can use these points to get "free" gear and items from a whole lot of different brands. But you can't pay bills with points or free items. AND you've still got to pay taxes on these items. You'll now have to find the monetary value of the items you've gotten, and report that for taxes. Basically, I think Needle is going to make away with a whole lot of money in this change. If an advocate takes $50 worth of chats, the company used to have to pay them $50.. but with this new change, if they take $50 worth of chats, needle only has to give them a $50 t-shirt or something of the sort (and we all know how high the mark-up is on clothing and goods). So Needle may only be spending $10 or so to pay someone for $50 worth of work. It was good while it lasted, but now with this change, it's not worth it anymore. I spent too much time trying to snag hours in the middle of the night, or forgetting to do it.. and then i would schedule my day around my work hours, instead of working when I have time. It would cut into my social life and I'd have to skip out on all kinds of things to "make money," when a lot of the time, I would only make a few dollars an hour.