Pros
Easy money if you work for a team that has steady traffic (but don't count on that, they won't tell you the reality of the situation)
Cons
There are many middle-managers with no actual power and they are terrible at communication and oftentimes very demeaning to contractors. (In response to unanswered questions and concerns) The only business strategy they have seems to be throwing around the word "Rockstar" as many times as possible. I don't say that lightly either, they have some odd reliance on clichéd corporate jargon to make it sound like they know what they're talking about while they beat around the bush. Management intentionally misleads contractors. They will lie about contract status with clients to your face (or rather to your computer). There were (at the time of my leaving) thousands of dollars behind on outstanding awards for contests- some of which were well over a year past due. They promise compensation (or entrance into a contest to win something) if you take part in their hokey marketing techniques but then fail to deliver almost always. They create contests that have no metric of winning, and then leave it in the dust after you played their stupid game for a week straight. They make mention of new levels of certification for contractors and then never mention it again. They'll say they'll review chat transcripts to find someone who performs best and then change the manager for the team and never bring it up again. Morgan Lynch, the founder of the company is also quite bigoted. He has a track record of using demeaning racist slurs and working himself into a bit of a frenzy. Needle attends many conferences to promote themselves and usually include some cringe worthy gimmick to get your attention (paid a flash mob to do a conga line in NYC Winter 2014). They also have contests where you can fill out a contact form or whatever and get a chance at winning a large cruise. The contest is of course rigged and they later discussed which client they had the best chance of getting to sign a contract and were planning on awarding the cruise package based on that. They use the fatal "if there's a problem, fire or move the person causing the problem until someone new and untrained gets it right on the first try" policy of employment, which seems to plague Utah start-ups for some unknown reason. They go through community managers for each brand very quickly and serve all that corporate doublespeak when you try to follow up on why that person left. They remove hours without notice, they hire people to cover hours that they won't give to you (cut from 50 hours/week during holiday to 23 by the spring) also without notice. (ie no one is working weekends [because we're already maxed at 23 hours we can commit to] so we need to hire more people). They tread a very gray area in terms of rights of contractors vs. employees. They don't want you as an employee for tax reasons, but they try to control the method of work of the contractors and have numerous metrics they keep track of and lots of training on how to handle each chat. They also beg you to take 50 hours a week during the holiday season and then when they do cut hours and you raise concern about it they call you stupid for not having a full time job and say this isn't really meant to supply income but is more of a hobby. They avoid putting things in writing- this of course only benefits the company and never the contractor. I've worked on the other side of this type of work and my manager would frequently take over negotiations that I had going by email to talk to them by phone so she wouldn't later have to deliver on what she promises. It's the same thing with Needle. There is micro-management to an insane scale. With even the smallest question for your community manager you'll hear nothing but platitudes until they verify it with their manager etc etc all the way to the CEO. They have no dedication to a healthy corporate culture. They will offer someone a job and ask them to come in to sign the paperwork but that instead turns into a one on one interview with the CEO who only wants bloodthirsty college grads with business degrees so they can grow 100% in a year. (Instead of cultivating culture, dealing with struggling communities/brands, or perfecting their catalog, IT, etc etc system). Their business model relies solely on being a middle-man for brands who want an online interactive chat presence. The idea is good, but they don't do anything that a brand couldn't do on its own (meaning the brand would save money and the contractor would make more). Middle-men business aren't "bad" but they do the absolute minimum required to do what they do- the IT team is desperately slow, their catalog system for contractors is borderline useless and any IT complaints are meant with a run-around/re-wording of your question in non-answer form. Simple scripting problems that would add great improvements to scheduling, chat-taking, etc for the contractor are ignored and dismissed. All of this that I have mentioned is abundantly clear on day 1 but I stayed much longer because it became easy money and the job market isn't great. The best months of the job were the ones after they fired a community manager and ignored the team for several months.