Great concept, but terrible execution ruins experience. - Writer WritersDepartment Employee Review

Unfortunately, several problems can make the work completely unproductive and unprofitable for writers: 1) Poor project vetting makes applying for projects difficult: Management posts project requests from clients for writers to bid on, which are often incomplete, vague, or even unintelligible. This sometimes forces writers to either contact the clients directly before they bid and work without pay to process the project request, OR go ahead and bid on the incomplete request, with the risk that they may end up being responsible for completing a project without the required information to do so. 2) Shortages of assignments results in a slow and unprofitable bidding process: There are simply not enough assignments to go around, forcing writers to spend much time and energy bidding on client project proposals, and sometimes working on the processing of those proposals (see above), with no guarantee of winning them and being paid. Sometimes the bidding process took more time than the actual assignments, which resulted in lots of unpaid time that added up and ate away at any pay I received for the projects themselves. I felt this also eroded the advantages of having flexible work in the first place, because I had to spend so much time chasing down potential assignments. It also made it harder for me to organize my time and juggle deadlines. 3) Beginning writers are relegated to tedious and difficult low-paying assignments: Management requires that newly-hired writers complete a few small projects (2-4 pages), which they claimed would only be for a short time and would be followed by longer, better paying ones. This sounded reasonable. However, by their nature the short projects tended to be unique and idiosyncratic, requiring more time and tedious work than longer standard research projects. As a result, the shorter projects were simply not worth the money given the time involved. I didn't mind this at first and saw this as a necessary trial period, but unfortunately given the shortage of longer assignments, I kept being mostly given short but tedious and unprofitable projects. The promises of better work after I successfully completed my first several assignments never materialized. 4) Reviewers often unreasonable and focused on irrelevant issues, wasting further time and energy: I excelled at prestigious universities where I gained a wealth of experience completing academic writing and research. While working with many professors and teaching assistants, I never saw the bureaucratic and legalistic approach the Writers Department reviewers used while reviewing completed projects, especially when it came to academic formatting. They would ignore the high-quality of writing and research I produced, and the correct citations I provided, but focused on arcane formatting issues (eg paper cover formats), which most actual academic instructors do not think about unless they explicitly require it. Moreover, the issues that reviewers raised are things that both formatting authorities, and often the reviewers themselves, are not even consistent about. The result was a massive waste of time and energy, and a very tedious editing process. 5) Work flow and project assignment poorly planned and managed: Because of the assignment shortage, writers are instructed to bid on multiple assignments, because out of say 10 projects a writer bids on, they will only be assigned one or two. The problem is that not only does this make it difficult for writers to plan their work, and further erodes the advantages of having a flexible schedule, but sometimes multiple projects would be assigned with close or overlapping deadlines. This would especially be a problem when projects were not properly vetted, and more time and effort was required by a writer to get necessary information from the client. 6) Website & project communication process not user-friendly and extremely tedious: The website requires constant user logins. Its also quite slow with many different sections, so alot of time and effort is required to navigate it. All of this made working on even the simplest tasks a nightmare. 7) Pay appears reasonable until writer takes into account time and effort: As the website states, the pay offered seems quite reasonable at first glance (around $9 to +$15 per page depending on the project, with about $10 to start off with for most beginning assignments). But the reality is that because of all the factors above, the time and energy involved makes the work not only unpleasant and tedious, but completely unprofitable for the writers. In effect, the pay drops to just a handful of dollars per hour of work.