Cactus Communications Employee Reviews about "native english speakers"

Pros

Honestly, the only pro is working from home.

Cons

1. There is absolutely no work-life balance. You are expected to finish lots of work under strict deadlines which compromises your quality of work. You then get penalized because of this low-quality. 2. They have unrealistic standards of expectation and expect you to work in the way they want you to. For example, as an editor, in case I use the term 'compared to', they flag it as wrong and tell me to change it to 'than'. Both the words have the same meaning, and fit well in the sentence, trust me. They have ridiculously high standards of expectations with can have a toll on your mental health....so beware. 3. ALSO, most of their editors are NOT native English speakers, but Indians. They have two different websites: 'Cactus' which is the Indian version, and 'Editage' which is the International version. Clients submit their documents through Editage expecting native speakers would be editing their documents. And hence, most of the papers you edit will not even give credit to you simply because your name could easily give away the fact you are not a native speaker. This is hypocrisy at its worst. Definitely a money-minded organization with no ethics or values.

Pros

Flexible working, a lot of work available most of the time

Cons

Poorly paid considering the time taken, work put in, and compared to other similar companies Recently changed their pay structure so that they pay you less by sending a manuscript to what appears to be a non-native english speaker first, who then changes the author's meaning and introduces errors, which you then have to fix.

Pros

- Flexible and truly work-from-wherever - Steady stream of work, no dearth of assignments - You will get paid on time, as agreed - Fairly responsive to questions and support issues - Makes a lot of sense as a reliable source of income IF you are in a country where the currency exchange rate (to US dollar) works in your favor.

Cons

- This is not a career, since there is no movement possible (up or down) per se. Recognize that this is a gig-based job. - Payout will be pretty paltry, especially for the amount of work and time investment required, IF you live in a country where you do not have a currency exchange rate advantage. You get paid in US dollars. Basically, if you live in any part of the developed world (which incidentally is the part of the world with the most number of native English speakers!), you will very likely make less than or if you are pretty efficient, close to minimum wage. In fact, you might just be better off working at a local McDonald's as a cook or cleaner, if you are concerned about pay. You might even get benefits at McDonald's, which you will not get here! - Work will get monotonous very quickly and learning will stop after the first couple of months once you get the hang of things, since this kind of writing is pretty cut-and-dry. - You get to read on a variety of subjects, since you will not just edit within your narrow expertise. Beyond a general interest, you need to decide if this kind of exposure is of particular value to you in the long run. - Very little tolerance for minor errors in the quality ratings. It is very likely that you will end up almost rewriting the paper and recommending major changes, but will get dinged for minor errors, with no regard or acknowledgment for the work you have done. While I will not dispute this need for attention to detail (after all, the job is language editing), it does require a lot of time investment and you have to necessarily weigh this requirement against the payout. So, accept this job only if you enjoy this kind of work. - There are some aspects of work such as journal formatting for which you are not paid for, but they take up a lot of time. Can feel thankless very quickly. Problem is that you will not know before accepting a job whether it has a formatting request or not. - I am an Indian with a very Indian name living in a western country. I have native-level English proficiency, but I am not a native English speaker, by definition. I do not see my name in any of the client-facing documents. Also, I see only Caucasian and African-American faces from English-speaking countries in the photos on the editage website, but I am pretty sure there are a lot of people like me working as editors. Having worked for a couple of decades in the United States, I know that my background does not necessarily preclude me from doing this work or meeting the quality standards required, but I cannot help but wonder, if there is a little bit of deception going on here. I have not seen any statistics on the geographical and demographic distribution of editors published. Advice to future contract editors: Realistically, you might be able to edit 450-500 words an hour, even after you are trained, considering all the bells and whistles required (formatting, letter from the editor, covering letter etc.). Use this as a rule of thumb to assess the payrate and weigh opportunity costs. Accept only if things still makes financial sense to you.

Pros

Flexible Hours Work from home You can take long breaks Extremely advanced and organized online platform Kind and responsive staff

Cons

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." I was so excited when I saw this opportunity. The staff seemed so nice when they reached out. They promised wages of up to $4k per month, and all work-from-home! Sounds great, right? A number of my friends applied for the job as well. The pay is $14 for every 1000 words. Sounds reasonable right? Here is the catch: They expect you to take an incomprehensive text and make it worthy of top journalistic standards. Any remaining error is YOUR fault, even though you salvaged this illegible "research paper" from going into someone's junk folder. Most of the time, you can't even READ through 1000 words in less than 2 hours, since it takes so long to decipher the meaning. Just imagine how many hours it actually takes to edit. THEN, they expect you to write a report and continue doing more edits. FOR FREE. You know what they charge their clients? $330/1000 words minimum. Check editage.com. Like the other reviewers have mentioned, once you calculate your final wages, it makes zero sense to continue working for Cactus. You end up making about $2/hour, while they pocket HUNDREDS for your time. If you are a native English speaker, let alone have a degree, why would you EVER bother working for them? They're scaring their qualified editors away. I feel bad for their clients. They're probably paying hundreds of dollars an hour to have their work edited by their fellow Indians.

Pros

Flexible schedule, work from home or anywhere, whenever you want.

Cons

Wages are much lower than standard for same work elsewhere. They want native English speakers with PhDs, but if you live in a developed nation you end up making less than minimum wage for tough papers because they pay per 1000 words (not by time as some of the competitors do). Bonuses are competitive and impossible if you don't work more than full-time. The reviews of your work, that ensure you keep getting work, sometimes seem to be done by non-native speakers criticizing and changing perfect English. Assignments are also competitive. You can receive an assignment at 2:30am, only to have another editor pick it up at 2:39am. Monthly topic newsletters post the names of the highest achievers and who gets bonuses, but this seems silly for a company without an office and workers from around the world. They also give you extra reading and training that is unpaid.

Pros

You get to read very interesting articles.

Cons

The way you are evaluated, management calls it "Quality Index," is a way for them to take money away from you. They grade you from a scale of 1 to 4, four being the highest, and the FIFTH ranking you receive determines how you are paid: 3 being 100% and 4 being 120%. Funny, you can earn 4's and then your 5th is a 3 and THAT'S how they base your pay. Just finished another increment of 5 assignments, all 3's and 4's, and now received a "1" for my "divisible by 5" assignment. Cutting my pay yet another 20%, and the person who reviewed my work (as all of them are)--aren't even native English speakers! The revisions he/she made were nonsense. If you like editing medical papers, and don't mind getting jipped with your pay, then this is the company for you. If you are trying to earn money, run the other way, and run fast.

Pros

Interesting work. Research papers include a broad range of topics. Work at your own pace from home.

Cons

Native English speakers receive incorrect criticism from those that speak English as a second language. Awkward sentence structures are considered normal at Cactus, if it makes sense to a native English speaker, it won't make sense to the reviewers. Reviewers do not seem to be highly knowledgeable in the field of science.

Pros

The contact people were very nice and were quite responsive within the constraints of the time difference with India. I loved the portal for picking up assignments and uploading finished work, filing invoices, and checking reference materials. Payment comes through in decent time. This is a good place to get schooled in medical editing and learn to work with authors who don't speak English as their first language.

Cons

For the degree of work that Cactus wants on these manuscripts, at the rate being paid, you're making far less than minimum wage by the time you finish an assignment—nowhere near industry standard, which helps bring down rates for freelance copyeditors everywhere. Cactus advertises itself as paying up to $4,000 a month, but I simply don't see how that's possible. I'm a longtime medical editor with a lot of experience in editing the work of non–native English-speakers, and I genuinely enjoyed the work, but I found the nitpicking by Cactus supervisors crazy-making. (Your pay is predicated on your quality rating, so even when you get great reviews from authors, it's in Cactus' best interest to find things wrong with your work and knock down your pay.) You will find yourself veering between having no work and having to tell Cactus to dial it back and stop inundating you with copy. The time difference with India can cause problems if you're needing help with some issue. I do not recommend working here unless you desperately need experience in medical/technical editing before moving on to a better-paying gig.

Pros

Work from home. The money you earn is sent on time and without fail.

Cons

1. The idea that freelance editing for Cactus (or Editage as their clients know them) is a good starting point from which to gain a better editing position seems mistaken. As another reviewer stated, this is not a job for beginners. You must sign a non-disclosure agreement so you can't use edited documents for a "portfolio" to show prospective employers or clients. Cactus doesn't seem to have any track for (or interest in) hiring freelancers for permanent positions, and there's no indication they're willing to write references so who knows how they'd react if you asked for one. As your full name isn't presented to authors, it isn't good for beginning a freelance career outside Cactus either. 2. You edit technical papers written in English ranging from ok-very poor. I suspect some were run through Google Translate or similar, but your rate of pay is the same regardless. You edit language and content. You must analyze the entire manuscript and fully understand the topic. The work lies somewhere between that of editor, preliminary peer-reviewer, and translator. Doing it right is time-consuming and when you're done the finished document is usually heavily red-lined and has a continuous stream of comments from you. For a 4000 word document you get about $100 to start and a bit more if you have a good quality rating. If it took you approximately six hours (an optimistic estimate for most documents), you made <$20 per hour for your editing/formatting and technical expertise. The required extra unpaid work reduces this further: A. Cover letter summarizing the article in a way that will interest a potential publisher. Add another half hour onto the time it takes to do the job. B. Letter to the author detailing the strengths/weaknesses of their document complete with a learning tip and a grade card you have to fill out. Add another half hour. C. While editing documents written in poor English, you will encounter indecipherable sentences. Many of your comments will be seeking clarification from the author. Days-weeks later, the document is reassigned to you after the author revises it and answers your questions. You need to edit revisions and review the rest.This can take another couple hours, and you will receive no money. With all the unpaid stuff you're probably down to < $15/hr. Revision editing occurs until the author is satisfied, and each return drops your hourly pay even more for that document. Another thing about these revisions and the ones described in #s 3 and 4 is that the time you get to do the work is arbitrary. You could get a 5000-word document for extensive revision with a two-day deadline. 3. If the first journal the author submits the document to rejects it, you discover this weeks-months later when it is reassigned to you as the author wants it reedited/reformatted for another journal. This reformatting can sometimes require completely rewriting the abstract in a different style, reducing the word count by 100's of words, editing text that was revised in the interim, and redoing all the references. Your pay? Often no pay is offered. If you complain, they will offer you 10% of your standard rate. Now you're redoing that 4000-word document for approximately $10. You do the math on the $/hr - not good. All this because the article was rejected for reasons that were not your fault. Because you're a freelancer, you have the option of refusing the reformatting job. In that case, presumably someone else gets 50% of their standard rate to do it. 4. If the article receives peer-review comments requiring an answer in some cases you're expected to edit the author's response letter (and manuscript revisions) for free even though you aren't paid more for those jobs up front. Again, this requires you to analyze the content, not just edit it. Authors pay more for the service if it comes with a free response letter check (see the company web site) but none of the extra money is passed along to the editors. 5. I agree with the previous reviewers who said people in the US don't get a fair shot at the best assignments even if they have a close to perfect quality rating (aka, QFR). Most assignments are posted between 12am- 6am US time (10:30am-4:30pm India time). During slow times you can't get any work at all. I saw some shockingly poor English in MRE's - maybe that wouldn't happen if native English speakers with a high QFR were given the job in the first place. It's ridiculous that documents due in two days are paid at the same rate as those with a five-day deadline. In what world do authors get a rush job at the same rate as a standard one? - but Editage doesn't pass any express bonus to editors. The rate paid for a document over 7,999 words causes you to earn less for an 8000-word document than a 7000-word document. The first 8000 should be paid at the usual rate with only the words over the 8000th being paid at the lesser. 6. Then there's the monthly bulletin with the same names on the graphs each time and a list of the 50 editors with the highest number of words edited that month. The numbers make little sense. Example, most months the top editor supposedly edited an average of > 10,000 words per day for 30-31 days straight (plus cover letters and grade cards for each document that aren't included in this word count). There's simply no way someone could edit the material I saw to the expected standard that quickly. Either that number is bologna or the "top editors" are getting easier content (or doing a different job) than everyone else. Also, if you add up the words edited by the top 50 each month, the number shows no significant seasonal variation. So, are these people getting first crack at the good stuff and everyone else just gets the overflow they don't want? Certainly, the number of words these 50 edit between them didn't show on my Whiteboard. It was fishy.

Pros

As far as a freelance gig goes, this is probably as good as it gets. There are some issues with the system, but at least the work load is consistent. Everyone I've dealt with at the company has been extremely polite and respectful, although they do sometimes expect me to respond to Skype messages at odd hours due to the time difference between India and the US. It's not perfect, but it's far better than any other remote job I've come across.

Cons

I went into this job with really high hopes. The honeymoon period is definitely over, though. The entire process, not just the system for assigning QI, is flawed. In the current system, non-native English speakers submit documents (mostly research papers with a fair amount of technical jargon) to Cactus' parent company, and they are sent to people like me to edit. Sometimes these projects have incredibly tight deadlines, and the English can be quite difficult to decipher. Like most other businesses, Cactus adopts a "the customer is always right" attitude. The real problem is the inability to communicate back and forth with an author while you're working on a project to ensure that your revisions express what they're trying to convey. If you happen to misinterpret what they've written (which happens frequently, because, as I've said, their English is usually quite bad) and they complain, you're docked for the whole project without being given a chance to revise the document for them. This "satisfaction guarantee" is great for the customers and for Cactus (as it entices people to use the service), but it's hell for the editors. It's an arbitrary, horrible system that makes it even harder to do quality work because, if you get dinged on QI or get a bad rating from a customer, you have to take on an even heavier workload to make a decent amount of money for the month. Basically, an editor working for this company is relying on the evaluation of a client who often barely speaks English at all in order to get paid.