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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML I'm a developer for a major food delivery app
anovikov wrote 43 min ago:
Isn't artificially delaying "normal" orders same thing as speeding up
priority ones? I mean, it means executing priority ones out of queue.
Unless they just force the deliverymen sit and do nothing for extra
5-10 minutes, which would be a waste of time and money for the company
way above $2.99 so i don't think they do that.
scoofy wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
I mean, regardless of whether or not this is true, the death of the
consumer surplus is upon us. When that goes, the entire point of
efficient markets goes with it.
armchairhacker wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Most of OP's claims can be supported or refuted by randomized trials.
For example:
> If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3
order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High
Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops
showing them high-paying orders.
Find lots of drivers. Ask some to log on at 10 PM and accept garbage
orders, others to log on at 3 PM and accept garbage orders, others to
log on at 3PM and only accept high-paying orders, etc. See what kind of
orders they receive after a while.
The drivers you select are biased towards enrolling in trials, but I
doubt that's significant. Even if so, the algorithm showing certain
drivers different orders, who don't clearly perform "worse" in a way
the study could observe, already seems wrong.
EDIT:
> If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and youâll likely drop
$10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it
offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved.
This is much easier. A single driver can provide strong evidence to
support or refute this by showing the base pay and tip for their recent
orders (AFAIK all apps show drivers these metrics). Unless someone
(even a single person) has done this (on one of the delivery
subreddits), there's strong evidence that OP is lying.
forinti wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
There's very good restaurant in my neighbourhood that I order from
regularly. I tried ordering directly from them after hearing about how
nasty the delivery app company was. I thought they would appreciate it:
they wouldn't have to pay the intermediary. But it turns out they
prioritise the app and my orders took longer to arrive.
So I'm back on the app...
dueyfinster wrote 12 min ago:
It may be that they have no choice since it's their biggest source of
customers. I spoke to a hotel receptionist before and she said the
order of upgrades was: booked direct, booking.com, Expedia and all
the rest after. The hotel couldn't afford to piss off booking as they
would suffer a lot in occupancy, the other platforms couldn't match.
I think it's worth giving the feedback to the restaurant direct and
see if they can fix it. It's always a delicate balance depending on
time and the app may penalize them.
mlrtime wrote 25 min ago:
I ask them what they prefer, sometimes they say call, sometimes they
say app.
HelloUsername wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
In case the reddit post gets deleted, here's the text:
Iâm a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and
'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.
Iâm posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am
technically under a massive NDA. I donât care anymore. I put in my
two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. Iâve been
sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting
pushed to production, and I canât sleep at night knowing I helped
build this machine.
You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the
reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy
theories. Iâm a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning
meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another
0.4% margin out of "human assets" (thatâs literally what they call
drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like
they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying
to pay rent.
First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to
us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you
pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but
the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you
up.
We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the
priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5
to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison.
Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just
by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service
better.
But the thing that actually makes me sickâand the main reason Iâm
quittingâis the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for
drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their
acceptance behavior.
If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order
instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation."
Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them
high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when
we know heâs desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips
for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience,
while the full-timers get grinded into dust.
Then there is the "Benefit Fee." Youâve probably seen that $1.50
"Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on
your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed
to make you feel like you're helping the worker.
In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to
lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center
for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are
literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep
your delivery guy homeless.
And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't
"steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we
use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.
If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and youâll likely drop
$10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it
offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that
your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; itâs subsidizing us.
Youâre paying their wage so we don't have to.
I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.
Y-bar wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
Mostly believable. Even though I have never seen anything like it, I
have worked with managers and product owners who have voiced a desire
to do similar things. It is also clear that companies today (including
the one I work at) often incentivise the dilution of responsibility so
that nobody is cleanly attributable as the person who caused the system
to be not just amoral, but actively detrimental to customers and other
users in the long term.
paulus_magnus2 wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we
target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing?
I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how
many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole
thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very
long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly
what they did from the start.
gethly wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this
more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and
history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big
daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments
on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not
buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly
quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep
on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and
their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an
engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people
working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how
much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or
religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of
view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the
big bucks at the end of the month.
phito wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on,
this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how
you whistleblow effectively.
To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and
getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is
clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge,
passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.
Fokamul wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
Library wifi and burner laptop?
1. Any serious IT person knows you don't need burner laptop with VM
2. Doxxed himself to said company in the same paragraph, nice.
Fan fiction or really bad opsec.
Also, anyone who drives for any food app in any country, knows it
sucks.
dsamarin wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
This is believable. I have a personal anecdote regarding "Priority
Delivery". This was about 2 years ago. After watching the driver go to
another business and house before me, I messaged support and they
refunded this priority delivery fee. The driving tip and base pay
accusation can be easily verified by testing tip amounts and asking
drivers what they are awarded.
Dansvidania wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments
below this article.
The biggest and scariest achievement of this enshittified internet is
how divided people are, and how ready they are calling bullshit on very
plausible claims.
I think the tech fields where companies rely on billions of tiny
transactions are more susceptible to this kind of shadiness, but even
in B2B saas we (grunt level engineers) were often asked to implement
enshittification to either increase customer retention (EG: lets not
give the users the API to exfiltrate their data and go to the
competition, anyone?) or revenue or some other shit.
Do (some of) you really think companies would NOT do this, unless its
not only illegal but also strictly enforced? I wish I were living in
the same optimistic world as you guys.
mgraczyk wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim
doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few
seconds.
The claim is that the benefits fee does not go to the driver, but that
is not possible in the only interpretation of the claim that matters.
When the law in California was passed that caused these fees to be
added. Drivers immediately started receiving benefits required by the
legislation. Those benefits are paid by the delivery company.
At the same time, the company added this fee. So the only question is,
how much fee money is collected relative to the cost of the benefits?
From a very coarse BOTEC, it seems that the fees are probably not
enough to cover the cost (for doordash), so in fact the fees do go
"100%" to the drivers, in the sense that more than the amount collected
by the fee is spent on the legally required benefits the the fee is
based on
BrenBarn wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it
anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market"
are always touting.
How to be sure? Transparency requirements. I think we need way more
transparency requirements. All sorts of financial and operational data
should be publicly available.
zmgsabst wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
I think we should be much more strict with what constitutes
âfraudâ:
If you sell me better service, but donât treat me any better, you
should owe me triple damages for defrauding me. And your executives
should be prosecuted for directing fraudulent behavior.
written-beyond wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
These delivery apps are shady, maybe even outright fraudulent.
I had my credit card on one of Delivery Hero's apps. Everything looked
fine until I went through my credit card statement, I had up to 5 $10
to $15 payments made to delivery hero which were refunded almost
instantly. Those charges weren't associated with a single order on the
app, no emails, nothing.
I assumed they were talking advantage of customers with credit cards on
file to line their books. I removed my credit card from their apps,
never going to save it in app for faster checkout.
samiv wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
Lots of people are sceptical of the reddit post. Yes sure the post can
be fake but if you consider any gig economy business what incentives
would they have for not doing this?
Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the
table.
mgraczyk wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
The incentives are that a lot of the specific claims would be bad for
long term retention and would be embarrassing if made public. That
doesn't imply it's fake but it's not obvious any company would be
incentivized to behave this way
samiv wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
Long term?
If there was some future backlash and the company would suffer,
that is someone else's future problem. The execs today don't care
about it as long as they reap their financial benefit today.
nxtfari wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Believability aside (I do think itâs believable personally) this is
pretty much how âevilâ (from outsider perspective) is done at every
company, including mine. Inside itâs all sprint meetings, KPIs and
terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed
to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. Itâs
easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets,
itâs just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up.
In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a
game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a
coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.
throwagay12 wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
It certainly seems to be in the ballpark of things that have been
done before : [1] "Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app"
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456715
raffael_de wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
> Defense (my field) is very much the same way.
First step here in terms of terminology is to call it "defense"
instead of "weapon technology to maim or kill human beings". Having
said that, I do believe we need weapon technology to maim and kill
human beings.
bdangubic wrote 6 min ago:
It is defense against others making weapon technology to maim or
kill human beings
JumpCrisscross wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
> I do think itâs believable
My believability is stretched by them disclosing they "put in my two
weeks yesterday." That's highly identifiable and incongruent with
"posting...from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop."
prartichoke wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
There are two datapoints in the text. One is the 2 weeks notice,
the other is that they knew of this since 8 months ago. If this
were me, I would give random made up information of this kind to
throw off anyone trying to investigate this. Also, this is not that
far from what we already know from whistleblowers of similar gig
economy companies so my believability is not stretched at all.
michaelbuck wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
Other comments pointed out the semi-obvious use of AI due to em
dashes.
I'm honestly at a point where every suspicious aspect of that
post could as well be counted as a countermeasure to getting
caught. Said engineer could still be working at the company or
could've left years ago. In my opinion the mentioned financial
adjustments could've been a discussion topic for higher ups far
far earlier than 2025.
Considering how ruthless Uber has acted thorough the years[0] I
am almost 100% sure other startups with similar opportunities
have at the very least committed crimes on a similar scale to the
linked Reddit confession.
Bonus option: The Reddit account starts astroturfing in a few
weeks and this was just a run-of-the-mill bot automation to gain
karma which happened to overlap with HN interests.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_...
dzhiurgis wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Doesnât mean itâs real fact. Deceit is almost required if
youâre posting something like this.
dgoldstein0 wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Yeah ... If true, that's almost enough to identify them. Probably
5 people max at each food delivery company that could be, and their
supposed role would be enough to single them out if the company can
correctly guess it's talking about them
mns wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some
brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem
to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that
affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of
months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our
company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the
performance of people in the company and people that use our platform
(let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who
to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he
thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and
AI and how amazing it could be to do this.
MrDresden wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
> Believability aside (I do think itâs believable personally) this
is pretty much how âevilâ (from outsider perspective) is done at
every company
I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had
genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if
we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could
pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and
have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).
We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these
scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.
ahofmann wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
In my new credit card app I can set if I want to repay 3%, 5% or
100% at the end of the month. If I set it to 100%, I have to pay $2
per month. Banking is already actively hostile against the
customer.
za3faran wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
By definition, usury/interest based banking is hostile against
the customer.
nothrabannosir wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Which bank is this?
haritha-j wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
You have to pay more money when you pay the total amount you owe?
That's just evil.
MrDresden wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
In some locations banks are allowed to charge you for the
interests they will loose out on when their clients pay more of
the principal.
In other locations this has been deemed illegal and/or only
allowed above a certain amount (think 10-15% of total remaining
principal).
I do not agree with this being an ok practice (to charge).
mlrtime wrote 44 min ago:
If we're talking normal credit cards in the US, you
technically are getting a 30 day loan for free, no interest
if paid in full every month.
I don't see a issue if credit cards charged 30d interest on
balance, but if mine did that I would drop it instantly.
hirako2000 wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
Banks make money on interest. Perhaps the principle itself is
the issue, if it's legal to earn money on loans, no surprise
a bank incentive is to make you take loan, and have you keep
them for as long as it can.
Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It
would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of
the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the
spare they've got.
Of course you can pay a fee to overpay.
mlrtime wrote 43 min ago:
Mortgages have amortization schedules, Banks love it when
you pay more as it only reduces the tail end of your loan.
You still pay the interest up front.
Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to
pay off early.
delusional wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Hannah Arendt wrote the fantastic "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil" about exactly this observation. That one of the
principal enablers of the Holocaust seemed obsessed, not with the
effects or outcomes of murdering Jews, but simply the expediency of
doing it.
If you're interested in the subject I can very much recommend reading
it. I can also recommend "The Ethic of Expediency" which deals with
the same subject, but attempts to indict all technical writing
instead. I personally changed my writing style after reading it to
inject more humanity into it.
nxtfari wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
Big fan of Arendt. I will check this out, thanks!
huhkerrf wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
> designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real
people
Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't
do bad things?
fennecfoxy wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
Typically no skin in the game. Same goes for any employee on a
salary or hourly wage.
The real parasites come out when stock options do.
progbits wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
I used to think that based on my friend bubble, but I've met some
coworkers who are real selfish assholes that have shattered this
belief.
DavidPiper wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
One reason we might assume "engineers" tend to operate with better
ethical frameworks is that (in Australia at least) you generally
have to register for accreditation via a large organisation like
Engineers Australia, IChemE, etc, to actually practice
professionally. These organisations have standard codes of ethics
that, if breached, can result in your removal and an inability to
continue professional practice.
Naturally, software engineering has none of this, and in most cases
explicitly doesn't want it.
But that's one reason I can think of.
nxtfari wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
I hear what youâre saying, there are definitely just amoral
engineers who truly donât care. I think the plurality though (and
this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to
feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people
need to stay with the program, as there arenât enough purely
amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.
Dansvidania wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to
negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they
MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad
things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms
of the Employer/Employee relationship.
vermilingua wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Itâs not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook
together and are more likely to discuss topics âuncomfortableâ
to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the
degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers,
they will make noise and move.
tiku wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Stop buying the overpriced slop. My hunger disappears when I see the
prices for just a pizza.
nelsonfigueroa wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
Obviously the OP has no hard evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if it
was all true. I'm sure every major company dreams of dynamically
gouging their workers and users like this.
pfannkuchen wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
> we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed
non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel"
faster by comparison
This in particular sounds very fake to me.
If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having
drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders.
In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization
behavior, not evil and not what OP is claiming.
In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then
they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. Which
might be fine for a quick A/B test on a subset of customers, but as
framed this is basically a psy op to trick customers en masse into
thinking the priority order is faster when it really isnât. To have
that effect, you would need to deploy this to all customers long enough
for them to organically switch back and forth between priority and
regular enough times to notice the difference. That seems like it
couldnât possibly be better than the much simpler option of just
implementing the priority behavior and reducing its effect down to zero
slowly over time (which would be evil but isnât the claim).
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
> If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a)
having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority
orders.
Delay would be easy. Just delay placing the order at the restaurant,
or delay sending the order to the driver. That wonât introduce any
NOP wait states.
This is all quite possible.
That said, Iâm skeptical that this is a real story, but I guess
time will tell.
I do have one prediction, though: this story will dive down, pretty
quickly. I donât think because evil. Itâs just too insupportable.
haritha-j wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
I think its b, but I still think its a dirty trick. Its like when
budget airlines prioritise the customers that pay to board first. If
no one paid for it, or if everyone paid for it, the effect would be
the same, except in the latter case the airline makes extra money.
aembleton wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Or option (c), they offer their drivers less for the job for 5
minutes to see if they'll take it anyway; if not then they pay a more
reasonable amount.
dawnerd wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
I think they all do that to an extent. But they also kinda force
drivers to take lesser value orders to keep their accept rate up.
Thereâs been a few food delivery drivers make videos on it.
No matter what all of the apps are designed to screw the customers,
the restaurants, and the drivers.
Iâve stopped using them stateside ever since that California law
went into effect to affect that basically jacked prices up even
more plus tips on top. Itâs pretty ridiculous. So glad my local
pizza place still has their own drivers.
femto wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
Beyond an initial effect when the delay is first implemented, adding
a delay would increase the latency (waiting time) but not the
throughput (utilisation of the system). It's queuing theory.
A way to think of it is that the drivers that are made idle by adding
a delay will be kept busy delivering previously delayed orders.
lwhi wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
Exactly .. the delay would be a one time event.
michaelt wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
> In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle,
then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly.
If there are 50 deliveries per driver per shift and I want do deliver
everything 5 minutes later, I don't need the driver to idle for 50 Ã
5 minutes.
The driver only needs to start the first delivery 5 minutes later, at
a time cost of 1 Ã 5 minutes. Then they finish it 5 minutes later,
and hence start the second delivery 5 minutes later, without standing
idle between deliveries.
And if I pay the workers per delivery, that 1 Ã 5 minutes of initial
delay doesn't cost me anything except worker morale.
rich_sasha wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
If true (I'm not sure), this is kind of economics in action. There's a
monopolistic market maker, screwing every last cent out of providers,
with enormous power imbalances. The market maker is semi monopolistic,
the labour is low-skilled, with little bargaining power and few better
options. The "winners" are shareholders of the company and to some
extent the end customers (who, other things being equal, would have to
pay more for the labour).
In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular
company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates
in.
(I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom
is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the
causes).
JumpCrisscross wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
> There's a monopolistic market maker
But there isn't? Doordash and Uber Eats compete nationally. Most
cities have a litany of local competitors. And that's before we get
to restaurants that handle delivery in house.
rich_sasha wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
You're right of course, there are more companies hiring drivers
casually.
For their conditions to improve based on competition for their
labour, youd need genuine competition between the companies for the
labour and some scarcity of supply. Neither seems present.
manuelmoreale wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
> In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular
company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates
in.
(I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the
symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at
the causes).
I think this is conceptually sound take but at the same time it's way
too kind towards the people who are on the field making these
decisions. Accepting to behave like a despicable human being and
justify it with "well this is the system I operate in" is not
acceptable for me from a moral standpoint.
The economic system is awful, sure. But deciding to go along and play
the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a
personal choice.
There is no such thing as "corporations". It's people. From top to
bottom. And people are responsible for their own actions.
anal_reactor wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
> But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag
everybody else down with it is a personal choice.
True but misleading. If the system promotes being an asshole, then
you'll have assholes at the top, no matter how much effort you put
into moralizing everyone.
rich_sasha wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
> it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making
these decisions.
So I guess, nicer taxi corporations existed, and got turfed out by
Uber and Lyft who managed to reduce prices or increase convenience,
and are reaping the fruit of their investment. Capitalism in
motion.
I guess my fundamental point is, you can't fix this by putting
pressure on companies to be nicer, because the ones being less nice
will ultimately win due to better economics. If you want to fix it,
change the law. Anything else is kind of shouting at clouds.
mlrtime wrote 27 min ago:
Taxi's were never nicer. They were very unpredictable if you
would ever get one.
Outside of NYC (in the US), you may never see a taxi driving with
the light on indicating you can hail it.
anal_reactor wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
I remember people welcoming Uber not because of the app, but
because the idea "you'll know exactly how much the ride will cost
you before you take it" was revolutionary at the time. Over here,
what used to happen was that you order the taxi, the guy says
"yeah I'll take you there it'll cost you $10" and then the bill
was $20 and there was nothing you could do about it except pay.
It was completely normal for taxis to scam people. So when Uber
came and started scamming drivers, everyone cheered.
The point is, you're essentially right. It's just that before
Uber customers were most likely victims of scams, while with Uber
it's the drivers. As in, in a capitalistic market the scamming is
always present, the question is who scams who.
mlrtime wrote 25 min ago:
Scam is too generic of a word... its information asymmetry.
Also for the most part everyone is trying to get some
service/product for the lowest price while at the same time
trying to earn as much as possible for some labor.
HellDunkel wrote 4 hours 31 min ago:
Another reason cash is important. Donât give up on it!
kaizenb wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push
for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the
operators. Humans such a disappointment.
mlrtime wrote 17 min ago:
>Humans such a disappointment.
Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who
rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?
jacobrussell wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting: [1]
Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI
detection. This came back as âFully AI Generated.â
It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure
how I feel about it!
Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things
with a grain of salt as always.
HTML [1]: https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-041690...
mlrtime wrote 19 min ago:
Every time this happens the OP says they're not a native english
speaker so they used AI to write it from their language or notes.
Wonder if the tool can detect this phenomenon?
shaky-carrousel wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
If I were a whistleblower, first thing I would do is run my text
through an LLM to obfuscate writing style.
jacobrussell wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
Hereâs a fun steelman for the post being true: the author
intentionally prompted an LLM to write the post in order to further
anonymize themselves from their company.
whatever1 wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home
during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The
company was paying, so whatever.
During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how
much he was making from the ride.
At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF.
From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes.
How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven?
It must be close to zero. Insane.
whatever1 wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Looking at the financials of Lyft, based on what they report gross
bookings are ~ 4.8B. 3B are driver earnings and 1.8B is the Lyft
portion. So on average Lyft is getting 37%. Maybe they subsidize the
shorter rides with the longer ones.
anal_reactor wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
I remember I ordered a taxi in Mexico and the driver had to pay
freeway toll that was roughly equal to the ride price. I gave him
cash for the toll.
rich_sasha wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
How does this compare to typical taxi corporations? In Europe at
least, taxis are often organised into companies, with centralised
bookings, and taxi drivers paying a cut to the corporation. Here the
cut is, based on your numbers, 65%, which does seem very high, but
then what do I know.
whatever1 wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
I believe taxi companies own the license (which is super expensive)
as well as the car. They also pay maintenance and gas costs. So 35%
cut to just drive equipment is not that bad. The issue with
uber/lyft is that you also need to bring your vehicle, pay
maintenance, gas, insurance and depreciation.
I think that poor guy made less than 15% (assuming an 80 cent per
mile cost for the vehicle).
rich_sasha wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
I believe in Europe taxi drivers typically cover these costs too.
Not sure about licensing costs. In that regard, they are more
like cooperatives rather than "companies with employees". But I
don't know for sure - and probably varies by locale.
anonzzzies wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
I know plenty of Uber (and normal taxis) drivers around the airport
here who pick up a someone, then ask if they mind taking someone
else. Because it is usually vans and business customers, they don't
care and actually kind of like talking with other business guys who
probably went or are going to the same seminar/conference etc. The
driver will then load up whatever fits who are waiting for taxis or
drivers and only report 1 person to the service. As this is hotel to
airport to hotel, there are not many ways of uber, lyft etc detecting
this unless someone rats them out. I asked a driver and obviously he
responded with Uber screws me, I screw Uber.
mlrtime wrote 32 min ago:
That would be a hard NO from me. Mostly because I don't want to
talk to someone for 75 minutes.
zmgsabst wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
In Vietnam, if you see a parked driver waiting for a call, you can
show him your Grab (ie, Asian copy of Uber) price to go somewhere,
then get the same ride for 80%.
Why would they mind more cash in their pocket?
reddalo wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
The same thing happened to me in Bucharest. The driver would give
me a discount if I canceled my Uber reservation and paid in cash.
slekker wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
A similar thing happened to me in South America while on
vacation, I was looking to book an Uber but the taxi driver gave
me a small discount to do it "on the side" and explained that he
wouldn't see most of the money from Uber.
As a passenger, the advantage of Uber is that if something
happens, I have someone accountable: drive + car plate. But in
reality I don't know if that works
KeplerBoy wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
How do people pay the driver? I guess cash isn't really a thing
anymore in a lot of places.
Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft,
whatever) at the same time?
anonzzzies wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
Many normal taxis drive also for Uber or Lyft as you need the
license anyway over here. Not sure if you can be Uber AND Lyft at
the same time.
Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how
the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I
had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on
their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let
out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to
open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your
card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge
similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.
charlie90 wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.
halapro wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
In 2026 it doesn't really matter whether LLM wrote it, because people
are lazy and will let AI write/rewrite their own short thoughts.
dartharva wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
This "LLM writing style" is how I write manually. Em-dashes could be
an auto-correct function of whatever tool the guy wrote it in before
pasting (likely Word).
LostMyLogin wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
I wonder how many people believe my writing is AI generated because I
have always overused em-dashes.
andoando wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
I can make the same post about one of the top apps on the App store. I
was burning with such rage I never did. I supposed I felt in the end
itd get no attention at all
galkk wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
I can believe in each fact individually, but altogether (and that the
author has exposure to all of that) it feels like just a rage bait.
Here are red flags for me:
1. Priority delivery. Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less,
but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery
proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going
straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries
to other people. So dispatch logic must be at least somewhat different.
Also from engineering/product perspective the delay between priority
and standard could be justified. To give rough analogy: FedEx can
deliever package that I drop at 5pm to other side of the country at
9am, if I pay a lot of premium. It doesnât mean that they can deliver
all the packages with that speed and they deliberately slow down all
other mail.
2. The emotionally manipulative things like âpay the rentâ, âtip
theftâ
3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0
chance that something would be called âdesperation scoreâ in us
business.
4. The benefit fee that goes into some âpolicy defenseâ - that I
can believe in, actually. But again, emotionally manipulative add on
(unions, your delivery guy homeless)
5. Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver.
If itâs not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So
the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to
implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used.
To summarize and repeat my point - I could believe some of the things
individually, but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.
LostMyLogin wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
> Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did
(doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was
not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your
house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people.
What occurs if your order is placed in a bucket of other priority
deliveries? Doesn't that simply become a regular order? Also, AFAIK
based on some digging, the drivers are not alerted to priority orders
they are simply routed for it. That could have changed though.
> The emotionally manipulative things like âpay the rentâ, âtip
theftâ
"New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a $16.75
million settlement with delivery platform DoorDash for misleading
both consumers and delivery workers (known as âDashersâ) by using
tips intended for Dashers to subsidize their guaranteed pay. Between
May 2017 and September 2019, DoorDash used a guaranteed pay model
that let Dashers see how much they would be paid before accepting a
delivery. An Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found
that under this model, DoorDash used customer tips to offset the base
pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers
the full tips they rightfully earned. DoorDash will pay $16.75
million in restitution for Dashers and up to $1 million in settlement
administrator costs to help issue the payments." - [1] > Again,
Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If
itâs not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So
the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to
implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used.
This was proven out multiple times in court with millions in
settlement fees across different companies. For example, one suit
alleges Instacart âintentionally and maliciously misappropriated
gratuities in order to pay plaintiffâs wages even though Instacart
maintained that 100 percent of customer tips went directly to
shoppers. Based on this representation, Instacart knew customers
would believe their tips were being given to shoppers in addition to
wages, not to supplement wages entirely.â
Leading the CEO to release the following:
âAfter launching our new earnings structure this past October, we
noticed that there were small batches where shoppers werenât
earning enough for their time,â Mehta wrote. âTo help with this,
we instituted a $10 floor on earnings, inclusive of tips, for all
batches. This meant that when Instacartâs payment and the customer
tip at checkout was below $10, Instacart supplemented the difference.
While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small
orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips as a part of this
guarantee was misguided. We apologize for taking this approach.â
Also, on a side note:
"Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under
no illusions about the companyâs law-breaking, with one executive
joking they had become âpiratesâ and another conceding: 'Weâre
just fucking illegal.'" - [2] "In one exchange, Uber executives
warned against sending drivers to a protest in France which could
lead to violence from angry taxi drivers. 'I think itâs worth it,'
wrote Kalanick. 'Violence guarantee[s] success.'" - [3] All to say
that none of this shocks me.
HTML [1]: https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-...
HTML [2]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/global-u...
HTML [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/10/leaked-uber-files-reveal-h...
daveoc64 wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
>What occurs if your order is placed in a bucket of other priority
deliveries? Doesn't that simply become a regular order? Also, AFAIK
based on some digging, the drivers are not alerted to priority
orders they are simply routed for it. That could have changed
though.
At least on the platforms in the UK, the only thing that priority
is advertised as doing is making your driver exclusively deliver
your food.
If you don't choose priority, you'll probably end up waiting for
the driver to pick up/deliver other people's food along the way.
It doesn't make the restaurant prepare the food faster. It also
doesn't allocate you a driver more quickly.
It just means that the driver goes straight to pick your food up,
then straight to you to deliver it.
LostMyLogin wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
From the Uber website:
> If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will
be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped
off first in case of a batched delivery.
Looks as if the only requirement is that you are first in a
batched delivery. However, does not cover anything about picking
up at multiple locations or waiting for separate orders. Nor does
it explain multiple priority orders in a batch.
ta-eleph-pants wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
> The emotionally manipulative things like âpay the rentâ, âtip
theftâ
Those are accurate descriptions of what's going on.
> With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0
chance that something would be called âdesperation scoreâ in us
business.
Not at all unrealistic. These are meant to be internal.
> (unions, your delivery guy homeless)
When was the last time you took an Uber? They don't smell that well,
and it's a known fact _a lot_ of drivers live in their cars.
> Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to
driver. If itâs not, they just painting crazy big target on their
backs.
This only means that the entire tip amount goes to the driver, which
is accurate. It doesn't preclude their other sources of revenue from
being reduced, as described by OP.
> but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.
Very plausible he/she does. I worked for a similar company and as a
software engineer of no particular rank I had access to everything,
incl. code, documents describing features, cross-team meetings where
those were discussed, etc. I also had friends across the teams who
would talk about what they are working on all the time.
avidiax wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
I was previously at Uber. I can imagine that the culture at some of
these companies is toxic enough that people may openly discuss or
even brag about some of these things.
There is also a good chance that this person only has 2nd and 3rd
hand information and much of the post is only partly true.
Re: 100% of tips going to the driver
I have heard that many of the services are required to at least pay
minimum wage. Let's say that this is $20/hr. If they receive $15 in
tips during that hour, the company reduces their wage to $5. Driver
gets $20 for the hour, $15 in tips, $5 in wages. Yes, 100% of the
tips goes to the driver. No, the driver isn't economically better off
depending on your tip, unless you are a very generous tipper.
In California, there's AB578 [1], which makes that practice illegal.
The poster's algorithm (set the wage before the tip, based on the
predicted tip) seems like it might be an attempted workaround for
that law. I think it adds credibility that the poster has insight on
that algorithm, since they aren't claiming just the publicly known
offsetting tactic.
HTML [1]: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1830894
armchairhacker wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
This undoubtedly exists at some level on the macro scale (servers
average salary would be higher if they didn't get tips, or they'd
be lower quality). Though maybe less where everyone gets paid near
minimum wage and servers can't be paid less offset by tips.
But the micro scale? It would be easy to prove, because drivers can
see their base pay and tip. OR the app could lie about the tip or
merge it with base pay; then it would be slightly harder, but the
driver could still prove by asking customers what they tip.
chrisfosterelli wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
> 3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0
chance that something would be called âdesperation scoreâ in us
business.
This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like
'payrate sensitivity factor'
d1sxeyes wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Something like this can be reworded to make it sound like a
âgoodâ thing: âmission-centricityâ or âdedicationâ or
some other label that spins this as being committed to the company
(leaving out that this is at their own expense).
BoneShard wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
Acceptance Elasticity
another_twist wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
2. tip theft and pay the rent are valid terms here.
3. quite likely something like this will exist and it might not be
called that right in the code base but it sounds like something that
will show up in Slack conversations. From a pure ML perspective
(throwing ethics out the windos, this is a good feature)
4. this one sounds sus because cash flow details may not be something
a backend engineer might be privy to.
5. UberEats as well. Either ways its quite difficult to say whether
or not this is true. But the post does say that tipping theft works
by reducing base pay and having the customer pick up the tab. So its
not so straightforward.
joduplessis wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
I smell some bullshit.
pedrozieg wrote 6 min ago:
âIn a library on a burner laptopâ - but Iâll narrow it down to
people who have handed in their notice on a specific day.
greatgib wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
With Deliveroo, I already caught the app lying. One time the order was
stuck at "waiting for the restaurant/cooking" for a very unusual time,
like 40 mins instead of the usual 10 mins.
So I called the restaurant and they told me that the order was ready
for like 25 mins but the driver didn't pick it up yet.
When I called the custom service after that, they told me that the
driver was finishing another delivery and will pick it up soon.
But so the drive was trying to pin the delay on restaurant when it was
their fault and that in the end you will get cold food.
Nextgrid wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
Same experience here, both with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I'm
surprised this doesn't get them in trouble on libel/defamation bases.
adrianwaj wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
Blockchain and split payments would work here. The transparency would
be useful. Maybe even using x402?
So buyers should be able to see where and how their money is going to
be distributed after payment. How much does the driver get? How much is
he/she earning? Comparable drivers can compare metrics.
Perhaps unions could build some type of payment app and have gig
workers use it as part of their employment contract?
So gig workers end up like ebay sellers with a feedback, followers and
sales data on display. They can take their profile with them to new
employers as well. Buyers get a profile too. Funds could also be held
in escrow, and refunds granted where applicable. I don't know.
sodafountan wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is actually a really
good solution that I hadn't thought of.
I'm eager for the web3 economy to truly take off. There are so many
little improvements to the way things work with blockchain compared
to the black hole that is fiat currency; it's astounding.
But yes, in essence, if the post is true, then this is a
misrepresentation of what the service is actually doing. Being able
to verify where your payment is going on a publicly available
blockchain would provide customers and employees with some clarity.
adrianwaj wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Yep, digital goods are the big one for a "transparency disruption"
in my view.
For me at least, if I am to buy some music I should be able to know
how much an artist is going to get along with all their
"tag-alongs." Payments should be fast, reliable, useful, easy; and
even variable, biased, delayed and aggregated.
dartharva wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
This is not a tech problem, it will not be solved by new tech. It is
a civil problem coming from institutional degradation and corruption.
sodafountan wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
I actually disagree; the only way to get to the bottom of any
wrongdoing here would be to do an external audit of their systems.
That can get expensive and complicated.
Using cryptocurrency with on-chain verification of the paper trail
could actually solve this problem without having to get auditors
and lawyers involved.
dartharva wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
And who is going to allow upending the entire current
infrastructure of payment processing and businesses? That's
right, the government. If you were going to go through the
government either way, the easier sell is to just make them do
their damn job and prevent scammers from scamming.
sodafountan wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Yes, but the government is notoriously inefficient and
ineffective.
Bitcoin was started right under their noses (and I'm not just
referring to the U.S government here, but all national
governments), and it continues to operate all across the globe.
It's kind of what makes it so interesting, you can't really
kill it, it's like a good financial virus.
I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure of payment
processing and business has already been upended by Bitcoin
alone. It's only a matter of time before we see layer-2
solutions like the one OP mentioned.
Bitcoin might not be the best blockchain to target for
small-scale financial transactions like delivery apps, but you
catch my drift. Just about any blockchain would do in this
scenario.
LostMyLogin wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as Iâm inherently
skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for
what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. Itâs 1:15am and
Iâm scrolling HN rather than sleeping.
I donât know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant
âfasterâ. It doesnât.
> If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be
added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first
in case of a batched delivery.
So, Iâm guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders
you are paying for normal service. [0][1]
Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments
so none of this really shocks me.
> At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per
year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which
make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2] Regarding the
desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well
studied and verified. [3][4]
The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered
apparently.
> In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors
that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when
there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been
added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like
Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are
entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the
company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million
less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new
limits.
> DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice
but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps.
> In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database,
DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city
for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts
for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for
DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city
councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5] > Uber,
Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised
Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to
persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to
the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and
drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the
television and digital ad space. [6] The section on companies
subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and
led to millions in settlements.
> On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press
release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the
Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform
âused customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed
to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully
earned.â
> Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million
settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a
lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left
for workers to boost the companyâs bottom line, and failed to pay
required sales taxes. [8] [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [4] [5] [5] [6] [7] [7]
[8]
HTML [1]: https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-dif...
HTML [2]: https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers-p...
HTML [3]: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash-u...
HTML [4]: https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wage-...
HTML [5]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithmic...
HTML [6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088
HTML [7]: https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-rcn...
HTML [8]: https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-must-...
nulld3v wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Thank you for putting in the time to do the research, this is
incredibly helpful!
renewiltord wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
The worst bit was when, at my major food app, we had a âcancer
patientâ score where we would just not deliver food to sufficiently
terminal patients because we knew that they would be dead before the
appeal process completed and we could reject and ask for arbitration.
Weâd win almost everything.
But thatâs just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
zzgo wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
Upvoted for speaking your truth.
renewiltord wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
It's actually quite enjoyable to just tell tall tales on the
Internet.
5701652400 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very,
very, very toxic.
g-b-r wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
uhm, 13 people upvoted the single comment of this newly created
account
pixelpoet wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
HN is recently absolutely chock full of brand new accounts agreeing
with and upvoting each other. The "new" section is repo after repo
created a handful minutes ago with AI slop.
I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any
better.
nubinetwork wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
> brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other
Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not
being /r/politics...
tzs wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
How do you know how many people upvoted it?
bcook wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
User has one comment and their karma is listed as "14" in their
profile.
dismalaf wrote 5 hours 59 min ago:
Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really
wouldn't surprise me.
hussachai wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
> Iâm posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I
am technically under a massive NDA. I donât care anymore. I put in my
two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
Why bother using library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop if he doesn't care
anymore? Why give out the biggest clue, which is the time of his
resignation letter?
If the story is real, this company is a straight-up scammer waiting for
the biggest headline and lawsuit of the year.
concinds wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
The biggest red flag is: "I don't care anymore, I hope they sue me",
and saying they're about to contact reporters.
It's designed to boost credibility (this is gonna be proven legit,
any day now! skeptics will look dumb!), but then why hasn't he gone
to them already? Texting a Signal number takes a second. Why would he
take additional legal and financial risk for fake internet points on
a minor subreddit known for its fanfic?
aduwah wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
Raising awareness is not a bad call. I would not know about this,
if it would surface in a random US paper
eduardogarza wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Sigh ... you would you specify when you put in your two weeks after
going through all the trouble with the burner tech?
0x1ceb00da wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
2 weeks notice and maybe even being backend developer is a lie. He's
trying to midlead them
system2 wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
It would be a good curve ball if he is that smart.
on_the_train wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
It's just another run of the mill reddit rage bait fanfic. Nothing
makes sense plus the weird responses by the user. Inb4 no shallow
dismissals
> The algorithm is a gigantic neural network, and as such essentially
a black box, incomprehensible to the human mind.
Yeah right
AmbroseBierce wrote 5 hours 47 min ago:
When you are burn out your brain doesn't brain too well, reminds me
of Luigi, that 3D printed his gun among other smart moves but made
many silly mistakes that got him caught (like carrying the silencer,
the magazine, and other incriminating evidence)
Tostino wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
I am 95% convinced he was caught because we live in a surveillance
panopticon.
The McDonald's kiosks could very easily be sharing data with other
private companies (e.g. Palantir) who the government contracts
with. There are so many other companies jumping in on sharing data
like this, why would a company like McDonald's care about selling
out customer privacy in exchange for a better bottom line for
investors?
mlrtime wrote 35 min ago:
>I am 95% convinced he was caught because we live in a
surveillance panopticon.
I'm sure this is unpopular opinion but I'm glad we can catch
murderers quickly which technology. The flip side is worse.
Note: This has nothing to do with the reasons for murdering which
I'm not going to debate.
altairprime wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
This is what I would do if my internal moral compass was exhausted to
the bone and I felt like public disclosure mattered. Fortunately,
public disclosure regarding my prior employment is already regularly
made and ignored, so I didnât have any compulsion to.
Libraries are a haven of safety for leaking material once only.
Burnout does not imply incompetent opsec. Neither does drunk; after
all, it would horrify non-tech folks to realize how often impaired /
intoxicated workers are using root privileges to fix an incident.
bb88 wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
It's also possible he lied about his end date to throw suspicion off.
Or he may be still working for the company and used someone else's
resignation to pin the blame on them.
thiht wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
Thatâs what I would have done. Planting a few lies to protect
your anonymity canât hurt. Maybe they quit months ago, or maybe
they didnât even put their notice yet.
Towaway69 wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Maybe âheâ is a âsheâ - quite right what you say, thereâs
no reason to believe their details.
I would say what they describe about their employer is probably
true. Iâve had similar experience of companies making every last
buck off their âhuman assetsâ but thats how profit works: you
take money off others in exchange for promised benefits.
symbogra wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.
anon7000 wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
I mean, itâs not even remotely hard to believe. There are plenty
of extremely similar examples, such as:
- grocery delivery algorithmic price fixing: [1] - dollar general
lying about prices: [2] But yeah, itâd be good to get this backed
up even better. Delivery companies are already on thin ice
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo
HTML [2]: https://youtu.be/uE5THiD-kTk
utopiah wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Meh, I wouldn't read too much into it. They might be a backend dev
but that doesn't make them perfectly rational under stress. Being
in a whistle blower situation makes smart people do dumb things.
To me it's coherent BUT I'll still wait from a source I trust, e.g.
404 Media, to actually do journalism. I'm not saying it's fanfic or
not, I'm saying "Noted, might read about it later in few days in a
proper format with verified claims." nothing more.
650REDHAIR wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
Could be fanfic, but fees are 100% misleading.
another_twist wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung
up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this
proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be
possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of
behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well
resourced investigative arm could pull off.
loktarogar wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
When I choose priority delivery in Uber, I can see the driver go
to the store, pick up my order and drive directly to my place. I
also see the driver usually have 1-2 stops on the way if I don't
select that. If there's enough gap between myself and the
restaurant, priority is absolutely a time save.
If this is Uber then it's not legitimate.
esseph wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
I don't think this is Uber, I think it's DoorDash?
muppetman wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
Or the app shows you a few fake deliveries... If this story is
real then there's no reason you can believe what the app shows
you.
nothrabannosir wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
It would have to do very accurate parallel construction of
GPS signal to lie about the driver's location yet correctly
predict the arrival time, which cannot be faked.
renewiltord wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire
him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying
he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone,
and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose.
Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your
own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from
trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed
Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like
that.
Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were
screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired,
but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it
without 3 months notice.
Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small
phrase discredit the rest of the claims.
indigodaddy wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
Oh man you had me right til the end
saagarjha wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Iâm just upset he didnât plummet sixteen feet through the
announcerâs table
renewiltord wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
I definitely did consider it, but for the fact that we'd
start endless debates about whether HN is becoming Reddit
and so on. Though now that I think about it, that is a
worthwhile honeypot to capture such a person in.
stingraycharles wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
Unfortunately, there is a lot of fiction on Reddit these days,
especially on subs like r/confession.
I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like
these, as âfiction until proven otherwiseâ.
This has been a longstanding issue, particularly in the era of
AI-generated content.
kombine wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that
infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own
food.
andrewinardeer wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
[1] If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before
OP nukes it.
HTML [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_deve...
thrdbndndn wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
Your link is wrong. It must be lower case .json.
fragmede wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
HTML [1]: https://archive.is/G2H0V
tbrownaw wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
A sprint planning meeting seems like the wrong place to put that topic.
I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into
accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure
things.
zzgo wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
I used to write tests for a cryptocurrency trading platform. I
regularly talked to the auditors, as they were the ones who made sure
that the crypto we transferred into external wallets made it back
into internal wallets after the test.
I wouldn't say that I knew a bunch of accounting practices from
talking to them, but I _did_ learn that the CTO and director of QA
both lied to me during my interview. Sure, we made _some_ money from
the spread as claimed in my interview, but in truth, the bulk of our
money came from loaning our customer deposits to 3 Arrows Capital. I
knew we were fucked _months_ before the company suddenly went under.
another_twist wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
Yup. Engineers do have visibility into fintech systems that they
implement, maybe even more so than the bean counters since they can
trace exactly which txns went where. These things are logged.
pdntspa wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Why not? They have to implement the systems that power this.
Also, water-cooler gossip
zmgsabst wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
I suspect it depends on the company â eg, at Amazon the tech team
went out of our way to blind ourselves to what the tax analysts
were doing; at a fintech startup, we knew intimate details of what
clients were doing.
This sounds like the kind of big-co where intentional segmentation
and blinding would happen.
neilv wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
If the allegations are true, then I think the writer needs to call up a
good state Attorney General's office, and ask who to talk to.
Though I'd guess that the alleged scummy company has seen this, and is
already preparing their response, trying to purge any incriminating
emails and PowerPoints, etc.
another_twist wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Well the company might just donate to a certain library and get away
scot free.
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
Why would an AG care? This is a huge company stealing from poor
people. The system is working as designed.
They would not be so brazen in doing this (in relative openness with
every developer being in on it) if they thought an AG would actually
care.
They do this because they correctly calculated that they have enough
connections and/or bribes to preempt such an action.
neilv wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
All the time, I'm reading about companies brazenly doing illegal
things.
We often see reports of state AGs taking actions against companies.
My guess is that bribes of state AG offices would be unusual. (Do
you have better information about that?)
The questions on my mind would be how much resources an AG's office
has to deal with corporate crime, and how a given crime would get
triaged.
zzgo wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
The California AG in particular wouldn't pass up any opportunity to
get his name and accomplishments in the press. I get a weekly
newsletter from him extolling his recent successes.
AlotOfReading wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the
term "NPCs".
DharmaPolice wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
Human assets doesn't seem that much worse than human resources (other
than familiarity).
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
Another food delivery app anecdote: they will always blame the
restaurant for their lack of driver supply. I've had orders stuck on
"preparing your food" for an hour but when I called the restaurant they
said it's been ready for 40 mins and they're waiting for someone to
come pick it up.
galkk wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
What is the chance that they will say things like âoops, we forgot
about your order?â âOops, we didnât click button that itâs
done and could be picked upâ.
I had situations where my order was forgotten/lost when I literally
was sitting in the restaurant and waiting for my order.
Yes, Iâm sure that those companies have shitty practices, but
unconditionally putting blame on them is not productive. The drivers
and restaurants arenât saints either.
cedws wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
Without evidence this is just fiction, I donât trust some random
Reddit post.
ch2026 wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
Youâre the sort of asshole that makes whistleblowers not even
bother.
huhkerrf wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
And you're the sort of overly credulous person who makes people
post fiction on internet forums for points.
I mean... It goes both ways.
sunaookami wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
if the user was a whistleblower they wouldn't post it on Reddit
sandeepkd wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
Not sure its justified to put it in any bucket right away for couple
reasons
- Terminology is realistic
- Everything mentioned is feasible and more or less thats how a
business works on the idea of extracting maximum profit
- Caveat is, whatever has been called out is most likely legal so the
company is legally playing by the rules, its just some ones moral
compass that does not wants to accept it
tsimionescu wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
The biggest red flag to me is the confident claims about where the
money is going. I really don't think it's plausible to any extent
that a backend developer for a major app would have any idea
whatsoever to what account any particular fee is being deposited
(they might know the account number if they worked on that area,
but knowing that the account represents a legal fund or whatever is
extremely unlikely).
RealCodingOtaku wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
Not backing up the claims, but,
You don't need to know the account or account number, just need
to know the transaction logic, which most backend developer will
know of as long as they work in that area.
If the product managers keep boasting about their new strategy
(which I have seen in almost all companies I have worked for),
even the juniors will know what's going on.
testbjjl wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
By that same token, couldnât someone say, without evidence, your
response is obfuscation and donât trust someone telling you food
deliver services are not taking advantage of people using an
algorithm? Not that I think you are but neither response proves
identity or motive.
bossyTeacher wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Including evidence in a public post will out them to the company and
make the upcoming lawsuit against them more serious by giving ammo to
the company. The evidence should be given to the journalist OP will
soon talk to.
dieselgate wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
I donât wholly disagree but consider it more a datapoint than an
outlier that should be omitted.
cedws wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Everybody knows delivery apps are shitty, if it were just gossip it
wouldnât matter but making specific allegations should be backed
up with proof.
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised
people think this is news.
olalonde wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Some of this seems plausibleâeven expectedâbut other parts feel
implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does
literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount
drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable.
Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems
unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight
across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My
guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some
liberties with the truth.
ramraj07 wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep
thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
You're not thinking like a techbro: there's nothing unscrupulous
about A/B testing or "revenue optimization".
hackable_sand wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
Techbros don't think, they just do.
bilekas wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
I do use some of these regularly when I'm in a pinch but I would never
even think to tip in the app itself. If I don't trust a company to pay
the drivers a wage, why would I trust them to give them my tip!
Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.
ramraj07 wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
It used to be the case briefly (I think) that drivers choose your
order after seeing the tip amount so as the poster mentioned, you
would get only the truly desperate drivers if you dont tip.
If whats written here is true (I honestly have no reason to doubt it)
its disgusting and ill definitely not use these apps any further.
bilekas wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
I'm inclined to believe the poster also, I see no real benefit
otherwise. I will say it's not a surprise at the very least, their
business model was market 'disruption' to the point there are no
alternatives as the customers will all be on the app. It reminds me
of a related video of the Last Week Tonight about the food apps.
Well worth a 20 min watch :
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII
auggierose wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
So are we talking Uber eats here?
jonny_eh wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
Doordash has the $2.99 priority optional fee, I dunno about other
services.
another_twist wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
For UberEats the listed prices are also different from when you order
directly at the restaurant. Its not just he ridiculous service fees.
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
I'm sure this isn't limited to any single company. It's just typical
VC/techbro company playbook.
subdavis wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
For context, this was removed from 4 other subreddits.
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/
zzgo wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
I got banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism for stating that we
shouldn't be ripping on people for having a Coexist bumper sticker.
OP getting their post rejected there doesn't surprise me in the
least.
abrookewood wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
Yet is seems entirely feasible.
winterqt wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
Looks like some were automod and some just went into modqueue, only
one was actually removed by mods.
ilvez wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
If this would come out for Bolt that my tip won't reach 100% to
driver/delivery guy, I would quit using it. Lying to users about
especially when they want to be generous is like fake beggars.
Nextgrid wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
It doesn't matter if 10% of users quit using it if the stolen tips
from the other 90% more than cover it. And where are you going to
run? The competition isn't any better.
dartharva wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
Just buy food physically, or call up the eatery and order on phone
directly?
ilvez wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
I think that's very cynical perspective. Probably you are correct,
but if they were all corrupted, I could try starting my own. I'm
probably naive but I still believe being ethical and profitable at
the same time is possible.
em-bee wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
being ethical and profitable is possible, but competing against
the unethical is another matter.
if a company keeps the tips they can charge lower prices. just
like some restaurants pay lower salaries when waiters can rely on
tipping (which is why i consider tipping itself to be unethical)
literallyroy wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
If it helps: they do not all work this way
rasse wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
You don't _need_ the competition, either. Just pretend it's 2005
and acquire food some other way.
lispisok wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
More evidence for my theory that the only reason Uber et al are able to
exist is because they have an infinite supply of suckers signing up as
drivers. Any McJob pays better now.
OGEnthusiast wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
*infinite supply of migrants
levocardia wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
But driving for Uber is much more pleasant than having a McJob. You
can listen to music. You can set your own schedule. If you need more
hours to make rent you can work more. If you get tired you can just
go home.
agilob wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
>f you need more hours to make rent you can work more.
Except the part the algorithm marks you as more desperate and from
now on pays you less.
backwardsponcho wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
Also much more dangerous, right? Since you're spending so much time
on the road.
rpcope1 wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
I remember when everyone was talking how we would all be gig workers
and it was going to be the best thing ever. I am eagerly awaiting
seeing whose legal department if any poop their pants tomorrow. Maybe
if we're lucky we'll even see an 8-K soon.
senectus1 wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
some countries do a better job of protecting their population from
corp psychopath companies.
Australia is one.
but its not enough and the moment the right wing side of Gov gets
in they start rolling back a lot of the labor law protections the
left wing work at putting in.
servo_sausage wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
The average gig worker here is a migrant, hard to see how that is
protecting Australians.
senectus1 wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
no its more about protecting the people from the corps. not
protecting the locals from the immigrants.
Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an
immigration quota issue.
OGEnthusiast wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
> Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an
immigration quota issue.
Immigration quotas should probably be considered part of
labor laws though, given the impact immigration can have on
wages and the job/housing market for natives.
vosper wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
Itâs a long way short of evidence, though. It might be right, but
it might just be food for confirmation bias, too.
ramraj07 wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Always possible, but the points here are too good to be out of a
random brainstorm of what an evil company would do. It sounds very
plausible as an exhaustive list of the most important dastardly
things an evil delivery company would do.
rationalist wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice
yesterday. His wish might be granted.
> Iâm posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I
am technically under a massive NDA. I donât care anymore. I put in my
two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
deepfriedbits wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
Yeah that was either a tactical misstep, or a smart move if they
fabricated the date or the fact that they put in in their two weeks.
apayan wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
[1] Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
HTML [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddit....
zzgo wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
The comments didn't load, you gotta archive old.reddit.com in order
to get 50 comments archived.
DIR <- back to front page