> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t 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.
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.
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 didn’t 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.
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)
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.
Maybe “he” is a “she” - quite right what you say, there’s no reason to believe their details.
I would say what they describe about their employer is probably true. I’ve had similar experience of companies making every last buck off their “human assets” but thats how profit works: you take money off others in exchange for promised benefits.
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
By that same token, couldn’t someone say, without evidence, your response is obfuscation and don’t 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m 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. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping.
I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t.
> 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, I’m 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 “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.”
> 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 company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8]
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 doesn’t 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 “pay the rent”, “tip theft”
3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.
4. The benefit fee that goes into some “policy defense” - 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 it’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice yesterday. His wish might be granted.
> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
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.
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.
What is the chance that they will say things like “oops, we forgot about your order?” “Oops, we didn’t click button that it’s done and could be picked up”.
I had situations where my order was forgotten/lost when I literally was sitting in the restaurant and waiting for my order.
Yes, I’m sure that those companies have shitty practices, but unconditionally putting blame on them is not productive. The drivers and restaurants aren’t saints either.
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.
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.
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.
The worst bit was when, at my major food app, we had a “cancer patient” 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. We’d win almost everything.
But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
Ahh yes, blockchain, that pathetic excuse for software - just needs to be implemented better.
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.
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