Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised people think this is news.

When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."

You're not thinking like a techbro: there's nothing unscrupulous about A/B testing or "revenue optimization".

Techbros don't think, they just do.

Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but 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.

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

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).

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.

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.

I don’t wholly disagree but consider it more a datapoint than an outlier that should be omitted.

Everybody knows delivery apps are shitty, if it were just gossip it wouldn’t matter but making specific allegations should be backed up with proof.

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.

You’re the sort of asshole that makes whistleblowers not even bother.

if the user was a whistleblower they wouldn't post it on Reddit

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.