It's a bit terrifying that people on twitter seem to think this is an intentional product decision rather than a bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop. I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.
Bugs like this happen sometimes. I used to work at Uber, here is what happens with bugs like this: - Some engineer will get paged, look at the incident, and eventually the root cause of the bug will be found. - The root cause of the bug will be fixed to prevent it from happening on new trips, new fare calc tests will be added, etc. - Engineers will identify which commit introduced the bug and which dates/trips are po…
The Uber fare calculation engineers should add a geofence at $-0.0.
This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.
Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…
The credit card company is the one that holds the power I guess. I wonder if someday visa will start threatening merchants who retaliate via bans as an extra card feature.
When she got out of the Uber, the driver continued driving for a long time before "ending" the ride, and the tab ran the entire time which racked up extra charges.
I thought the ride automatically ended, geo-fenced to the destination. Is that not the case?
nope. As a driver, you never know when your passenger is gonna be like, "I'm gonna change my mind, let's go all the way to santa barbara instead". Both you and UBER/lyft want that ride. Surprised-not-surprised that uber doesn't send the client app a message asking for approval.
Another Uber bug I ran into a couple weeks ago. I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip. After getting out of the Uber I clicked to pay a 20% tip, and it paid it on the original (much higher) amount. Worked out to be almost a 100% tip. I called support, walked the very nice woman through what happened, she filed a bug report and reset the tip to a normal amount.
> I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip
Bugs notwithstanding, if intentional, then that's a pretty scummy thing to do. Not all drivers are given the full details of the offer they are accepting (it's the norm not to have details), but some offers that drivers receive do include things like "guaranteed $X trip". So even if unintentional, someone would be getting screwed there (e.g. Uber, if they were forced to cover the difference to the driver).
Businesses deliberately plan for and rely on people like you making that distinction, even though you shouldn’t. Why should it matter? The consumer is fucked either way.
For the same reason that if some kind of Cordyceps-like brain-parasite were to infect a person and make them murder people, that wouldn't be that person's fault. Especially if the brain parasite could be removed, reverting their personality to normal. I wouldn't hold that against the person going forward (unless they for some reason actively pursued further brain-parasite infections as a general preference.) Companie…
That's an interesting way of framing the issue. By that logic, while active malfeasance may be the scenario that generates more outrage, it's actually the banal/emergent evil that represents more of a reason to avoid a business because between the two it's much harder to fix.
Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…
The credit card company is the one that holds the power I guess. I wonder if someday visa will start threatening merchants who retaliate via bans as an extra card feature.
Previously, Visa(?) had tried to prevent merchants from having separate cash and debit/credit prices (gas stations for example), and they got in trouble with “monopoly laws”. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on them retaliating on merchants who ban customers.
It will take massive fines and employment regulation to change anything. Uber will continue and defend this type of behavior until they're made to do otherwise.
No. It will take a driver shortage. Or a rider shortage.
It will take massive fines and employment regulation to change anything. Uber will continue and defend this type of behavior until they're made to do otherwise.
No. It will take a driver shortage. Or a rider shortage.
This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.
Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…
I hate having to dispute charges with the CC company because I don’t like the idea that the merchant gets stuck with the bill, but I have done it on a few occasions where I felt like I had absolutely no recourse. I recently had to do this with one of those gigantic furniture warehouse places. I paid full retail price + delivery and setup changes for a bed. The guys came and set up the bed, but it had some greasy smudges all over the headboard and some other ones issues I can’t recall, so I called to complain and they basically gave me the runaround and said there’s nothing we can do because I didn’t reject the item right away and that it was only cosmetic. I wasted my time begging and pleading with store management and their customer satisfaction department, but there was never any real resolution. In the end they offered me a $100 gift certificate towards my next purchase. I felt insulted and exhausted at that point and kindly informed them that I would be doing a chargeback. “ok”, they said. The next day I got a credit for the full cost, which IIRC was about $900. I honestly felt horrible for doing that because I essentially got the bed free. I suppose the company’s policies simply didn’t allow them to actually do the right thing and fix or replace the bed. Perhaps it was simply less costly for them to eat the coat of a chargeback instead of paying someone to fix the problem or replace it due to labor and other costs.
People try to take any chance to make a villian out of big tech, it's just a damn bug people! They might not be the most decent "being", but the fact that this post is trending bothers me
And it bothers me that there are people who think they need to white knight for a company valued at billions of dollars when a bug causes a driver to pay money to work, yet here we are.