141–150 of 316 posts
Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the table.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.
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.
If this is Uber then it's not legitimate.
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.
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.
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.
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 t…
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.
I think that poor guy made less than 15% (assuming an 80 cent per mile cost for the vehicle).
Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just l…
Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?
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
Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just l…
> 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?
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.