Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 92 posts

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#21

Post by Fede_V »

jacalata wrote: post #6
hagope wrote: post #2

I've had only awesome experiences as an Uber rider (in the Boston area and Bay Area) and all the drivers I talked to seem pretty happy (especially ex-taxi drivers). I agree the software is a bit shotty, but I'd bet they are aware of and working out all the kinks.

My understanding is that Uber drivers are always happy about being uber drivers when talking to customers because there is a "secret shopper" program that considers complaining about the company to be a bad thing.

I understand why the company does it, but that's horrific. There was a sandwhich chain (mostly based in the UK) that even had a collective punishment thing - if someone at a shop was found to be insufficiently cheerful, everyone lost on the weekly bonus.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when-c...

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#22

Post by denzil_correa »

Let me add an slightly alternate (may be off topic) perspective!

In India, the maps are (surprisingly) accurate on the Uber app. The ETA is close to expected and everything's fine. BUT, the driver has no idea on how to use them! It results in the driver calling multiple times to locate where you are. I think Uber must provide a little bit of training to the drivers on the use of navigation system on their app.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#24

Post by pbreit »

martinko wrote: post #12
LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

> Having accepted a rider, the driver has no idea of the destination. Only if you don't enter your destination in the app, which you can totally do.

This is not true, at least according to my limited experience in Prague. The driver will see the destination I put in only after he STARTS the ride, ie after I get in the car (as opposed to seeing it before or after he accepts the ride).

In the US, at least, entering the destination is optional.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#25

Post by aetherson »

jess23 wrote: post #16
moonka wrote: post #8

I've used Uber since they showed up in Seattle, and was a big proponent of it. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of issues with the estimated eta being off by 20 minutes or so, which has led me to start using other services (Lyft, sidecar, & crown car), all of which seem to do a better job of giving me an ETA which is within a couple of minutes of them showing up.

I have also seen the GPS estimates degrade over time -- which begs the question: shouldn't those estimate be improving over time, unless something shady is going on?

I would guess that GPS experiences like the article mentions are either driver app errors or scaling problems. That is, it sounds like the server is calculating the ETA of the driver based on a stale location. The location would be stale either because the driver app is not updating it correctly or because even when it is updating location correctly, the server is (sometimes) using an older location, probably due to an eventually consistent data store.

When I worked for Flywheel (Uber competitor, same general needs of "figure out the closest driver and provide an ETA"), we'd occasionally see drivers whose phones seemed to get "stuck" in a location, essentially because the location service crashed in the O/S and would stop updating the app (though this was on Android phones and not iOS, and I'd be slightly surprised to see it happen in iOS).

But I think that the scaling issue is the most likely. Location updates come fast and furious, and must be queried quickly. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Uber is using some kind of big scalable highly available database that could in the event of fairly routine network partitions report stale driver locations some of the time, and/or a cache in front of their underlying store that sometimes fails to get invalidated. That seems like it's consistent with the experience of the driver that the problem tends to happen on particular nights (when they're having some kind of underlying problem with, say, communication between components of their data store cluster), and why you might see it getting worse over time (as they scale).

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#26

Post by Schweigi »

techsupporter wrote: post #14
moonka wrote: post #8

I've used Uber since they showed up in Seattle, and was a big proponent of it. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of issues with the estimated eta being off by 20 minutes or so, which has led me to start using other services (Lyft, sidecar, & crown car), all of which seem to do a better job of giving me an ETA which is within a couple of minutes of them showing up.

My experience with Uber in Seattle hasn't been so hot, but I rarely use taxis or taxi-like services so maybe it's just the luck of the draw. One driver actively campaigned for me to start using Lyft and another decided that downtown to Ballard (as in just outside University Street tunnel station to 15th and Market) needed to go via the Fremont bridge. It's easier for me to just take Metro and use car2Go to fill in th…

I took an Uber already a couple of times in Seattle and noticed that the Uber GPS seems to take a longer route than necessary in some cases. A former taxi driver told me too that the Uber GPS is not very good.

I'm wondering if they developed their own routing algorithm which would explain why it isn't as good as other navigation systems.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#27

Post by dnautics »

I'm not sure how her back to back drives add up to only $10/hr. I drive Uber/Lyft in San Diego, routinely don't get back-to-back rides and have some long stretches of downtime, and usually make $1000 on a 50 hour on-call week (~30h of actual drive time). So that's about $20/hour. If you minus gas (~150/wk) that's a little bit less; I drive a honda insight, which gets slightly worse gas mileage than the prius, and the per hour and per mile in SF is higher than than in San Diego.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#28

Post by spacemanmatt »

microtonal wrote: post #18
mbrameld wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a synonym now for a long time.

That does not mean one can't protest it ;). You need a way to refer to an actual lousy GPS as well (long fix time, inaccurate). Lumping everything together makes it hard to be precise (like using 'begging the question' wrongly somewhere else in these comments ;)).

I don't like it when words I know lose power either, but language changes under stress of modern usage and wrong becomes the new correct. 'Literal' became the new figurative. And so it goes.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#29

Post by spacemanmatt »

SyneRyder wrote: post #7

I'm not so sure about the "lousy GPS". In an UberX ride I had the other week, the driver & I were joking about how dodgy GPS can be, and we both agreed to ignore its suggestions... Uber was suggesting we take a tunnel that would take us away from our destination, and it's a tunnel no regular taxi driver has ever used with me when driving to that destination before. Well, after dealing with evening crowds & inner city…

I have learned to stop second-guessing Waze on a similar basis. It has sent me clear around enough traffic snarls and accidents to earn my trust.

Re: I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver

#30

Post by ghshephard »

dnautics wrote: post #27

I'm not sure how her back to back drives add up to only $10/hr. I drive Uber/Lyft in San Diego, routinely don't get back-to-back rides and have some long stretches of downtime, and usually make $1000 on a 50 hour on-call week (~30h of actual drive time). So that's about $20/hour. If you minus gas (~150/wk) that's a little bit less; I drive a honda insight, which gets slightly worse gas mileage than the prius, and the…

This is easily one of the best contributions I've read in HN in the last month regarding Uber. Nothing beats someone who has actual experience (for better or worse).
Post reply on HN