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I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

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Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#271

Post by ramsey72 »

mlrtime wrote: post #225
hirako2000 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks make money on interest. Perhaps the principle itself is the issue, if it's legal to earn money on loans, no surprise a bank incentive is to make you take loan, and have you keep them for as long as it can. Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the spare they've got. Of course…

Mortgages have amortization schedules, Banks love it when you pay more as it only reduces the tail end of your loan. You still pay the interest up front. Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to pay off early.

Banks don't care at all how or when you pay your mortgage. They only originate and service the loan. The loan is sold to Fannie & Freddie and isn't on the banks' books anymore.

Only credit unions and small regional banks still hold mortgages on their books. The overwhelming majority(90%+) of mortgages are agency - ie sold to the federal government.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#272

Post by ramsey72 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #165
manuelmoreale wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in. (I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes). I think this is conceptually sound take but at the same time it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these…

> it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these decisions. So I guess, nicer taxi corporations existed, and got turfed out by Uber and Lyft who managed to reduce prices or increase convenience, and are reaping the fruit of their investment. Capitalism in motion. I guess my fundamental point is, you can't fix this by putting pressure on companies to be nicer, because the ones being less nice w…

There was no such thing as a nice taxi before Uber. Not only did you have to schedule rides in advance, they were also incredibly unreliable. Prices were much higher and people routinely got scammed because you didn't know how much it would cost until you arrived.

Uber/lyft is miles better than the old taxis.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#273

Post by whatever1 »

eudamoniac wrote: post #255
whatever1 wrote: post #88

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…

$38/hr sounds pretty good to me though.

If you drove 50 miles in an hour, then likely $38 does not cover your car costs.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#274

Post by ramsey72 »

RealCodingOtaku wrote: post #140
tsimionescu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except this is complete bullshit. Money is anonymous. Why would they have some kind of pipeline account that goes directly from the fees to political spend? Why wouldn't the fees just go to a generic revenue account and the lobbying would come out of the same account?

This is like claiming someone set up a special account where all their paychecks on rainy days get spent directly on weed. It makes zero sense.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#275

Post by roncesvalles »

swat535 wrote: post #250
muppetman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the app shows you a few fake deliveries... If this story is real then there's no reason you can believe what the app shows you.

If you ask Uber drivers, they explain it to you that they are not even aware of your priority order. All it does is that it puts you first in queue (assuming two people don’t pay priority in the batch). So it’s a gamble on your end.

But that makes sense. Why should the driver be aware of who is marked Priority? It might also open up the app company to liability (oh the app told me it's a "Priority", so I drove faster and crashed). The driver simply goes where the app tells them to go.

In my experience on Uber Eats, Priority definitely works.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#276

Post by roncesvalles »

hussachai wrote: post #32

> 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 t…

Also, the NDA part. I've never heard of SWEs getting "NDAs". Technically everything you do while employed is supposed to be confidential. It doesn't require a special NDA.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#277

Post by another_twist »

renewiltord wrote: post #130
another_twist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that…

I don't think you have to claim you made that thing up. I don't care about the language, the hyperbole of the post just the claims. The claim that you know the OP of an anonymous reddit account is where I'd stop reading.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#279

Post by loktarogar »

muppetman wrote: post #193
loktarogar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I choose priority delivery in Uber, I can see the driver go to the store, pick up my order and drive directly to my place. I also see the driver usually have 1-2 stops on the way if I don't select that. If there's enough gap between myself and the restaurant, priority is absolutely a time save. If this is Uber then it's not legitimate.

Or the app shows you a few fake deliveries... If this story is real then there's no reason you can believe what the app shows you.

It shows the guy going to the restaurant, the same guy that eventually shows up at my door. It shows it on the way to a couple of deliveries and takes as long as extra deliveries should roughly take. It shows the immediate previous delivery when it's almost delivered, and the guy spends about as long as i'd expect at that place.

Not saying that it's not deceptive in some way, but it's more than just a surface-level difference.

Re: I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

#280

Post by Glawen »

mns wrote: post #166
nxtfari wrote: post #135

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…

Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the performance…

I also sometimes think about how to make computers supervise/control human activity. It's like a inner engineering rush, but then I come back to my senses and think of how outraged I would be. However for some colleagues, as long as is not affecting them, they don't see any issue with such propositions.
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