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Data Science Challenges at Instacart

tech.instacart.com

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Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#31

Post by callmeed »

randycupertino wrote: post #4

My friend works at Instacart, she says it totally sucks. Mainly because there's no guaranteed hourly pay and what she gets paid depends entirely on what the customers decide to give out as a tip. So for example sometimes she spends an hour grocery shopping for someone, then 30 minutes to drive to their house, and then the person can just arbitrarily decide to tip her $10. So she makes $10 for 90 minutes of work? That…

See, this is the problem with the entire business model. Your friend has now put the onus of paying her living wage on the consumer. I don't want to hire a personal delivery person for $10/hour. Unless I've got a $100+ dinner bill, tipping $25 sounds crazy to me. Calling people "cheapskates" for not doing so is completely unfair–especially when these people are already paying a delivery fee. Do you honestly think families in Omaha and Birmingham are gonna pay to have groceries delivered AND want to tip 20%?

To be clear, most of the blame falls on Instacart. But your friend should find a new job. A tip-only contractor job is as bad as a 100% commission telemarketer job (maybe worse).

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#32

Post by jsprogrammer »

callmeed wrote: post #31
randycupertino wrote: post #4

My friend works at Instacart, she says it totally sucks. Mainly because there's no guaranteed hourly pay and what she gets paid depends entirely on what the customers decide to give out as a tip. So for example sometimes she spends an hour grocery shopping for someone, then 30 minutes to drive to their house, and then the person can just arbitrarily decide to tip her $10. So she makes $10 for 90 minutes of work? That…

See, this is the problem with the entire business model. Your friend has now put the onus of paying her living wage on the consumer. I don't want to hire a personal delivery person for $10/hour. Unless I've got a $100+ dinner bill, tipping $25 sounds crazy to me. Calling people "cheapskates" for not doing so is completely unfair–especially when these people are already paying a delivery fee. Do you honestly think fam…

The onus of a living wage is always on the consumer. Even if instacart were paying a living wage to the people who perform deliveries, they would need to reflect at least those wages and other expenses in whatever they charge the consumer (unless deliveries are subsidized by VC's or other interested parties).

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#33

Post by dlgeek »

randycupertino wrote: post #10
iamse7en wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then she should quit. There are certainly other people out there willing to do this type of simple work for a low wage. Instacart is basically passing it to the consumers so that the economics of the business work.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is going to, I know she and the other people that do it hate it. Shouldn't they be guaranteed minimum wage? I mean, if they don't make minimum wage they can sue, or report them to the Department of Labor, right?

Not if they're classified as contractors.

(Whether the contractor classification is reasonable is a whole other ball of wax)

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#34

Post by sandGorgon »

jeremystan wrote: post #14
jsprogrammer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“We will take full ownership of our projects. We take pride in our work and relentlessly execute to get things completely finished.” Does this mean that as an employee, or ex-employee, I can take my owned projects with me and use them for my own purposes?

We've worked hard to open source projects whenever we think they'll be useful broadly: https://www.instacart.com/opensource . There is definitely more of this we can (and I hope will) do in the future.

How do you guys run R in production? Just getting started with R based datascience and it has been a struggle to figure out how to build a production data science stack.

Do you snapshot the computed models as RData and stream them to s3, etc

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#35

Post by asdfologist »

JasonCEC wrote: post #27
minimaxir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely more technical detail and statistical process in that post, although I strongly question the use of a hiring test that intricate and time consuming for an internship .

It's a 3 month paid internship, and 99% of the students have been from Princeton. Did you see the work we linked to? That's intern work here - we treat our interns as full members of the team, and they've delivered.

So you had 100 interns and 99 of them were from Princeton??

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#36

Post by cballard »

jeremystan wrote: post #14
jsprogrammer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“We will take full ownership of our projects. We take pride in our work and relentlessly execute to get things completely finished.” Does this mean that as an employee, or ex-employee, I can take my owned projects with me and use them for my own purposes?

We've worked hard to open source projects whenever we think they'll be useful broadly: https://www.instacart.com/opensource . There is definitely more of this we can (and I hope will) do in the future.

Why don't you pay your workers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121092

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#38

Post by grayclhn »

> Many of our best data science ideas have come from Instacart employees in the field – working directly with our shoppers in our stores, or interacting directly with our customers.

I have no idea what this could mean. Either you're getting algorithm suggestions from your shoppers and customers, or (more likely) "data science" means "user interface."

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#39

Post by Pyxl101 »

bunderbunder wrote: post #30
ffumarola wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely understand your frustration, but calling the people cheap idiots seems a bit harsh. Does Instacart give tipping guidance? As a user, I would just assume they pay reasonable wages and a tip should be just that... a tip, not a living wage.

As Instacart users, we've experienced some confusion on this front. They don't make it at all clear to their customers how the pickers are paid or how much they might or might not depend on tips. I want to believe this is something Instacart employees could easily clear up by disseminating some information on the subject rather than hoping that Instacart will handle it.

This isn't something that a user should have to know. We're going down the wrong track by implying that they should. Instacart shouldn't be expected to share their compensation model for their employees or contractors publicly or with their customers, and users shouldn't be expected to know or care about it in order to make fair decisions. This is a business relationship of customer to service provider. Paying the price you're charged with an optional tip for good service is entirely appropriate.

Re: Data Science Challenges at Instacart

#40

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

minimaxir wrote: post #18
JasonCEC wrote: post #11

On this note: My team and I at Analytical Flavor Systems[1] wrote a blog post on how we go about hiring data science interns[2]. It's heavier on the technical details, and suffers from less... romanticism.... [1] www.gastrograph.com [2] https://gastrograph.com/blogs/gastronexus/interviewing-data-...

There is definitely more technical detail and statistical process in that post, although I strongly question the use of a hiring test that intricate and time consuming for an internship .

That is very true. However, I'm all for these kinds of tests in general. I read the assignment (and after lol'ing at the specification of methods), found it reasonably interesting. I reckon it would take me an hour or two to complete (as long as I didn't get sucked in to exploring the data) :).

Then again, I'm not looking for an internship.

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