UberEats could be underpaying delivery drivers on 21% of trips

Uber is making it harder and harder to get on board with the idea that it's not an employer. Leveling out people's pay over multiple trips or retroactively adjusting the reward per job sure sounds like an employer having very strong control over the work conditions and compensation. And this almost brings back echoes of Doordash (?) when it was caught taking drivers' tips so that their pay was reduced to the minimum hourly promised "wage".

It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental legal fight defining what they are.

You would think they would go in the opposite direction and pay people such good rates during this controversy, you could hold that up and say, "see? People are clearly much better under this system". But I guess not.

On a separate note, I will say that this is pretty expected in terms of how software errors go. Of course programmers at a company will be checking quite diligently that they're not overpaying through their algorithms. But underpaying? Only those who can't easily check your code are harmed by that one. It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.

I'm more interested in the data than the tool. What was the start and end point for the trip and other details.

For example, this makes no sense:

"I had this one delivery that was an hour-and-a-half long and I got paid $16 and I thought, 'There is no way that's right,'" Armin Samii, an unemployed computer scientist who has been working Uber Eats on the side, told Salon. "I looked into it and found out that Uber paid me for a one mile delivery instead of a four mile delivery. Of course it's all made worse because I'm on a bike and they don't account for that, but that's a separate issue."

A 11 mile hill climb of Mount Hamilton with 2700 of elevation gain takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to do. A straight hill climb which you would only find in cities like Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro is like the worst case scenario. A 4 mile trip in pretty much any major city should be maybe 20-25 minutes with stop signs and traffic lights. Not saying there wasn't an issue with that trip, but this makes no sense.

I have worked a lot with this stuff in my career, so I'm inclined to want to see the data myself so I can try and reverse engineer what may have happened.

Furthermore Armin Samii appears to have worked for a direct competitor of the company he's criticizing while developing this.

Why would there be a buy in the Eats tracking but not in Rideshare? I'd imagine it's the same underlying GPS tracking/routing software used in both cases. Is it just that the rides are paid differently than Eats deliveries are so they're noticing it differently?

> It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.

I wouldn't say it's rare. Companies that do this are very open to lawsuits but also bad press, and that's the thing all companies hate - having to make public statements and ultimately fix the issue, isn't worth it to any business at scale. The DoorDash tipgate was hugely embarrassing for them, and Uber has also been very publicly ridiculed in the past that the the last thing Dara wants is anymore bad press.

I don't understand why an investor would fund unprofitable Uber 2.0. Without a massive differentiator there is no reason to believe their trajectory would be any different from Uber's - except with increased capital requirements from being the third(fourth?) mover.

Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?