I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/

by apayan • 7 months ago

623 292 7 months ago

old.reddit.com

apayan• 7 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddi...

Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com

zzgo4• 7 months ago

The comments didn't load, you gotta archive old.reddit.com in order to get 50 comments archived.

rationalist• 7 months ago

I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice yesterday. His wish might be granted.

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.

deepfriedbits• 7 months ago

Yeah that was either a tactical misstep, or a smart move if they fabricated the date or the fact that they put in in their two weeks.

hahahahhaah• 7 months ago

Of course they did. You dont use a burner laptop then drop PII in the post.

They may also not work for the company and just larp as a combo of stories they heard, or it is all made up for karma or kicks.

warmedcookie• 7 months ago

Big brain play: he decided to post this when someone on his team put in their two weeks that he did not like.

lispisok• 7 months ago

More evidence for my theory that the only reason Uber et al are able to exist is because they have an infinite supply of suckers signing up as drivers. Any McJob pays better now.

vosper• 7 months ago

It’s a long way short of evidence, though. It might be right, but it might just be food for confirmation bias, too.

ramraj073• 7 months ago

Always possible, but the points here are too good to be out of a random brainstorm of what an evil company would do. It sounds very plausible as an exhaustive list of the most important dastardly things an evil delivery company would do.

rpcope1• 7 months ago

I remember when everyone was talking how we would all be gig workers and it was going to be the best thing ever. I am eagerly awaiting seeing whose legal department if any poop their pants tomorrow. Maybe if we're lucky we'll even see an 8-K soon.

senectus12• 7 months ago

some countries do a better job of protecting their population from corp psychopath companies. Australia is one.

but its not enough and the moment the right wing side of Gov gets in they start rolling back a lot of the labor law protections the left wing work at putting in.

levocardia• 7 months ago

But driving for Uber is much more pleasant than having a McJob. You can listen to music. You can set your own schedule. If you need more hours to make rent you can work more. If you get tired you can just go home.

backwardsponcho• 7 months ago

Also much more dangerous, right? Since you're spending so much time on the road.

agilob• 7 months ago

f you need more hours to make rent you can work more.

Except the part the algorithm marks you as more desperate and from now on pays you less.

OGEnthusiast2• 7 months ago

*infinite supply of migrants

conradojordan• 7 months ago

This is basically the concept of "Reserve army of labour": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

ilvez2• 7 months ago

If this would come out for Bolt that my tip won't reach 100% to driver/delivery guy, I would quit using it. Lying to users about especially when they want to be generous is like fake beggars.

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

It doesn't matter if 10% of users quit using it if the stolen tips from the other 90% more than cover it. And where are you going to run? The competition isn't any better.

rasse• 7 months ago

You don't _need_ the competition, either. Just pretend it's 2005 and acquire food some other way.

ilvez2• 7 months ago

I think that's very cynical perspective. Probably you are correct, but if they were all corrupted, I could try starting my own. I'm probably naive but I still believe being ethical and profitable at the same time is possible.

dartharva4• 7 months ago

Just buy food physically, or call up the eatery and order on phone directly?

i_play_stax• 7 months ago

The answer is simple, do not use the apps. It's not about comparing competitors. Simply abstain entirely. The gig economy is an exploitation engine.

eleventen• 7 months ago

For context, this was removed from 4 other subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/

winterqt• 7 months ago

Looks like some were automod and some just went into modqueue, only one was actually removed by mods.

abrookewood• 7 months ago

Yet is seems entirely feasible.

zzgo4• 7 months ago

I got banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism for stating that we shouldn't be ripping on people for having a Coexist bumper sticker. OP getting their post rejected there doesn't surprise me in the least.

auggierose• 7 months ago

So are we talking Uber eats here?

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

I'm sure this isn't limited to any single company. It's just typical VC/techbro company playbook.

another_twist6• 7 months ago

For UberEats the listed prices are also different from when you order directly at the restaurant. Its not just he ridiculous service fees.

swat5352• 7 months ago

Yes, I was chatting with a local resturant and they said they have to put higher prices on Uber to cover the fees.

jonny_eh• 7 months ago

Doordash has the $2.99 priority optional fee, I dunno about other services.

bilekas2• 7 months ago

I do use some of these regularly when I'm in a pinch but I would never even think to tip in the app itself. If I don't trust a company to pay the drivers a wage, why would I trust them to give them my tip!

Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.

ramraj073• 7 months ago

It used to be the case briefly (I think) that drivers choose your order after seeing the tip amount so as the poster mentioned, you would get only the truly desperate drivers if you dont tip.

If whats written here is true (I honestly have no reason to doubt it) its disgusting and ill definitely not use these apps any further.

bilekas2• 7 months ago

I'm inclined to believe the poster also, I see no real benefit otherwise. I will say it's not a surprise at the very least, their business model was market 'disruption' to the point there are no alternatives as the customers will all be on the app. It reminds me of a related video of the Last Week Tonight about the food apps.

Well worth a 20 min watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII

cedws2• 7 months ago

Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised people think this is news.

ramraj073• 7 months ago

When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."

olalonde• 7 months ago

Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but other parts feel implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable. Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some liberties with the truth.

rozap• 7 months ago

Yea, idk why this is even surprising. It's all sort of the obvious conclusion that these sorts of companies get to.

Facebook, dating apps, etc all do similar things with affinities and desperation to boost engagement.

The pearl clutching is just cope from people who haven't yet internalized that our industry encourages and glorifies deploying scummy practices at a huge scale.

dieselgate• 7 months ago

I don’t wholly disagree but consider it more a datapoint than an outlier that should be omitted.

cedws2• 7 months ago

Everybody knows delivery apps are shitty, if it were just gossip it wouldn’t matter but making specific allegations should be backed up with proof.

bossyTeacher• 7 months ago

Including evidence in a public post will out them to the company and make the upcoming lawsuit against them more serious by giving ammo to the company. The evidence should be given to the journalist OP will soon talk to.

testbjjl• 7 months ago

By that same token, couldn’t someone say, without evidence, your response is obfuscation and don’t trust someone telling you food deliver services are not taking advantage of people using an algorithm? Not that I think you are but neither response proves identity or motive.

sandeepkd• 7 months ago

Not sure its justified to put it in any bucket right away for couple reasons

- Terminology is realistic

- Everything mentioned is feasible and more or less thats how a business works on the idea of extracting maximum profit

- Caveat is, whatever has been called out is most likely legal so the company is legally playing by the rules, its just some ones moral compass that does not wants to accept it

tsimionescu• 7 months ago

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).

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

Another food delivery app anecdote: they will always blame the restaurant for their lack of driver supply. I've had orders stuck on "preparing your food" for an hour but when I called the restaurant they said it's been ready for 40 mins and they're waiting for someone to come pick it up.

galkk2• 7 months ago

What is the chance that they will say things like “oops, we forgot about your order?” “Oops, we didn’t click button that it’s done and could be picked up”.

I had situations where my order was forgotten/lost when I literally was sitting in the restaurant and waiting for my order.

Yes, I’m sure that those companies have shitty practices, but unconditionally putting blame on them is not productive. The drivers and restaurants aren’t saints either.

AlotOfReading• 7 months ago

"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the term "NPCs".

DharmaPolice• 7 months ago

Human assets doesn't seem that much worse than human resources (other than familiarity).

neilv2• 7 months ago

If the allegations are true, then I think the writer needs to call up a good state Attorney General's office, and ask who to talk to.

Though I'd guess that the alleged scummy company has seen this, and is already preparing their response, trying to purge any incriminating emails and PowerPoints, etc.

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

Why would an AG care? This is a huge company stealing from poor people. The system is working as designed.

They would not be so brazen in doing this (in relative openness with every developer being in on it) if they thought an AG would actually care.

They do this because they correctly calculated that they have enough connections and/or bribes to preempt such an action.

zzgo4• 7 months ago

The California AG in particular wouldn't pass up any opportunity to get his name and accomplishments in the press. I get a weekly newsletter from him extolling his recent successes.

neilv2• 7 months ago

All the time, I'm reading about companies brazenly doing illegal things.

We often see reports of state AGs taking actions against companies.

My guess is that bribes of state AG offices would be unusual. (Do you have better information about that?)

The questions on my mind would be how much resources an AG's office has to deal with corporate crime, and how a given crime would get triaged.

another_twist6• 7 months ago

Well the company might just donate to a certain library and get away scot free.

tbrownaw2• 7 months ago

A sprint planning meeting seems like the wrong place to put that topic.

I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.

pdntspa• 7 months ago

Why not? They have to implement the systems that power this.

Also, water-cooler gossip

zmgsabst3• 7 months ago

I suspect it depends on the company — eg, at Amazon the tech team went out of our way to blind ourselves to what the tax analysts were doing; at a fintech startup, we knew intimate details of what clients were doing.

This sounds like the kind of big-co where intentional segmentation and blinding would happen.

tbrownaw2• 7 months ago

It sounds like the sort of thing that would belong where items get enqueued into the backlog, rather than where a batch of things get finalized and dequeued.

zzgo4• 7 months ago

I used to write tests for a cryptocurrency trading platform. I regularly talked to the auditors, as they were the ones who made sure that the crypto we transferred into external wallets made it back into internal wallets after the test.

I wouldn't say that I knew a bunch of accounting practices from talking to them, but I _did_ learn that the CTO and director of QA both lied to me during my interview. Sure, we made _some_ money from the spread as claimed in my interview, but in truth, the bulk of our money came from loaning our customer deposits to 3 Arrows Capital. I knew we were fucked _months_ before the company suddenly went under.

another_twist6• 7 months ago

Yup. Engineers do have visibility into fintech systems that they implement, maybe even more so than the bean counters since they can trace exactly which txns went where. These things are logged.

andrewinardeer• 7 months ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de...

If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.

thrdbndndn• 7 months ago

Your link is wrong. It must be lower case .json.

fragmede• 7 months ago

https://archive.is/G2H0V

kombine• 7 months ago

Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own food.

hussachai• 7 months ago

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 the biggest headline and lawsuit of the year.

symbogra• 7 months ago

It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.

another_twist6• 7 months ago

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.

650REDHAIR• 7 months ago

Could be fanfic, but fees are 100% misleading.

utopiah• 7 months ago

Meh, I wouldn't read too much into it. They might be a backend dev but that doesn't make them perfectly rational under stress. Being in a whistle blower situation makes smart people do dumb things.

To me it's coherent BUT I'll still wait from a source I trust, e.g. 404 Media, to actually do journalism. I'm not saying it's fanfic or not, I'm saying "Noted, might read about it later in few days in a proper format with verified claims." nothing more.

anon7000• 7 months ago

I mean, it’s not even remotely hard to believe. There are plenty of extremely similar examples, such as:

- grocery delivery algorithmic price fixing: https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo

- dollar general lying about prices: https://youtu.be/uE5THiD-kTk

But yeah, it’d be good to get this backed up even better. Delivery companies are already on thin ice

bb882• 7 months ago

It's also possible he lied about his end date to throw suspicion off. Or he may be still working for the company and used someone else's resignation to pin the blame on them.

Towaway69• 7 months ago

Maybe “he” is a “she” - quite right what you say, there’s no reason to believe their details.

I would say what they describe about their employer is probably true. I’ve had similar experience of companies making every last buck off their “human assets” but thats how profit works: you take money off others in exchange for promised benefits.

thiht• 7 months ago

That’s what I would have done. Planting a few lies to protect your anonymity can’t hurt. Maybe they quit months ago, or maybe they didn’t even put their notice yet.

altairprime• 7 months ago

This is what I would do if my internal moral compass was exhausted to the bone and I felt like public disclosure mattered. Fortunately, public disclosure regarding my prior employment is already regularly made and ignored, so I didn’t have any compulsion to.

Libraries are a haven of safety for leaking material once only. Burnout does not imply incompetent opsec. Neither does drunk; after all, it would horrify non-tech folks to realize how often impaired / intoxicated workers are using root privileges to fix an incident.

AmbroseBierce• 7 months ago

When you are burn out your brain doesn't brain too well, reminds me of Luigi, that 3D printed his gun among other smart moves but made many silly mistakes that got him caught (like carrying the silencer, the magazine, and other incriminating evidence)

Tostino• 7 months ago

I am 95% convinced he was caught because we live in a surveillance panopticon.

The McDonald's kiosks could very easily be sharing data with other private companies (e.g. Palantir) who the government contracts with. There are so many other companies jumping in on sharing data like this, why would a company like McDonald's care about selling out customer privacy in exchange for a better bottom line for investors?

on_the_train• 7 months ago

It's just another run of the mill reddit rage bait fanfic. Nothing makes sense plus the weird responses by the user. Inb4 no shallow dismissals

The algorithm is a gigantic neural network, and as such essentially a black box, incomprehensible to the human mind.

Yeah right

0x1ceb00da• 7 months ago

2 weeks notice and maybe even being backend developer is a lie. He's trying to midlead them

system2• 7 months ago

It would be a good curve ball if he is that smart.

eduardogarza• 7 months ago

Sigh ... you would you specify when you put in your two weeks after going through all the trouble with the burner tech?

concinds• 7 months ago

The biggest red flag is: "I don't care anymore, I hope they sue me", and saying they're about to contact reporters.

It's designed to boost credibility (this is gonna be proven legit, any day now! skeptics will look dumb!), but then why hasn't he gone to them already? Texting a Signal number takes a second. Why would he take additional legal and financial risk for fake internet points on a minor subreddit known for its fanfic?

aduwah• 7 months ago

Raising awareness is not a bad call. I would not know about this, if it would surface in a random US paper

maplethorpe• 7 months ago

If it was me, and I was trying to hide my identity, I'd add those sorts of details to muddy the waters.

roncesvalles2• 7 months ago

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.

hajile4• 7 months ago

I've signed NDAs at a few companies. Implied confidentiality has more limitations and gray areas than an NDA and requires trials when businesses tend to prefer arbitrators (those supposedly neutral parties that know their future business depends on "making the right decision" which is why companies win nearly 95% of arbitrations).

dismalaf• 7 months ago

Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really wouldn't surprise me.

5701652400• 7 months ago

true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very, very, very toxic.

g-b-r• 7 months ago

uhm, 13 people upvoted the single comment of this newly created account

tzs• 7 months ago

How do you know how many people upvoted it?

pixelpoet• 7 months ago

HN is recently absolutely chock full of brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other. The "new" section is repo after repo created a handful minutes ago with AI slop.

I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

LostMyLogin4• 7 months ago

Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m inherently skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping.

I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t.

If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first in case of a batched delivery.

So, I’m guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders you are paying for normal service. [0][1]

Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments so none of this really shocks me.

At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2]

Regarding the desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well studied and verified. [3][4]

The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered apparently.

In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new limits.
DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps.
In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database, DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5]
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space. [6]

The section on companies subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and led to millions in settlements.

On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.”
Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8]

[0] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-d...

[1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers...

[2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash...

[3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag...

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088

[7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r...

[8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...

nulld3v• 7 months ago

Thank you for putting in the time to do the research, this is incredibly helpful!

adrianwaj2• 7 months ago

Blockchain and split payments would work here. The transparency would be useful. Maybe even using x402?

So buyers should be able to see where and how their money is going to be distributed after payment. How much does the driver get? How much is he/she earning? Comparable drivers can compare metrics.

Perhaps unions could build some type of payment app and have gig workers use it as part of their employment contract?

So gig workers end up like ebay sellers with a feedback, followers and sales data on display. They can take their profile with them to new employers as well. Buyers get a profile too. Funds could also be held in escrow, and refunds granted where applicable. I don't know.

dartharva4• 7 months ago

This is not a tech problem, it will not be solved by new tech. It is a civil problem coming from institutional degradation and corruption.

sodafountan3• 7 months ago

I actually disagree; the only way to get to the bottom of any wrongdoing here would be to do an external audit of their systems. That can get expensive and complicated.

Using cryptocurrency with on-chain verification of the paper trail could actually solve this problem without having to get auditors and lawyers involved.

sodafountan3• 7 months ago

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is actually a really good solution that I hadn't thought of.

I'm eager for the web3 economy to truly take off. There are so many little improvements to the way things work with blockchain compared to the black hole that is fiat currency; it's astounding.

But yes, in essence, if the post is true, then this is a misrepresentation of what the service is actually doing. Being able to verify where your payment is going on a publicly available blockchain would provide customers and employees with some clarity.

adrianwaj2• 7 months ago

Yep, digital goods are the big one for a "transparency disruption" in my view.

For me at least, if I am to buy some music I should be able to know how much an artist is going to get along with all their "tag-alongs." Payments should be fast, reliable, useful, easy; and even variable, biased, delayed and aggregated.

greatgib• 7 months ago

With Deliveroo, I already caught the app lying. One time the order was stuck at "waiting for the restaurant/cooking" for a very unusual time, like 40 mins instead of the usual 10 mins.

So I called the restaurant and they told me that the order was ready for like 25 mins but the driver didn't pick it up yet.

When I called the custom service after that, they told me that the driver was finishing another delivery and will pick it up soon.

But so the drive was trying to pin the delay on restaurant when it was their fault and that in the end you will get cold food.

Nextgrid7• 7 months ago

Same experience here, both with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I'm surprised this doesn't get them in trouble on libel/defamation bases.

joduplessis• 7 months ago

put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

I smell some bullshit.

pedrozieg• 7 months ago

“In a library on a burner laptop” - but I’ll narrow it down to people who have handed in their notice on a specific day.

galkk2• 7 months ago

I can believe in each fact individually, but altogether (and that the author has exposure to all of that) it feels like just a rage bait.

Here are red flags for me:

1. Priority delivery. Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people. So dispatch logic must be at least somewhat different. Also from engineering/product perspective the delay between priority and standard could be justified. To give rough analogy: FedEx can deliever package that I drop at 5pm to other side of the country at 9am, if I pay a lot of premium. It doesn’t mean that they can deliver all the packages with that speed and they deliberately slow down all other mail.

2. The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

4. The benefit fee that goes into some “policy defense” - that I can believe in, actually. But again, emotionally manipulative add on (unions, your delivery guy homeless)

5. Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used.

To summarize and repeat my point - I could believe some of the things individually, but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

another_twist6• 7 months ago

2. tip theft and pay the rent are valid terms here.

3. quite likely something like this will exist and it might not be called that right in the code base but it sounds like something that will show up in Slack conversations. From a pure ML perspective (throwing ethics out the windos, this is a good feature)

4. this one sounds sus because cash flow details may not be something a backend engineer might be privy to.

5. UberEats as well. Either ways its quite difficult to say whether or not this is true. But the post does say that tipping theft works by reducing base pay and having the customer pick up the tab. So its not so straightforward.

chrisfosterelli• 7 months ago

3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like 'payrate sensitivity factor'

BoneShard• 7 months ago

Acceptance Elasticity

d1sxeyes• 7 months ago

Something like this can be reworded to make it sound like a “good” thing: “mission-centricity” or “dedication” or some other label that spins this as being committed to the company (leaving out that this is at their own expense).

avidiax• 7 months ago

I was previously at Uber. I can imagine that the culture at some of these companies is toxic enough that people may openly discuss or even brag about some of these things.

There is also a good chance that this person only has 2nd and 3rd hand information and much of the post is only partly true.

Re: 100% of tips going to the driver

I have heard that many of the services are required to at least pay minimum wage. Let's say that this is $20/hr. If they receive $15 in tips during that hour, the company reduces their wage to $5. Driver gets $20 for the hour, $15 in tips, $5 in wages. Yes, 100% of the tips goes to the driver. No, the driver isn't economically better off depending on your tip, unless you are a very generous tipper.

In California, there's AB578 [1], which makes that practice illegal. The poster's algorithm (set the wage before the tip, based on the predicted tip) seems like it might be an attempted workaround for that law. I think it adds credibility that the poster has insight on that algorithm, since they aren't claiming just the publicly known offsetting tactic.

[1] https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1830894

armchairhacker2• 7 months ago

This undoubtedly exists at some level on the macro scale (servers average salary would be higher if they didn't get tips, or they'd be lower quality). Though maybe less where everyone gets paid near minimum wage and servers can't be paid less offset by tips.

But the micro scale? It would be easy to prove, because drivers can see their base pay and tip. OR the app could lie about the tip or merge it with base pay; then it would be slightly harder, but the driver could still prove by asking customers what they tip.

ta-eleph-pants• 7 months ago

The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

Those are accurate descriptions of what's going on.

With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

Not at all unrealistic. These are meant to be internal.

(unions, your delivery guy homeless)

When was the last time you took an Uber? They don't smell that well, and it's a known fact _a lot_ of drivers live in their cars.

Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs.

This only means that the entire tip amount goes to the driver, which is accurate. It doesn't preclude their other sources of revenue from being reduced, as described by OP.

but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

Very plausible he/she does. I worked for a similar company and as a software engineer of no particular rank I had access to everything, incl. code, documents describing features, cross-team meetings where those were discussed, etc. I also had friends across the teams who would talk about what they are working on all the time.

LostMyLogin4• 7 months ago

Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people.

What occurs if your order is placed in a bucket of other priority deliveries? Doesn't that simply become a regular order? Also, AFAIK based on some digging, the drivers are not alerted to priority orders they are simply routed for it. That could have changed though.

The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

"New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a $16.75 million settlement with delivery platform DoorDash for misleading both consumers and delivery workers (known as “Dashers”) by using tips intended for Dashers to subsidize their guaranteed pay. Between May 2017 and September 2019, DoorDash used a guaranteed pay model that let Dashers see how much they would be paid before accepting a delivery. An Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that under this model, DoorDash used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned. DoorDash will pay $16.75 million in restitution for Dashers and up to $1 million in settlement administrator costs to help issue the payments." - https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-...

Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used.

This was proven out multiple times in court with millions in settlement fees across different companies. For example, one suit alleges Instacart “intentionally and maliciously misappropriated gratuities in order to pay plaintiff’s wages even though Instacart maintained that 100 percent of customer tips went directly to shoppers. Based on this representation, Instacart knew customers would believe their tips were being given to shoppers in addition to wages, not to supplement wages entirely.”

Leading the CEO to release the following:

“After launching our new earnings structure this past October, we noticed that there were small batches where shoppers weren’t earning enough for their time,” Mehta wrote. “To help with this, we instituted a $10 floor on earnings, inclusive of tips, for all batches. This meant that when Instacart’s payment and the customer tip at checkout was below $10, Instacart supplemented the difference. While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips as a part of this guarantee was misguided. We apologize for taking this approach.”

Also, on a side note:

"Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no illusions about the company’s law-breaking, with one executive joking they had become “pirates” and another conceding: 'We’re just fucking illegal.'" - https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/global-u...

"In one exchange, Uber executives warned against sending drivers to a protest in France which could lead to violence from angry taxi drivers. 'I think it’s worth it,' wrote Kalanick. 'Violence guarantee[s] success.'" - https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/10/leaked-uber-files-reveal-h...

All to say that none of this shocks me.

daveoc64• 7 months ago

What occurs if your order is placed in a bucket of other priority deliveries? Doesn't that simply become a regular order? Also, AFAIK based on some digging, the drivers are not alerted to priority orders they are simply routed for it. That could have changed though.

At least on the platforms in the UK, the only thing that priority is advertised as doing is making your driver exclusively deliver your food.

If you don't choose priority, you'll probably end up waiting for the driver to pick up/deliver other people's food along the way.

It doesn't make the restaurant prepare the food faster. It also doesn't allocate you a driver more quickly.

It just means that the driver goes straight to pick your food up, then straight to you to deliver it.

andoando• 7 months ago

I can make the same post about one of the top apps on the App store. I was burning with such rage I never did. I supposed I felt in the end itd get no attention at all

charlie90• 7 months ago

LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.

LostMyLogin4• 7 months ago

I wonder how many people believe my writing is AI generated because I have always overused em-dashes.

dartharva4• 7 months ago

This "LLM writing style" is how I write manually. Em-dashes could be an auto-correct function of whatever tool the guy wrote it in before pasting (likely Word).

halapro• 7 months ago

In 2026 it doesn't really matter whether LLM wrote it, because people are lazy and will let AI write/rewrite their own short thoughts.

Tiberium• 7 months ago

Yeah, it's surprising that people just blindly believe posts like that.

whatever15• 7 months ago

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 the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.

anonzzzies2• 7 months ago

I know plenty of Uber (and normal taxis) drivers around the airport here who pick up a someone, then ask if they mind taking someone else. Because it is usually vans and business customers, they don't care and actually kind of like talking with other business guys who probably went or are going to the same seminar/conference etc. The driver will then load up whatever fits who are waiting for taxis or drivers and only report 1 person to the service. As this is hotel to airport to hotel, there are not many ways of uber, lyft etc detecting this unless someone rats them out. I asked a driver and obviously he responded with Uber screws me, I screw Uber.

KeplerBoy• 7 months ago

How do people pay the driver? I guess cash isn't really a thing anymore in a lot of places.

Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?

zmgsabst3• 7 months ago

In Vietnam, if you see a parked driver waiting for a call, you can show him your Grab (ie, Asian copy of Uber) price to go somewhere, then get the same ride for 80%.

Why would they mind more cash in their pocket?

mlrtime9• 7 months ago

That would be a hard NO from me. Mostly because I don't want to talk to someone for 75 minutes.

rich_sasha5• 7 months ago

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.

whatever15• 7 months ago

I believe taxi companies own the license (which is super expensive) as well as the car. They also pay maintenance and gas costs. So 35% cut to just drive equipment is not that bad. The issue with uber/lyft is that you also need to bring your vehicle, pay maintenance, gas, insurance and depreciation.

I think that poor guy made less than 15% (assuming an 80 cent per mile cost for the vehicle).

anal_reactor3• 7 months ago

I remember I ordered a taxi in Mexico and the driver had to pay freeway toll that was roughly equal to the ride price. I gave him cash for the toll.

whatever15• 7 months ago

Looking at the financials of Lyft, based on what they report gross bookings are ~ 4.8B. 3B are driver earnings and 1.8B is the Lyft portion. So on average Lyft is getting 37%. Maybe they subsidize the shorter rides with the longer ones.

qcnguy4• 7 months ago

Lyft is software. Marginal cost is almost always close to zero for software but it hardly matters, software like that has high R&D + marketing costs. It's not like Lyft just magically appeared. Uber took many years to become profitable because their costs were so high, Lyft is probably the same.

eudamoniac3• 7 months ago

$38/hr sounds pretty good to me though.

whatever15• 7 months ago

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

jacobrussell2• 7 months ago

I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting:

https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416...

Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI detection. This came back as “Fully AI Generated.”

It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure how I feel about it!

Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things with a grain of salt as always.

jacobrussell2• 7 months ago

Here’s a fun steelman for the post being true: the author intentionally prompted an LLM to write the post in order to further anonymize themselves from their company.

shaky-carrousel• 7 months ago

If I were a whistleblower, first thing I would do is run my text through an LLM to obfuscate writing style.

mlrtime9• 7 months ago

Every time this happens the OP says they're not a native english speaker so they used AI to write it from their language or notes.

Wonder if the tool can detect this phenomenon?

kaizenb2• 7 months ago

Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the operators. Humans such a disappointment.

mlrtime9• 7 months ago

Humans such a disappointment.

Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?

dxdm• 7 months ago

I think it's okay to be disappointed in the behavior of people who can make informed decisions how to act after taking consequences into account.

kaizenb2• 7 months ago

I guess I expect better from us, regarding our high intelligence as species. But probably you are right, there is an utopic vision of us in my mind.

HellDunkel• 7 months ago

Another reason cash is important. Don‘t give up on it!

rich_sasha5• 7 months ago

If true (I'm not sure), this is kind of economics in action. There's a monopolistic market maker, screwing every last cent out of providers, with enormous power imbalances. The market maker is semi monopolistic, the labour is low-skilled, with little bargaining power and few better options. The "winners" are shareholders of the company and to some extent the end customers (who, other things being equal, would have to pay more for the labour).

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).

manuelmoreale2• 7 months ago

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 decisions. Accepting to behave like a despicable human being and justify it with "well this is the system I operate in" is not acceptable for me from a moral standpoint.

The economic system is awful, sure. But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a personal choice.

There is no such thing as "corporations". It's people. From top to bottom. And people are responsible for their own actions.

rich_sasha5• 7 months ago

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 will ultimately win due to better economics. If you want to fix it, change the law. Anything else is kind of shouting at clouds.

anal_reactor3• 7 months ago

But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a personal choice.

True but misleading. If the system promotes being an asshole, then you'll have assholes at the top, no matter how much effort you put into moralizing everyone.

JumpCrisscross2• 7 months ago

There's a monopolistic market maker

But there isn't? Doordash and Uber Eats compete nationally. Most cities have a litany of local competitors. And that's before we get to restaurants that handle delivery in house.

rich_sasha5• 7 months ago

You're right of course, there are more companies hiring drivers casually.

For their conditions to improve based on competition for their labour, youd need genuine competition between the companies for the labour and some scarcity of supply. Neither seems present.

danaris2• 7 months ago

Sure, they "compete", but would you be surprised if they have some kind of under-the-table agreement to keep prices high and payments low...?

pfannkuchen3• 7 months ago

we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison

This in particular sounds very fake to me.

If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders.

In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization behavior, not evil and not what OP is claiming.

In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. Which might be fine for a quick A/B test on a subset of customers, but as framed this is basically a psy op to trick customers en masse into thinking the priority order is faster when it really isn’t. To have that effect, you would need to deploy this to all customers long enough for them to organically switch back and forth between priority and regular enough times to notice the difference. That seems like it couldn’t possibly be better than the much simpler option of just implementing the priority behavior and reducing its effect down to zero slowly over time (which would be evil but isn’t the claim).

michaelt• 7 months ago

In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly.

If there are 50 deliveries per driver per shift and I want do deliver everything 5 minutes later, I don't need the driver to idle for 50 × 5 minutes.

The driver only needs to start the first delivery 5 minutes later, at a time cost of 1 × 5 minutes. Then they finish it 5 minutes later, and hence start the second delivery 5 minutes later, without standing idle between deliveries.

And if I pay the workers per delivery, that 1 × 5 minutes of initial delay doesn't cost me anything except worker morale.

femto• 7 months ago

Beyond an initial effect when the delay is first implemented, adding a delay would increase the latency (waiting time) but not the throughput (utilisation of the system). It's queuing theory.

A way to think of it is that the drivers that are made idle by adding a delay will be kept busy delivering previously delayed orders.

lwhi• 7 months ago

Exactly .. the delay would be a one time event.

pfannkuchen3• 7 months ago

Consider that demand for food delivery is not constant throughout the day and night.

I believe throughput would actually be reduced every time demand increases, which would happen in the morning, at various meal times, around the different opening and closing times of various restaurants, etc.

I do agree that the throughput reduction would be more complex than “1 driver sits idle for <delay time> every 1 order”.

aembleton• 7 months ago

Or option (c), they offer their drivers less for the job for 5 minutes to see if they'll take it anyway; if not then they pay a more reasonable amount.

dawnerd• 7 months ago

I think they all do that to an extent. But they also kinda force drivers to take lesser value orders to keep their accept rate up. There’s been a few food delivery drivers make videos on it.

No matter what all of the apps are designed to screw the customers, the restaurants, and the drivers.

I’ve stopped using them stateside ever since that California law went into effect to affect that basically jacked prices up even more plus tips on top. It’s pretty ridiculous. So glad my local pizza place still has their own drivers.

haritha-j2• 7 months ago

I think its b, but I still think its a dirty trick. Its like when budget airlines prioritise the customers that pay to board first. If no one paid for it, or if everyone paid for it, the effect would be the same, except in the latter case the airline makes extra money.

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 months ago

If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders.

Delay would be easy. Just delay placing the order at the restaurant, or delay sending the order to the driver. That won’t introduce any NOP wait states.

This is all quite possible.

That said, I’m skeptical that this is a real story, but I guess time will tell.

I do have one prediction, though: this story will dive down, pretty quickly. I don’t think because evil. It’s just too insupportable.

nelsonfigueroa• 7 months ago

Obviously the OP has no hard evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all true. I'm sure every major company dreams of dynamically gouging their workers and users like this.

tiku• 7 months ago

Stop buying the overpriced slop. My hunger disappears when I see the prices for just a pizza.

nxtfari3• 7 months ago

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 like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

huhkerrf• 7 months ago

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?

vermilingua• 7 months ago

It’s not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook together and are more likely to discuss topics “uncomfortable” to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers, they will make noise and move.

Dansvidania2• 7 months ago

IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms of the Employer/Employee relationship.

nxtfari3• 7 months ago

I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.

DavidPiper• 7 months ago

One reason we might assume "engineers" tend to operate with better ethical frameworks is that (in Australia at least) you generally have to register for accreditation via a large organisation like Engineers Australia, IChemE, etc, to actually practice professionally. These organisations have standard codes of ethics that, if breached, can result in your removal and an inability to continue professional practice.

Naturally, software engineering has none of this, and in most cases explicitly doesn't want it.

But that's one reason I can think of.

progbits• 7 months ago

I used to think that based on my friend bubble, but I've met some coworkers who are real selfish assholes that have shattered this belief.

fennecfoxy• 7 months ago

Typically no skin in the game. Same goes for any employee on a salary or hourly wage.

The real parasites come out when stock options do.

jrockway• 7 months ago

I had to take Computer Ethics as part of my degree, but it didn't really anticipate the sort of problems that software engineers run into today. It mostly focused on Therac-25 and integer overflows. Indeed, letting your integer overflow kill a bunch of people is horrifying and is something we should avoid. But we have a much wider reach than people thought at the time. Software is pervasive throughout society and touches every area of life: food delivery and banking are among the examples listed in this thread, and were never touched on in any class I took.

Software didn't create the gig economy or the microloan economy, but as engineers, we had the opportunity to step up and say "hmm, this doesn't seem right, I don't think we should do that". We didn't.

AI is a whole 'nother can of worms. I watched a lot of my friends deactivate social media over the holiday as their pictures got posted to Twitter and got live AI edited by Grok into things that horrify them. You probably wouldn't have gotten an A in Computer Ethics if you said "yeah, we should publicly show women nude pictures of themselves if someone asks in the comments section", but here we are.

It's not great. As a field, we have been remiss in our duty to society.

delusional• 7 months ago

Hannah Arendt wrote the fantastic "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" about exactly this observation. That one of the principal enablers of the Holocaust seemed obsessed, not with the effects or outcomes of murdering Jews, but simply the expediency of doing it.

If you're interested in the subject I can very much recommend reading it. I can also recommend "The Ethic of Expediency" which deals with the same subject, but attempts to indict all technical writing instead. I personally changed my writing style after reading it to inject more humanity into it.

nxtfari3• 7 months ago

Big fan of Arendt. I will check this out, thanks!

MrDresden2• 7 months ago

Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company

I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).

We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.

ahofmann• 7 months ago

In my new credit card app I can set if I want to repay 3%, 5% or 100% at the end of the month. If I set it to 100%, I have to pay $2 per month. Banking is already actively hostile against the customer.

QuiEgo2• 7 months ago

Not shocking, their ethical responsibility is to do what’s right to make profit for the shareholders, not to do what’s best for the customer.

mns• 7 months ago

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 of people in the company and people that use our platform (let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and AI and how amazing it could be to do this.

Glawen• 7 months ago

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.

fuckinpuppers• 7 months ago

Jeff Goldblum said it best “so preoccupied if they could, they never stopped to think if they should”

JumpCrisscross2• 7 months ago

I do think it’s believable

My believability is stretched by them disclosing they "put in my two weeks yesterday." That's highly identifiable and incongruent with "posting...from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop."

dgoldstein0• 7 months ago

Yeah ... If true, that's almost enough to identify them. Probably 5 people max at each food delivery company that could be, and their supposed role would be enough to single them out if the company can correctly guess it's talking about them

dzhiurgis• 7 months ago

Doesn’t mean it’s real fact. Deceit is almost required if you’re posting something like this.

prartichoke• 7 months ago

There are two datapoints in the text. One is the 2 weeks notice, the other is that they knew of this since 8 months ago. If this were me, I would give random made up information of this kind to throw off anyone trying to investigate this. Also, this is not that far from what we already know from whistleblowers of similar gig economy companies so my believability is not stretched at all.

raffael_de• 7 months ago

Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

First step here in terms of terminology is to call it "defense" instead of "weapon technology to maim or kill human beings". Having said that, I do believe we need weapon technology to maim and kill human beings.

bdangubic• 7 months ago

It is defense against others making weapon technology to maim or kill human beings

throwagay12• 7 months ago

It certainly seems to be in the ballpark of things that have been done before :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456715 "Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app"

hoherd• 7 months ago

Relevant quote from Screwtape Letters:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

samiv2• 7 months ago

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.

mgraczyk2• 7 months ago

The incentives are that a lot of the specific claims would be bad for long term retention and would be embarrassing if made public. That doesn't imply it's fake but it's not obvious any company would be incentivized to behave this way

samiv2• 7 months ago

Long term?

If there was some future backlash and the company would suffer, that is someone else's future problem. The execs today don't care about it as long as they reap their financial benefit today.

written-beyond• 7 months ago

These delivery apps are shady, maybe even outright fraudulent.

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.

BrenBarn• 7 months ago

Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market" are always touting.

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.

zmgsabst3• 7 months ago

I think we should be much more strict with what constitutes “fraud”:

If you sell me better service, but don’t treat me any better, you should owe me triple damages for defrauding me. And your executives should be prosecuted for directing fraudulent behavior.

akramachamarei• 7 months ago

Wouldn't that be a more loose definition of fraud? It's not clear how the behavior you described has any relation to fraud whatsoever.

mgraczyk2• 7 months ago

Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few seconds.

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

Dansvidania2• 7 months ago

The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments below this article.

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.

dsamarin• 7 months ago

This is believable. I have a personal anecdote regarding "Priority Delivery". This was about 2 years ago. After watching the driver go to another business and house before me, I messaged support and they refunded this priority delivery fee. The driving tip and base pay accusation can be easily verified by testing tip amounts and asking drivers what they are awarded.

Fokamul• 7 months ago

Library wifi and burner laptop?

1. Any serious IT person knows you don't need burner laptop with VM

2. Doxxed himself to said company in the same paragraph, nice.

Fan fiction or really bad opsec.

Also, anyone who drives for any food app in any country, knows it sucks.

phito• 7 months ago

So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on, this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how you whistleblow effectively.

To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge, passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.

gethly• 7 months ago

I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the big bucks at the end of the month.

paulus_magnus2• 7 months ago

Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing?

I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

Y-bar• 7 months ago

Mostly believable. Even though I have never seen anything like it, I have worked with managers and product owners who have voiced a desire to do similar things. It is also clear that companies today (including the one I work at) often incentivise the dilution of responsibility so that nobody is cleanly attributable as the person who caused the system to be not just amoral, but actively detrimental to customers and other users in the long term.

HelloUsername• 7 months ago

In case the reddit post gets deleted, here's the text:

I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. 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. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust. Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless. And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.

forinti• 7 months ago

There's very good restaurant in my neighbourhood that I order from regularly. I tried ordering directly from them after hearing about how nasty the delivery app company was. I thought they would appreciate it: they wouldn't have to pay the intermediary. But it turns out they prioritise the app and my orders took longer to arrive.

So I'm back on the app...

mlrtime9• 7 months ago

I ask them what they prefer, sometimes they say call, sometimes they say app.

dueyfinster• 7 months ago

It may be that they have no choice since it's their biggest source of customers. I spoke to a hotel receptionist before and she said the order of upgrades was: booked direct, booking.com, Expedia and all the rest after. The hotel couldn't afford to piss off booking as they would suffer a lot in occupancy, the other platforms couldn't match. I think it's worth giving the feedback to the restaurant direct and see if they can fix it. It's always a delicate balance depending on time and the app may penalize them.

ponector• 7 months ago

Once I've walked into the hotel and asked for a room. They said price 20% higher than listed on booking.com. When asked about this the receptionist said I can book there.

armchairhacker2• 7 months ago

Most of OP's claims can be supported or refuted by randomized trials.

For example:

If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders.

Find lots of drivers. Ask some to log on at 10 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3PM and only accept high-paying orders, etc. See what kind of orders they receive after a while.

The drivers you select are biased towards enrolling in trials, but I doubt that's significant. Even if so, the algorithm showing certain drivers different orders, who don't clearly perform "worse" in a way the study could observe, already seems wrong.

EDIT:

If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved.

This is much easier. A single driver can provide strong evidence to support or refute this by showing the base pay and tip for their recent orders (AFAIK all apps show drivers these metrics). Unless someone (even a single person) has done this (on one of the delivery subreddits), there's strong evidence that OP is lying.

scoofy• 7 months ago

I mean, regardless of whether or not this is true, the death of the consumer surplus is upon us. When that goes, the entire point of efficient markets goes with it.

anovikov• 7 months ago

Isn't artificially delaying "normal" orders same thing as speeding up priority ones? I mean, it means executing priority ones out of queue.

Unless they just force the deliverymen sit and do nothing for extra 5-10 minutes, which would be a waste of time and money for the company way above $2.99 so i don't think they do that.

StrLght• 7 months ago

And so another myth was born, thanks to an anonymous fiction writer from Reddit!

People still believe that "Uber raises prices when your battery is low!", and now they'll be parroting this for years to come. Great job.

everdev• 7 months ago

Why is this flagged? Because it's anonymous? As a dev and a driver, I know these delivery companies are doing shenanigans like this.

rjrobinson• 7 months ago

Dark Gamification. i wrote a whole blog post about this.

nunez2• 7 months ago

Ragebait or not, this post convinced me to delete my DoorDash account today.

I'm the weird contrarian that really likes tipping. I didn't know that DoorDash uses tips to offset hourly wages.

Abusing my wanting to give hard-working drivers extra is where I draw the line, and it's a damn shame that this is legal.

I hope this gets more air time and lights a fire under these food delivery companies like the sex scandals did to Uber (a service I'm also seeking alternatives for, though that's another reply for another post).

resonious• 7 months ago

I guess a cash tip is the way to go.

nunez2• 7 months ago

No disrespect to you, but this solution is unacceptable.

The onus should not be on customers to workaround corporate wrongdoing. DoorDash states that 100% of the tip goes to drivers. They conveniently omit that some of their base wages will be covered by the tip. That should be illegal, and paying drivers under the table gives DoorDash the right to keep acting badly, my convenience be damned.

But let's say I was willing to gloss over this. The extra logistics just aren't customer-friendly.

Drivers see te tip before they accept the delivery mission. I would have to tip normally (so that drivers will deliver to us), take out cash (which I almost never use), add logistics for giving them a cash tip, then drop the tip to zero post-delivery (which could mess with my rankings and threaten our future with the service).

Tipping in cash is easier with something like Uber, where you'll already have cash on hand (because you're already out) and the money can change hands at the end of the ride. (To be clear: I'm not giving Uber a pass here. They also do shady stuff with driver payouts.)

gverrilla• 7 months ago

If people think what this guy is reporting is too much, they live in a fantasy world.

markus_zhang• 7 months ago

Wow this is flagged, no wonder...

subculture• 7 months ago

This was debunked by Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax...

I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

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