> 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).
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many normal taxis drive also for Uber or Lyft as you need the license anyway over here. Not sure if you can be Uber AND Lyft at the same time.
Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
>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.
> 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.
Looks as if the only requirement is that you are first in a batched delivery. However, does not cover anything about picking up at multiple locations or waiting for separate orders. Nor does it explain multiple priority orders in a batch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue.
Immigration quotas should probably be considered part of labor laws though, given the impact immigration can have on wages and the job/housing market for natives.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The worst bit was when, at my major food app, we had a “cancer patient” score where we would just not deliver food to sufficiently terminal patients because we knew that they would be dead before the appeal process completed and we could reject and ask for arbitration. We’d win almost everything.
But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
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.
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.
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.
being ethical and profitable is possible, but competing against the unethical is another matter.
if a company keeps the tips they can charge lower prices. just like some restaurants pay lower salaries when waiters can rely on tipping (which is why i consider tipping itself to be unethical)
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.
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.
And who is going to allow upending the entire current infrastructure of payment processing and businesses? That's right, the government. If you were going to go through the government either way, the easier sell is to just make them do their damn job and prevent scammers from scamming.
Yes, but the government is notoriously inefficient and ineffective.
Bitcoin was started right under their noses (and I'm not just referring to the U.S government here, but all national governments), and it continues to operate all across the globe. It's kind of what makes it so interesting, you can't really kill it, it's like a good financial virus.
I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure of payment processing and business has already been upended by Bitcoin alone. It's only a matter of time before we see layer-2 solutions like the one OP mentioned.
Bitcoin might not be the best blockchain to target for small-scale financial transactions like delivery apps, but you catch my drift. Just about any blockchain would do in this scenario.
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.
Yep, digital goods is 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.
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).
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).
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.
I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”.
This has been a problem for years, even more so in the age of AI generated content.
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.
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.
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.
> The algorithm is a gigantic neural network, and as such essentially a black box, incomprehensible to the human mind.
Yeah right
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.
Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?
Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.
- 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
Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.
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.
Well worth a 20 min watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII
Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
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...
I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.
Also, water-cooler gossip
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.
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.
I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not being /r/politics...
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.
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
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.
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.
This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like 'payrate sensitivity factor'
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.
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.
> 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.
Looks as if the only requirement is that you are first in a batched delivery. However, does not cover anything about picking up at multiple locations or waiting for separate orders. Nor does it explain multiple priority orders in a batch.
Except the part the algorithm marks you as more desperate and from now on pays you less.
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.
Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue.
Immigration quotas should probably be considered part of labor laws though, given the impact immigration can have on wages and the job/housing market for natives.
> 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.
If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/
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.
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.
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.
But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
if a company keeps the tips they can charge lower prices. just like some restaurants pay lower salaries when waiters can rely on tipping (which is why i consider tipping itself to be unethical)
I smell some bullshit.
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.
Using cryptocurrency with on-chain verification of the paper trail could actually solve this problem without having to get auditors and lawyers involved.
Bitcoin was started right under their noses (and I'm not just referring to the U.S government here, but all national governments), and it continues to operate all across the globe. It's kind of what makes it so interesting, you can't really kill it, it's like a good financial virus.
I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure of payment processing and business has already been upended by Bitcoin alone. It's only a matter of time before we see layer-2 solutions like the one OP mentioned.
Bitcoin might not be the best blockchain to target for small-scale financial transactions like delivery apps, but you catch my drift. Just about any blockchain would do in this scenario.
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.
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.