DoorDash is requiring engineers to deliver food(sfgate.com) |
DoorDash is requiring engineers to deliver food(sfgate.com) |
Every DoorDash employee, from engineers to CEO, will make deliveries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716186 - Dec 2021 (152 comments)
DoorDash will require all employees to deliver goods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29675076 - Dec 2021 (133 comments)
That $400,000/yr engineer makes more money in a day than a DoorDash worker makes in 2 weeks working full time. I do not feel any sympathy for the 1 dash they will have to make a month.
Alex: I’m headed to Bob’s for some lunch. Want anything?
Tory: Sure. Hey, let me put in a DD order for it.
Alex: Sweet, that’s this month down…
The engineers salary (actually total compensation, not salary) was quoted in the article.
"An engineer with a reported total compensation, or TC, of $400,000 a year griped about the responsibility of having to do a once-a-month delivery. “What the actual f—k?” the engineer wrote on the platform. “I didn’t sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this.”"
I am suggesting that if you make $400,000 a year, one minor inconvenience a month by actually using the product you are working on really isn't something you should complain about.
Use cases, flows, and product paths seem logical on a whiteboard. However, the real world often introduces nuances that significantly alter use in micro ways.
The objection to interact with customers from engineers I believe is more due to a social aversion, introversion, etc rather than a defiance of not doing the delivery. Engineers can often be afraid of unknown social situations - which is fair.
If I were the CEO, I'd have engineers go in packs of 3 engineers at first for 3-4 months. Then pair to group of 2 with one as a "ride along, no interaction" for moral support.
Even if the commentary isn't fake, it's just one engineer within a huge organization. For those upvoting this story, shouldn't our outrage/attention be directed elsewhere?
Why? It's the primary source where this was first "reported".
Many many DoorDash employees confirmed that this was really happening on Blind.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Doordash-making-engineers-del...
> Why [not name the source]?
Because my intuition is that there's a high probability of this being a viral stunt -- in which case, I'd rather this site not exist.
Perhaps it would engender some empathy between different areas of society and reduce the overall sense of entitlement some folks seem to have.
This person claiming to standing around not knowing what to do just shows that they really are trying to do anything. You've been assigned a task, do it. If you don't know, ask. They aren't trying to be better because they know at the end of the one day their nightmare will be over.
If anything the problem is I get too many ideas for things that could be improved and in reality you can't actually do a fraction of them.
But all this "extremely competent" guy gets out of it is "standing around not knowing what I should do"? What a joke.
TIMESTAMP_UTC_TIME, TIMESTAMP_UTC_DATE, TIMESTAMP_LOCAL_TIME, TIMESTAMP_LOCAL_DATE, PAYOUT_TIME, PAYOUT_DATE, STORE_ID, BUSINESS_ID, STORE_NAME, MERCHANT_STORE_ID, TRANSACTION_TYPE, TRANSACTION_ID, DOORDASH_ORDER_ID, MERCHANT_DELIVERY_ID, EXTERNAL_ID, DESCRIPTION, FINAL_ORDER_STATUS, CURRENCY, SUBTOTAL, TAX_SUBTOTAL, COMMISSION, COMMISSION_TAX_AMOUNT, DRIVE_CHARGE, MARKETING_FEES, DELIVERY_FEES, SMALL_ORDER_FEES, TAX_FEES, FLEXIBLE_FULFILLMENT_FEE, FLEXIBLE_FULFILLMENT_FEE_TAX, TIPS, CREDIT, DEBIT, DOORDASH_TRANSACTION_ID, PAYOUT_ID, TAX_REMITTED_BY_DOORDASH_TO_STATE, SUBTOTAL_FOR_TAX, DOORDASH_FUNDED_SUBTOTAL_DISCOUNT_AMOUNT, MERCHANT_FUNDED_SUBTOTAL_DISCOUNT_AMOUNT
What's worse is it doesn't add up correctly.
SUBTOTAL + TAX_SUBTOTAL + DELIVERY_FEES + SMALL_ORDER_FEES + TIPS
does not _always_ equal
CREDIT + COMMISSION + DRIVE_CHARGE + MARKETING_FEES
The protesting engineer cited sounds like a bad team player who needs opportunities like this to develop character.
I really hope this type of strategies help in this regard. For the people developing those platforms, to remember that in the end those who work for those Apps are humans too, and not only a number in an A/B test or KPI spreadsheet.
The CEOs and executives that actually decide what the product IS will most likely either feign participation, or keep 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic'
The leagues of engineers and other relatively disconnected workers being encouraged to do this won't collectively Do Better.
They'll keep trying to keep their heads above water in their sprints/what-have-you, while a vague entity sets the direction
So, say you're paying me $15 an hour. Really, if you own a business by the time you pay for taxes, infrastructure, capital outlay and insurance you are really paying about $45 an hour for me to hang out and do what you tell me to do at varying levels of competency. You need to make that much more value from my labor per-hour or you are going to go out of business.
Say I have a piece of software that, because of a miscommunication between the developers who wrote it and the people who have to use the software (ideally this is what management is for but, lolz) has added 30 seconds to a transaction I do 20 times an hour. This means that, suddenly, there are 10 minutes of labor added to this task on aggregate an hour.
If you have a piece of software that wastes 10 minutes of my time, you just wasted $7.50 worth of my labor. But, of course, I'm using this software for 8 hours a day. So that is $60 of money wasted a day.
So, really, you thought you needed to make $45 an hour from my labor, but you just added $7.50 to the total. So, $52.50, and now you have a morale problem to boot: because the folks who are using the software are now accomplishing less than they used to for the same amount of work.
Regardless of how you spend your hour, it still costs them $45/hr for you. If $7.50 of that is paying for idle time, that's still part of the $45, it doesn't get added again. If they could save those 10 minutes, that would just make you more productive and allow them to reach $45/hr easier.
How would you quantify this?
In other words, the difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer often comes down to experience and understanding.
My guess is the company is also taking note of the engineer's attitude and reaction to this experience requirement as well.
I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it during normal times never mind during a pandemic. Seems like a bold strategy during the most job seeker friendly market I have seen in 20 years.
I made life choices so I wouldn't ever have to go door to door for anything. No offense to hard working delivery people but when I did that sort of work I chose to mop floors and clean toilets over anything food service.
The reasons I dislike DoorDash and stopped using it:
- It has frequent outages.
- Has been the subject of controversies regarding tips.
- Does not have live customer support. They get back to you in 3 days.
Grubhub has none of the issues above, and they are always on top of orders.
Amazon Restaurants was another yet superior competitor to DoorDash but was discontinued as a service.
I have no affiliation to any of these companies, just talking from the perspective of a user.
> For employees unable to do deliveries, there are other programs in place to work with service employees and businesses
I wonder if a good compromise would be for them to ride along with another driver?
"Today you, tomorrow me" should be what everyone says to themselves when confronted with this sort of thing.
Yet another manifestation of the callousness of SF tech workers
But you know what? Good.
Maybe that is what they need since the drivers and riders get 0.01% of what these engineers earn and I'm sure that there were complaints about that. So when one is getting nearly $0.5m for the engineering work and told to do just ONE delivery a month, they are STILL complaining.
Just deliver a pizza to your friends house once a month and eat it and that would count.
Job done.
I applaud DoorDash for this move and quite frankly this would make me more likely to take a job there.
And how is that industry issue?
> Just work a bit more one day
> Just take a paycut
Nothing good comes out of mindset like this.
The very people trying to invoke the value of their time, are in that very process exposing how valuable it actually isn't.
Nothing good ever starts off that way. Astonishingly sociopathic website.
That said, I do think that the media are deliberately seeking out the weirdest and most unpleasant employee opinions; I can’t imagine most employees of the company have an issue with this. And it does seem to be something they did before; they just suspended it for a bit.
Let's say that your $45/hr number accounts for all the overhead. Just to keep the math simple here.
Let's then say that you generate $60/hr value for the company. That's $15/hr of profit for them right now.
If they could eliminate that delay, that's $10/hr of value you could be adding with that time. That's straight to their profits if they could eliminate it at zero cost.
Now, we both know that it's not zero cost. There's some cost associated with eliminating that delay. If the cost of eliminating that delay is more that $10/hr, it'll cost more to remove it than to realize it. And that'll eat into the $15/hr they're currently making.
We also know that while it'll cost now to fix the delay, at some point it will stop costing because the delay will be fixed. At that point, we get to realize the full profit.
Then it becomes a calculation of how long will it take. Because if it would take $11/hr for an entire year, then it might be worth it to suffer the loss in profits this year because the extra profits in the new year will make up for the shortfall this year.
And if you have multiple people using the app, the cost to fix it gets spread out across all the employees. With two employees, that's now $20/hr I could capture and as long as it costs less than that, we'll be good. Well, less than $30/hr because we aren't capturing that $20/hr until the work is done and we have to pay for the labor in the meantime and that means affecting current profits.
And of course, that scales. The more employees you have using the app, the more you can afford to throw at the problem and the more profitable it becomes to capture that extra. At just 100 employees, that's $1500/hr you can afford to fix this issue and you'll see returns of $1000/hr.
And in my opinion, the doordash product will suffer for it.
While not exactly the same, we were responsible for developing an in-house app used by our retail employees. Every single engineer working on the app would every so often shadow one of these employees to see firsthand how it was being used in the real world.
Let’s see how many actually quit over this. My guess is few to none.
I think that's the main sentiment in those threads and the main response to that is "oh woe how dare you think like that, you prima donna".
Many parts of life are much easier when you're financially secure. And the challenges to navigate vary by wealth level.
1. Entice investors 2. Planning for some external company event like a merger 3. Pandering to analysts 4. Pandering to the sales department, who again, sell into VPs and not to users
I think it's incredibly out of touch to suggest engineers are the ones that lack empathy for their own product, and not the myriad of individuals who haven't touched a line of code or a design file for the past decade. As an engineer I field support tickets every day, I know what problems the system has, no amount of me using the application is going to change what gets consistently submited through help desk.
You'll have to forgive me for being bitter after a decade of trying to innovate in the products I worked on only to be shut down every single step of the way by upper management; then to have to swallow this self-righteous PR stunt where the world seems to blame "out of touch" workers for not knowing what their job is and not having empathy for their users.
Beyond that, don't get me wrong, I don't think doing deliveries is beneath anyone. I would probably accept half a million dollars to do deliveries. However, I do think it's incredibly immoral to suggest that you can pay some people $200/hr to do deliveries, but others only $7/hr. Instead of focusing ire on those that are upset that their job duties are not what was described to them when hired; perhaps we can be upset that doordash has the capacity to pay their laborers much much more, and chooses not to in order to ensure they can pay half a million dollars for what everyone here considers "mediocre engineers".
Also, again, I personally would not work at doordash because of this requirement. However, I wouldn't have any issue with the company if they CLEARLY outlined this job requirement during their hiring process; which it looks like they did not do.