I'm a developer for a major food delivery app(old.reddit.com) |
I'm a developer for a major food delivery app(old.reddit.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the table.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?
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
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.
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.
I smell some bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
- 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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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).
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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...
Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
So I'm back on the app...
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
This sounds like the kind of big-co where intentional segmentation and blinding would happen.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.
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.
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.
Wonder if the tool can detect this phenomenon?
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.
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.
I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Why would they mind more cash in their pocket?
Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?
I think that poor guy made less than 15% (assuming an 80 cent per mile cost for the vehicle).
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.
:(
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.
Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?
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.
The real parasites come out when stock options do.
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.
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."
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456715 "Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not being /r/politics...
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.
> 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.
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.
That's not exactly what they said. They said normal orders get artificially delayed and priority deliver orders get sent right away. They were clear that the real issue is that priority only exists because they actively made normal orders worse (I'd guess they actually took a few months of slowly backing off normal order time to get customers accustomed to the extra wait).
The point is, you're essentially right. It's just that before Uber customers were most likely victims of scams, while with Uber it's the drivers. As in, in a capitalistic market the scamming is always present, the question is who scams who.
Uber/lyft is miles better than the old taxis.
Outside of NYC (in the US), you may never see a taxi driving with the light on indicating you can hail it.
If you do have to buy a car just for uber, then you would have to consider the interest payments as additional cost (not just the depreciation of the equipment, which will be super brutal for a brand new car).
In any case, you are looking at something north of 50 cents per mile.
AAA has a nice breakdown: https://www.ace.aaa.com/automotive/advocacy/cost-of-driving....
I'm honestly at a point where every suspicious aspect of that post could as well be counted as a countermeasure to getting caught. Said engineer could still be working at the company or could've left years ago. In my opinion the mentioned financial adjustments could've been a discussion topic for higher ups far far earlier than 2025.
Considering how ruthless Uber has acted thorough the years[0] I am almost 100% sure other startups with similar opportunities have at the very least committed crimes on a similar scale to the linked Reddit confession.
Bonus option: The Reddit account starts astroturfing in a few weeks and this was just a run-of-the-mill bot automation to gain karma which happened to overlap with HN interests.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
Back in the days before LLMs, I went out of my way to set up the Compose key on Linux, just so I could do cool things like —, ®, ™, and ¹ quickly!
I'm sure this is unpopular opinion but I'm glad we can catch murderers quickly which technology. The flip side is worse.
Note: This has nothing to do with the reasons for murdering which I'm not going to debate.
According to whom? Homicide clearance rates in the US have been getting worse for decades [1][2]. The same is true in the UK, another surveillance state, where only 10% of violent offenses get solved [3].
This promise of a crime-free utopia has been nothing but a deceptive manipulation of the public and the scary part is that it keeps working.
[1] https://www.murderdata.org/p/reported-homicide-clearance-rat...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/13/most-violent...
You don't need to know the account or account number, just need to know the transaction logic, which most backend developer will know of as long as they work in that area.
If the product managers keep boasting about their new strategy (which I have seen in almost all companies I have worked for), even the juniors will know what's going on.
This is like claiming someone set up a special account where all their paychecks on rainy days get spent directly on weed. It makes zero sense.
> Money is anonymous.
Unless you pay in cash (or some cryptocurrency that doesn't leave traces), money is not anonymous. Not sure what made you make that claim.
> Why would they have some kind of pipeline account that goes directly from the fees to political spend?
Is the pipeline account you mention here the delivery company's account?
> This is like claiming someone set up a special account where all their paychecks on rainy days get spent directly on weed. It makes zero sense.
Pretty sure that already happens, that's one of many ways to do tax evasion with offshore accounts.
I'd put this into that bucket of "someone I trust told me they heard the story from someone they trust". It means the story may not be true and they don't have any hard evidence, but they found it believable enough to repeat.
In other locations this has been deemed illegal and/or only allowed above a certain amount (think 10-15% of total remaining principal).
I do not agree with this being an ok practice (to charge).
Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the spare they've got.
Of course you can pay a fee to overpay.
I believe this to be illegal in the USA but would not be shocked if a rule change was slipped into some random unrelated bill.
I don't see a issue if credit cards charged 30d interest on balance, but if mine did that I would drop it instantly.
I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”.
This has been a longstanding issue, particularly in the era of AI-generated content.
If this is Uber then it's not legitimate.
Not saying that it's not deceptive in some way, but it's more than just a surface-level difference.
All it does is that it puts you first in queue (assuming two people don’t pay priority in the batch). So it’s a gamble on your end.
Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice.
Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.
In my experience on Uber Eats, Priority definitely works.
Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to pay off early.
Only credit unions and small regional banks still hold mortgages on their books. The overwhelming majority(90%+) of mortgages are agency - ie sold to the federal government.
The parent of that comment mentioning "a fee to overpay" is one I've never even heard of before. Definitely not the case here, free to pay down the principal as much as I want whenever I want as long as the current interest for the month is paid first.