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This is a great example in my opinion of the apathy we need to combat as technologists. Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process

This is a great example in my opinion of the apathy we need to combat as technologists. Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? "This is wrong/greedy/will have blowback." No one voiced concerns? Or, more specifically, if they did, no one listened? They didn't think this would leak out, with all the hatred regarding wage stagnation, income inequality, corporate greed? A marketing pro, PR specialist, or frankly anyone in touch with culture and human beings would have throw up a flare that this is a terrible idea. What is going on with culture at these companies?

jonknee 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? Who's to say someone didn't? All we know is they decided to steal tips, not that everyone thought it was a great idea.
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  I address that later in my comment... Is this a function of schooling? MBA programs? Corporatism?
  - jonknee 8y ago
    The Excel models all look a lot nicer if you take the tips!
  - airstrike 8y ago
    As an MBA, I really take issue with this cynicism of MBA programs. It's not like we're cold greedy bastards. Stop generalizing. People can make great and terrible decisions, regardless of grad school degree choice.
    - resters 8y ago
      Hah. Well it's obviously a case where the consumer habit of tipping for delivery means that on a $100 order there may be $105 that the customer is willing to (or used to having to) pay. Thus leaving that $5 on the table is perhaps a stupid business decision. I should hope an MBA would point that out, so long as another MBA pointed out that the user experience may be more important than the few extra dollars.
      - airstrike 8y ago
        An MBA would point out that in the this isn't a sustainable strategy, regardless of any concept of fairness. Backlash from customers and workers is virtually guaranteed to hurt long-term profits.
        save_ferris 8y ago
        Serious question: are ethics taught in MBA programs, and if so, how? Generally speaking, how are MBA's taught to avoid making this very mistake?
        throwaway5752 8y ago
        Pardon my interruption, but I think a perfectly adequate response would be to counter by asking if ethics are taught in CS/CE programs (or what curricula have ethics prereqs)
        tedmiston 8y ago
        Yes, ethics are a required component of the ABET CS model curriculum.
        throwaway5752 8y ago
        That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment. I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites. Plenty of engineering schools offer compute ethics courses as electives, but then again, plenty of business schools offer business ethics electives in MBA programs.
    - dba7dba 8y ago
      Someone signed off on that feature that stole $4 from a $5 tip given to a person making minimum wage. Was that person an MBA graduate or not?
      - airstrike 8y ago
        Let's blame all males if that was their gender too!
        dba7dba 8y ago
        I don't care about all that gender stuff. The point is someone signed off on that. And in a business, it's usually someone with an MBA. I can't imagine a business of that popularity having someone making business decisions without an MBA under their belt.
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    I mean ultimately it's the executives that call the shots. I've seen people stand up to executives over things like this and then they get fired and it's business as usual. Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers, especially when you feel powerless to actually stop it from happening. I mean it's so socially acceptable we've even coined the term "gig economy" Chances are the people that really feel strongly about these things just refuse to work for those companies in the first place.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers Ironic that they may have ended doing long term damage to their careers as a result.
      - ergothus 8y ago
        Did they? Can you name the people to blame? If someone shows up with Instacart on their resume, is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision?
        anigbrowl 8y ago
        I'd definitely discount applicants on that basis. is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision? No, but fooling me if I want to know is a different matter.
      - imtringued 8y ago
        In what way? The vast majority of employers want cogs. They don't want rebels.
  - rjpr 8y ago
    It's just greed, plain and simple. It doesn't have to be more complex than that.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    We don't have corporatism (corporate crony capitalism, which is a bit redundant, but not corporatism which is a completely different thing; the corpora referred to in corporatism is the body formed by the whole of society, not each individual firm as a corporation.)
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    Hard to say exactly without being privy to their conversations, but the aggressive growth pressure that young companies with VC funding face almost always factors in somehow. It's hard to truly expect companies to make the correct ethical decision in this scenario when the survival of founders is dependent on raising more and more money. The "grow now, profit later" model truly puts pressure on execs to take whatever they can. And in this case, they clearly thought either nobody would notice or care.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Who polices the VCs? It seems like they have no accountability, even financially speaking. If one investment fails they have nine more to reallocate towards, so to speak.
      - save_ferris 8y ago
        > Who polices the VCs? Great question. They benefit tremendously by minimizing their own risk and maximizing the leverage they have over founders they invest in.
        pas 8y ago
        The market, obviously. If they invest in shit startups, then eventually they will lose all of their money. Now the problem is, what if people still use something and give their money to even if that service/company is unethical? Is it unethical to make very bad employment deals with people who have no better opportunities on the job market? Well, now that's where again people come in. Some people say, no, because if they don't like the job, they can start their own company (ehm, ehm, maybe that's why we are here, too many people trying to start stupid companies built on almost stealing from each other). Some people say, fuck no, that's just a race to the bottom Somalia. Some people pitch NIT (negative income tax, a form of universal basic income). Some full blown direct action style socialism/anarchism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - bspn 8y ago
        Technically LPs, but they're more-often-than-not large, faceless funds only interested in returns and mostly insulated from any blowback so moral considerations don't always concern them.
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    Its a function of money. The people who make the decisions (CEO, board) are judged on how much money the company makes. They are paid based on it. They keep their job only if they make more money. Basically imagine you are an investor who spent $70 million on this company. That money could represent anything. Money can be used for anything so people can imagine it will all be used for altruistic purposes if they want. Sometimes a portion of it is. It can represent 50 or 500 or 5000 people who are counting on that money to grow. The point being, it is very easy for a person in charge of a large sum of money to come up with a moral justification for maintaining or increasing that sum of money. The least of which is keeping their job or social standing -- but that one alone is usually enough for people to justify many things. In this case, they will probably just say something like "well, its not our responsibility to make sure that people earn a good wage". In the end, the only thing they are really being held accountable for is how much money they make.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    It is the ancient philosophy of nickel-and-diming employees in low-margin hospitality sector businesses. I don't have access to the financials, but at no point has 'on demand food delivery' seemed to be anything other than a highly risky business servicing an extremely price-sensitive market.
    - ModFightsCron 8y ago
      that's funny. a market with almost inelastic demand is high risk for a business. right. on demand food delivery is risky and price-sensitive? what are you talking about. there is always an almost inelastic guaranteed demand for food delivery, irrelevant of economic factors. unemployed white trash get pizza delivered. there is zero price sensitivity, because compared to the food the price is low, and the laziness is high. If someone wants food delivered, making the delivery fee double, will not make them go get food or cook. it will just make them find the lowest delivery fee and order there. you are literally saying the opposite of what is obviously true.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I would believe that someone did/has. If you look at things like Project Maven at Google people did speak out, or the Chinese search engine. Speaking out doesn't help if you're not in a position to modify the plan though. I've been in both places, both where I could keep a bad idea from going through and times when I could only share my concerns. For me, it was situations like this that gave me the motivation to get better at pitching (and shooting down) ideas. Using the tip fiasco as an example, you can argue it at the social justice level which will be ignored by the Chief Product Officer because they don't care about social justice, so for them you argue it at the product angle, "This policy/product is going to stain our product and make us look like greedy chumps, look at how our competitors product idea to do <x> resulted in so much bad publicity they had to pay <y>, which totally negated any value to the company. Do you want to be the guy that costs this company that money? Are you ready to be out on the street looking for a job where your last idea turned out to be reviled by press? It will be you because the CEO certainly isn't going to take the blame for it, they are going to fire you and say 'See? We thought it was horrible too and we fired the person responsible.', and that is going to be you. Think about that before you move forward on this product idea, kthx bye." That makes is personal to someone in a position to actually stop it from going out the door. If you can show them the risk in a way they will understand, then, and only then, do you get any traction in stopping it.
  - crushcrashcrush 8y ago
    I wish I could upvote you twice, and I'm stealing your quoted paragraph as essentially a template for when these situations appear in future meetings.
  - Fede_V 8y ago
    I totally agree with this, and I think this makes the point that social outrage can sometimes play a positive role. In an ideal world, we could get people to act ethically because it's the right thing to do: if we can't do that, at least we can appeal to their self interest and point out how horribly this could backfire if people found out.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  True, but once someone knows something illegal or deeply unethical is going down and sticks around, they can't complain about getting part of the blame for it.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  I think it is more, "Why does this keep happening?" and "What can we do to stop it?"
- minimaxir 8y ago
  The argument, especially for low-margin businesses like these delivery startups, is that the company might go under if financial tricks aren't in place. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well take the path of least embarrassment and hope no one calls out the tricks.
  - deogeo 8y ago
    > Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Surely that should be "Business goes under if you don't, executives go to jail for mass fraud if you do."
    - minimaxir 8y ago
      I'm not a lawyer, but I do wonder what the legal threshold between "following ethics" and "fiduciary duty" is.
  - criddell 8y ago
    I'd have more sympathy if there were also giving equity to the people they are stealing from.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    So maybe your business model is flawed? If you can't survive without robbing your employees then you shouldn't survive at all. This would easily be solvable by building growth organically, or having companies that hook into your service willingly to offer delivery at lower cost to them than hiring a full time employee. This would necessarily limit usefulness to larger population centers, but would make it more viable long term.
orky56 8y ago
Unfortunately, it's the hacking mindset when it's applied to the treatment of other humans.
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  I've been in growth hack meetings (usually around customer acquisition and retention) this screams to me like a former PwC consultant came in and delivered PPT presentation with some sort of finance speak of "Leveraging In-App Tips to Dynamically Improve Cash Flow via User Behavior Arbitrage" or some other such nonsense.
hunter23 8y ago
My guess is this was a top down decision from the CFO/COO or head of product.
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  Betting on CFO/COO. Head of Product should be more in touch with... humans.
  - drugme 8y ago
    No - almost by definition, they get to be in that position be being in touch with what the founders want, and how they tick. Not for being in touch with "humans".
SN76477 8y ago
I am currently working under Grubhub, Doordash, Uber Eats and several other food delivery services. None of them communicate, none of them tell you what is going on, none of them are controlling the conversation their employees are talking about on Facebook. It is PR 101 to control the conversation... but every one of them fail at this when it comes to contractors.
- treis 8y ago
  I think that is the big issue. It's ok as a payment scheme, but it's fraud to say 100% of the tips go to the Dasher if a separate payment is reduced based on the tip amount.
- rconti 8y ago
  Is Uber Eats or Grubhub (or PostMates) better than DoorDash in terms of how they handle tipping? Or can you even tell? I imagine the payments are so opaque it can be hard to tell. I'm not using DoorDash anymore, not that I used them much before, but I feel ripped off. If I choose to use a delivery service, I'd at least like to know it's one that hasn't been lying to me. I realize that probably means Uber is right out :)
  - sl1ck731 8y ago
    I think the simplest way to tell is if the app requires you to tip before or after the order has been placed. I've read in other HN threads that Uber Eats tip policy is what we as customers expect, but don't take my word for it.
    - rconti 8y ago
      It would be just as easy to implement a process where a tip after-the-fact still reduces the "employee"'s normal pay.. Do just mean, in practice, that's not the way it's normally implemented?
      - sl1ck731 8y ago
        You're right I didn't consider them making it up on the backend somehow. I still believe that forcing a "pre-tip" is a clear indication of something sketchy going on. I can't think of any other valid reason for forcing it.
desireco42 8y ago
I think they did. They got shot down. I was at the meeting at payday lender when we discussed some ways how to extract maximum money from people who are delinquent. People do speak up, they get shot down.
gdulli 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? Meetings are rarely open-ended forums for arbitrary ideas or feedback and more often venues for agreeing with and carrying out decisions that were already made. Anyway, I think it's far from settled that the amount of "blowback" from decisions like these actually hurt a company in the typical case.
itronitron 8y ago
Worth noting as well that they call the workers 'shoppers' which helps distance them from the concept of doing work. You mean we have to pay them just to shop all day? /s
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  As a marketer, I fully blame a marketer for this. Woof.
PopeDotNinja 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? That person probably did speak up, which was probably followed by that person getting pushed out and/or quitting. When some greedy jackass with questionable ideas on how a business should be run gets into a position of power, capable people who dont agree with Captain Jackass aren't going on Captain's team very long.
yoodenvranx 8y ago
> No one voiced concerns? Or, more specifically, if they did, no one listened? Based on experience I would say that the engineers had concerns but they knew that upper management was not interested. It's all about that short-term profit!
product50 8y ago
I am sure someone would have said that. The problem is that Instacart and Door Dash are very low margin business and through tactics like this, they can probably stay afloat or make some (small) profit. I know it is difficult to empathize with their behavior and assume the worst but when you are competing with deep pockets such as Amazon and Uber Eats, it is important to ensure that your unit economics work out and that the next fund raising happens successfully. Otherwise, they will eventually die anyways.
- sl1ck731 8y ago
  If you can't survive without grossly misleading your customers then you have no right to survive at all.
bluetidepro 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? This is a really silly assumption. As a UI/UX designer, I have brought up many times at previous companies when they were trying to do sketchy/dark-patterns/etc. to users. At the end of the day, a lot of times, you get classified as someone who is not being a "team player", or are just being "negative." It sucks, but I can bet you that people there probably did speak up about this, but it got now where and they didn't want to risk their career over it. If you were in their shoes, would you quit your job over this if you spoke up and they still didn't listen? It's easy to answer that from the outside, but not everyone has the ability to do that. It's much more complicated.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  I don't do crooked stuff, that started in primary school for me, and I don't envy the people who are obedient, they had some short-term gains, sure, but long-term they end up with nothing to say, nothing to do and to be. If one has to be crooked to not risk it, what kind of career is it in the first place? > You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. > Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    That's a great speech but you would have to stand up to your boss, tell him he did something wrong, and then quit your job. So if you actually did that then I would buy your argument.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I'm on the IEEE P7010 Standards working group, which is part of the larger P7000 series that is focused on addressing ethical concerns when building software.[1] As a body, we're going through painstaking effort to build a firm footing for how and why systems designers should build an ethics decision process into their workflow. However I keep struggling to see why any software developer would care to follow our standards. They don't seem to generally follow any other standards, or even generally know they exist. I can't think of anything more formalized that would help either, because the monetary incentives of ignoring or never learning about standards just aren't there. If you're just out there winging it, trying to make as much money as possible, what short term incentive do you have to adopt ethics? I'm trying to help find or create real incentives that aren't easy to ignore, so if anyone has any good ideas I'm open. [1] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7010.html https://standards.ieee.org/project/7010.html [2] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7000.html https://standards.ieee.org/project/7000.html
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I think you're missing the point. The problem is not that developers don't care about standards. And its not that developers are just trying to make as much money as possible. Most developers have financial obligations that require them to keep their jobs. The people making unethical decisions are their bosses. The developers cannot contradict their bosses in this way and keep their jobs. However, if you make the standards an organization-level thing and tie management and legal into it, it may be come to be that it is some developer's job to report on standards infringement. In which case they could say "no, this is illegal" and if there were legal precedent showing criminal charges or penalties had been applied, the management might consider following the standard. Although at first even if those standards existed, I assume sometimes management would just fire the messenger and hire another one who would claim the standards were upheld.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    I'm not missing the point. Ethics isn't negotiable. This is not a place to be cynical. "Just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse. You either quit or you're complicit. It's pretty straightforward actually. What we're trying to get to is a place where there is some incentive for organizations to do the process you described. At a certain point we're just going to legislate it, so we can wait for that blunt hammer to happen, or we can get our collective act together.
Benjammer 8y ago
The people in positions of power to make these sorts of decisions are almost never incentivized to do anything other than make the maximum possible amount of money for investors/shareholders. I've never heard of a corporate leadership structure that would, for example, reward the lowest executive/director on the totem pole individually for choosing to do something that has a good chance of limiting revenue from what is legally possible, but for empathetic/moral reasons around "caring about users." And this isn't about some sort of explicit negative incentive against this sort of thing, it's just that the individual incentives to make more money are so much more tantalizing and rewarding. It's not about creating a non-zero incentive out of thin air around moral actions, it's about looking at the overall incentive structure and moving "user empathy" to a higher rung in the overall hierarchy, among things like reducing costs & increasing revenue. You could then argue with me over the appropriate place for "user empathy" in that overall hierarchy, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect mis-aligned incentive structures to produce many cases (always can be outliers...) of someone in a leadership position "doing the right thing" from a moral standpoint outside the numbers of the business.
- smallgovt 8y ago
  I couldn't agree with this comment more. Outrage may solve these issues on a case by case basis, but it seems more prudent to focus on the larger systemic issue -- capitalistic incentives.
Sylamore 8y ago
I've been in similar meetings and spoken out against similar shadiness. I was told the decision was made and it was happening because a new revenue stream on a process that was otherwise already saving us money was too irresistible and to shut up and do my job, there was a long line of people willing to replace me. I did eventually leave that company and at least one of the specific individuals involved in pushing that decision were ultimately caught embezzling money and fired, but they were not otherwise punished and they had a new job within a week. Hell our CEO from when we were involved in a 880 million dollar accounting scandal got off effectively Scott free despite anyone who ever worked with him knowing he personally directed the accounting fraud that lead to the scandal. Only the CMO got any jail time. My point is that if the rot is from the top down, no amount of speaking up is going to do anything except limit your career path. There is limited recourse for holding the decision makers accountable.
threatofrain 8y ago
Most tech workers are in a position for building and not leading, so their most powerful option is to sabotage. This is similar to asking why a McDonald's worker doesn't think more about American health. A single fast food employee may contribute more to the end product than most engineers. A tech strike is also far less effective. Only people in the region can effectively make your burger. People in Australia can coordinate with people in China to build your software.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Probably because people did voice those concerns and it wasn't politically the right thing to do in the org at the time, they were labelled "not a team player" and shown the door.
dawhizkid 8y ago
I don't know if "apathy" is the right term. It's more a lack of a moral compass (not uncommon in most profit-seeking business) and a tendency to see people as numbers and data points.
CharlesColeman 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? I think other commenters have covered the futility of speaking up internally (basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine in action), but the question I have is: Why did no one blow the whistle? Instacart's tip stealing code had likely been in place a long time before any external activists noticed it. An ethical developer could have passed word of it and its implications to activists or journalists right as it went into production. That would not have exposed the dev to retaliation (as it'd be publicly observable in PROD), but would have likely torpedoed the feature before it could do much harm to workers.
- SilasX 8y ago
  The Friedman doctrine wouldn't advocate against doing this either, because it's not within the bounds of law.
dba7dba 8y ago
> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? I am assuming you are saying PM, designers, backend engineers or others who actually had a hand in building the product should protest this. So you are basically saying engineers and designers should stand up and say no. I think the focus is on wrong people. The question should be, why is MBA schools still teaching their students to reduce cost at all cost and increase revenue at all cost. No matter what. Fine, the engineers build what they build. But someone hires/fires people, and signs checks for certain projects. Someone tells the engineers to build something. And who are these people? Let's focus the public anger at the right people. It's not the engineers. It's the graduates of the expensive MBA schools.
Tactic 8y ago
I have spoke up in similar situations several times at a number of companies. Not once was what I said a revelation or surprise. The business people knew already what the possible results would be. They had assessed it and decided to move on regardless. Clearly the potential results were worth the risk in their assessment. I have learned that my code of ethics are just not the same as a number of business persons'. This may explain, in part, why I have two failed businesses.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Unfortunately, we reward bad behavior by not having the hammer be swung down hard and fast. Look at the ridesharing companies, all of them started by defying local laws. Couple of people get assaulted here and there, doesn't matter as long as Silicon Valley gets it's money.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    The hammer swings down fast in some cases. Look at Robin Hood's checking account debacle. The SEC, FDIC and SPIC do not play around. The problem is where regulations are enforced. At state level results may vary. At local level very few jurisdictions can out-battle a company with millions or billions in VC funding. Uber blocked local regulators in Portland from blocking rides: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-portland/portland-probe-finds-uber-used-software-to-evade-16-government-officials-idUSKCN1BQ08Z https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-portland/portland-pr...
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
      At some point, it becomes impossible to argue that taxi regulations were actually benefiting the public. Civil disobedience is a valid option in such cases, whether your name is Travis Kalanick or Rosa Parks.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        Uber and Lyft are hardly Rosa Parks. They mostly use their size to bully around smaller localities that can’t handle the pressure. If they truly believed that taxi regulations were onerous they’d fight them wherever they exist. Uber and Lyft left Austin in protest because they felt a fingerprinting requirement was too onerous, and they didn’t come back until Texas overruled them; but they already comply with such a regulation in New York! And this is before we get into their other controversies, like Uber India obtaining a customer’s medical report after she got raped in one of their cars.
Johnny555 8y ago
I worked for a company that did something similar (they said they sent a portion of profit to a non-profit of the user's choice, which was true, but if the user didn't designate a non-profit, then the company would keep the money... something close to 50% of the users didn't bother to designate a non-profit after signing up). I brought a feature to remind these users to designate their non-profit, but the company had no interest in doing so since it would reduce their revenue. And this came from the top, it wasn't a product manager decision. The company is no longer around, but I didn't stick around long after that, it seemed unethical.
ErikVandeWater 8y ago
Blame the biggest VCs. They have enough market power and smarts to enforce ethics on their portfolio companies, but probably encourage these ideas.
coffee 8y ago
Most likely this did NOT play out as you've described. I'd wager to bet it was a very high level, executive decision that got green lighted and quickly shuffled down to a low-level developer for implementation.
thrwwaydontask 8y ago
I worked at a different crowdsource delivery than DoorDash or Instacart. When this exact situation came up, I loudly voiced these exact concerns. Management said 'hey, no worries, legal department says it's not illegal!'. They did not understand the difference between "this is illegal" and "this is unethical". They just didn't get it. And most of the developers said "wow, that's awful, but I guess there's nothing we can do". I quit. I'm still furious about it. Those who didn't walk when they knew it was wrong are good people- just cowards. That's what really makes me angry. If I publicly discuss it or name names, I'll probably be sued for violating my NDA. They made that very clear. So I'm a coward too. At least I'm not a part of it anymore. The lesson is never tip with an app- use cash. I guess that most of these companies are playing these games now.

jonknee 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? Who's to say someone didn't? All we know is they decided to steal tips, not that everyone thought it was a great idea.

crushcrashcrush 8y ago
I address that later in my comment... Is this a function of schooling? MBA programs? Corporatism?
- jonknee 8y ago
  The Excel models all look a lot nicer if you take the tips!
- airstrike 8y ago
  As an MBA, I really take issue with this cynicism of MBA programs. It's not like we're cold greedy bastards. Stop generalizing. People can make great and terrible decisions, regardless of grad school degree choice.
  - resters 8y ago
    Hah. Well it's obviously a case where the consumer habit of tipping for delivery means that on a $100 order there may be $105 that the customer is willing to (or used to having to) pay. Thus leaving that $5 on the table is perhaps a stupid business decision. I should hope an MBA would point that out, so long as another MBA pointed out that the user experience may be more important than the few extra dollars.
    - airstrike 8y ago
      An MBA would point out that in the this isn't a sustainable strategy, regardless of any concept of fairness. Backlash from customers and workers is virtually guaranteed to hurt long-term profits.
      - save_ferris 8y ago
        Serious question: are ethics taught in MBA programs, and if so, how? Generally speaking, how are MBA's taught to avoid making this very mistake?
        throwaway5752 8y ago
        Pardon my interruption, but I think a perfectly adequate response would be to counter by asking if ethics are taught in CS/CE programs (or what curricula have ethics prereqs)
        tedmiston 8y ago
        Yes, ethics are a required component of the ABET CS model curriculum.
        throwaway5752 8y ago
        That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment. I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites. Plenty of engineering schools offer compute ethics courses as electives, but then again, plenty of business schools offer business ethics electives in MBA programs.
  - dba7dba 8y ago
    Someone signed off on that feature that stole $4 from a $5 tip given to a person making minimum wage. Was that person an MBA graduate or not?
    - airstrike 8y ago
      Let's blame all males if that was their gender too!
      - dba7dba 8y ago
        I don't care about all that gender stuff. The point is someone signed off on that. And in a business, it's usually someone with an MBA. I can't imagine a business of that popularity having someone making business decisions without an MBA under their belt.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  I mean ultimately it's the executives that call the shots. I've seen people stand up to executives over things like this and then they get fired and it's business as usual. Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers, especially when you feel powerless to actually stop it from happening. I mean it's so socially acceptable we've even coined the term "gig economy" Chances are the people that really feel strongly about these things just refuse to work for those companies in the first place.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers Ironic that they may have ended doing long term damage to their careers as a result.
    - ergothus 8y ago
      Did they? Can you name the people to blame? If someone shows up with Instacart on their resume, is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision?
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        I'd definitely discount applicants on that basis. is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision? No, but fooling me if I want to know is a different matter.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      In what way? The vast majority of employers want cogs. They don't want rebels.
- rjpr 8y ago
  It's just greed, plain and simple. It doesn't have to be more complex than that.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  We don't have corporatism (corporate crony capitalism, which is a bit redundant, but not corporatism which is a completely different thing; the corpora referred to in corporatism is the body formed by the whole of society, not each individual firm as a corporation.)
- save_ferris 8y ago
  Hard to say exactly without being privy to their conversations, but the aggressive growth pressure that young companies with VC funding face almost always factors in somehow. It's hard to truly expect companies to make the correct ethical decision in this scenario when the survival of founders is dependent on raising more and more money. The "grow now, profit later" model truly puts pressure on execs to take whatever they can. And in this case, they clearly thought either nobody would notice or care.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Who polices the VCs? It seems like they have no accountability, even financially speaking. If one investment fails they have nine more to reallocate towards, so to speak.
    - save_ferris 8y ago
      > Who polices the VCs? Great question. They benefit tremendously by minimizing their own risk and maximizing the leverage they have over founders they invest in.
      - pas 8y ago
        The market, obviously. If they invest in shit startups, then eventually they will lose all of their money. Now the problem is, what if people still use something and give their money to even if that service/company is unethical? Is it unethical to make very bad employment deals with people who have no better opportunities on the job market? Well, now that's where again people come in. Some people say, no, because if they don't like the job, they can start their own company (ehm, ehm, maybe that's why we are here, too many people trying to start stupid companies built on almost stealing from each other). Some people say, fuck no, that's just a race to the bottom Somalia. Some people pitch NIT (negative income tax, a form of universal basic income). Some full blown direct action style socialism/anarchism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - bspn 8y ago
      Technically LPs, but they're more-often-than-not large, faceless funds only interested in returns and mostly insulated from any blowback so moral considerations don't always concern them.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  Its a function of money. The people who make the decisions (CEO, board) are judged on how much money the company makes. They are paid based on it. They keep their job only if they make more money. Basically imagine you are an investor who spent $70 million on this company. That money could represent anything. Money can be used for anything so people can imagine it will all be used for altruistic purposes if they want. Sometimes a portion of it is. It can represent 50 or 500 or 5000 people who are counting on that money to grow. The point being, it is very easy for a person in charge of a large sum of money to come up with a moral justification for maintaining or increasing that sum of money. The least of which is keeping their job or social standing -- but that one alone is usually enough for people to justify many things. In this case, they will probably just say something like "well, its not our responsibility to make sure that people earn a good wage". In the end, the only thing they are really being held accountable for is how much money they make.
- rchaud 8y ago
  It is the ancient philosophy of nickel-and-diming employees in low-margin hospitality sector businesses. I don't have access to the financials, but at no point has 'on demand food delivery' seemed to be anything other than a highly risky business servicing an extremely price-sensitive market.
  - ModFightsCron 8y ago
    that's funny. a market with almost inelastic demand is high risk for a business. right. on demand food delivery is risky and price-sensitive? what are you talking about. there is always an almost inelastic guaranteed demand for food delivery, irrelevant of economic factors. unemployed white trash get pizza delivered. there is zero price sensitivity, because compared to the food the price is low, and the laziness is high. If someone wants food delivered, making the delivery fee double, will not make them go get food or cook. it will just make them find the lowest delivery fee and order there. you are literally saying the opposite of what is obviously true.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I would believe that someone did/has. If you look at things like Project Maven at Google people did speak out, or the Chinese search engine. Speaking out doesn't help if you're not in a position to modify the plan though. I've been in both places, both where I could keep a bad idea from going through and times when I could only share my concerns. For me, it was situations like this that gave me the motivation to get better at pitching (and shooting down) ideas. Using the tip fiasco as an example, you can argue it at the social justice level which will be ignored by the Chief Product Officer because they don't care about social justice, so for them you argue it at the product angle, "This policy/product is going to stain our product and make us look like greedy chumps, look at how our competitors product idea to do <x> resulted in so much bad publicity they had to pay <y>, which totally negated any value to the company. Do you want to be the guy that costs this company that money? Are you ready to be out on the street looking for a job where your last idea turned out to be reviled by press? It will be you because the CEO certainly isn't going to take the blame for it, they are going to fire you and say 'See? We thought it was horrible too and we fired the person responsible.', and that is going to be you. Think about that before you move forward on this product idea, kthx bye." That makes is personal to someone in a position to actually stop it from going out the door. If you can show them the risk in a way they will understand, then, and only then, do you get any traction in stopping it.
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  I wish I could upvote you twice, and I'm stealing your quoted paragraph as essentially a template for when these situations appear in future meetings.
- Fede_V 8y ago
  I totally agree with this, and I think this makes the point that social outrage can sometimes play a positive role. In an ideal world, we could get people to act ethically because it's the right thing to do: if we can't do that, at least we can appeal to their self interest and point out how horribly this could backfire if people found out.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
anigbrowl 8y ago
True, but once someone knows something illegal or deeply unethical is going down and sticks around, they can't complain about getting part of the blame for it.
tomc1985 8y ago
I think it is more, "Why does this keep happening?" and "What can we do to stop it?"
minimaxir 8y ago
The argument, especially for low-margin businesses like these delivery startups, is that the company might go under if financial tricks aren't in place. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well take the path of least embarrassment and hope no one calls out the tricks.
- deogeo 8y ago
  > Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Surely that should be "Business goes under if you don't, executives go to jail for mass fraud if you do."
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but I do wonder what the legal threshold between "following ethics" and "fiduciary duty" is.
- criddell 8y ago
  I'd have more sympathy if there were also giving equity to the people they are stealing from.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  So maybe your business model is flawed? If you can't survive without robbing your employees then you shouldn't survive at all. This would easily be solvable by building growth organically, or having companies that hook into your service willingly to offer delivery at lower cost to them than hiring a full time employee. This would necessarily limit usefulness to larger population centers, but would make it more viable long term.

orky56 8y ago

Unfortunately, it's the hacking mindset when it's applied to the treatment of other humans.

crushcrashcrush 8y ago
I've been in growth hack meetings (usually around customer acquisition and retention) this screams to me like a former PwC consultant came in and delivered PPT presentation with some sort of finance speak of "Leveraging In-App Tips to Dynamically Improve Cash Flow via User Behavior Arbitrage" or some other such nonsense.

hunter23 8y ago

My guess is this was a top down decision from the CFO/COO or head of product.

crushcrashcrush 8y ago
Betting on CFO/COO. Head of Product should be more in touch with... humans.
- drugme 8y ago
  No - almost by definition, they get to be in that position be being in touch with what the founders want, and how they tick. Not for being in touch with "humans".

SN76477 8y ago

I am currently working under Grubhub, Doordash, Uber Eats and several other food delivery services. None of them communicate, none of them tell you what is going on, none of them are controlling the conversation their employees are talking about on Facebook. It is PR 101 to control the conversation... but every one of them fail at this when it comes to contractors.

treis 8y ago
I think that is the big issue. It's ok as a payment scheme, but it's fraud to say 100% of the tips go to the Dasher if a separate payment is reduced based on the tip amount.
rconti 8y ago
Is Uber Eats or Grubhub (or PostMates) better than DoorDash in terms of how they handle tipping? Or can you even tell? I imagine the payments are so opaque it can be hard to tell. I'm not using DoorDash anymore, not that I used them much before, but I feel ripped off. If I choose to use a delivery service, I'd at least like to know it's one that hasn't been lying to me. I realize that probably means Uber is right out :)
- sl1ck731 8y ago
  I think the simplest way to tell is if the app requires you to tip before or after the order has been placed. I've read in other HN threads that Uber Eats tip policy is what we as customers expect, but don't take my word for it.
  - rconti 8y ago
    It would be just as easy to implement a process where a tip after-the-fact still reduces the "employee"'s normal pay.. Do just mean, in practice, that's not the way it's normally implemented?
    - sl1ck731 8y ago
      You're right I didn't consider them making it up on the backend somehow. I still believe that forcing a "pre-tip" is a clear indication of something sketchy going on. I can't think of any other valid reason for forcing it.

desireco42 8y ago

I think they did. They got shot down. I was at the meeting at payday lender when we discussed some ways how to extract maximum money from people who are delinquent. People do speak up, they get shot down.

gdulli 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? Meetings are rarely open-ended forums for arbitrary ideas or feedback and more often venues for agreeing with and carrying out decisions that were already made. Anyway, I think it's far from settled that the amount of "blowback" from decisions like these actually hurt a company in the typical case.

itronitron 8y ago

Worth noting as well that they call the workers 'shoppers' which helps distance them from the concept of doing work. You mean we have to pay them just to shop all day? /s

crushcrashcrush 8y ago
As a marketer, I fully blame a marketer for this. Woof.

PopeDotNinja 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? That person probably did speak up, which was probably followed by that person getting pushed out and/or quitting. When some greedy jackass with questionable ideas on how a business should be run gets into a position of power, capable people who dont agree with Captain Jackass aren't going on Captain's team very long.

yoodenvranx 8y ago

> No one voiced concerns? Or, more specifically, if they did, no one listened? Based on experience I would say that the engineers had concerns but they knew that upper management was not interested. It's all about that short-term profit!

product50 8y ago

I am sure someone would have said that. The problem is that Instacart and Door Dash are very low margin business and through tactics like this, they can probably stay afloat or make some (small) profit. I know it is difficult to empathize with their behavior and assume the worst but when you are competing with deep pockets such as Amazon and Uber Eats, it is important to ensure that your unit economics work out and that the next fund raising happens successfully. Otherwise, they will eventually die anyways.

sl1ck731 8y ago
If you can't survive without grossly misleading your customers then you have no right to survive at all.

bluetidepro 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? This is a really silly assumption. As a UI/UX designer, I have brought up many times at previous companies when they were trying to do sketchy/dark-patterns/etc. to users. At the end of the day, a lot of times, you get classified as someone who is not being a "team player", or are just being "negative." It sucks, but I can bet you that people there probably did speak up about this, but it got now where and they didn't want to risk their career over it. If you were in their shoes, would you quit your job over this if you spoke up and they still didn't listen? It's easy to answer that from the outside, but not everyone has the ability to do that. It's much more complicated.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
I don't do crooked stuff, that started in primary school for me, and I don't envy the people who are obedient, they had some short-term gains, sure, but long-term they end up with nothing to say, nothing to do and to be. If one has to be crooked to not risk it, what kind of career is it in the first place? > You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. > Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  That's a great speech but you would have to stand up to your boss, tell him he did something wrong, and then quit your job. So if you actually did that then I would buy your argument.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

I'm on the IEEE P7010 Standards working group, which is part of the larger P7000 series that is focused on addressing ethical concerns when building software.[1] As a body, we're going through painstaking effort to build a firm footing for how and why systems designers should build an ethics decision process into their workflow. However I keep struggling to see why any software developer would care to follow our standards. They don't seem to generally follow any other standards, or even generally know they exist. I can't think of anything more formalized that would help either, because the monetary incentives of ignoring or never learning about standards just aren't there. If you're just out there winging it, trying to make as much money as possible, what short term incentive do you have to adopt ethics? I'm trying to help find or create real incentives that aren't easy to ignore, so if anyone has any good ideas I'm open. [1] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7010.html https://standards.ieee.org/project/7010.html [2] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7000.html https://standards.ieee.org/project/7000.html

ilaksh 8y ago
I think you're missing the point. The problem is not that developers don't care about standards. And its not that developers are just trying to make as much money as possible. Most developers have financial obligations that require them to keep their jobs. The people making unethical decisions are their bosses. The developers cannot contradict their bosses in this way and keep their jobs. However, if you make the standards an organization-level thing and tie management and legal into it, it may be come to be that it is some developer's job to report on standards infringement. In which case they could say "no, this is illegal" and if there were legal precedent showing criminal charges or penalties had been applied, the management might consider following the standard. Although at first even if those standards existed, I assume sometimes management would just fire the messenger and hire another one who would claim the standards were upheld.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I'm not missing the point. Ethics isn't negotiable. This is not a place to be cynical. "Just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse. You either quit or you're complicit. It's pretty straightforward actually. What we're trying to get to is a place where there is some incentive for organizations to do the process you described. At a certain point we're just going to legislate it, so we can wait for that blunt hammer to happen, or we can get our collective act together.

Benjammer 8y ago

The people in positions of power to make these sorts of decisions are almost never incentivized to do anything other than make the maximum possible amount of money for investors/shareholders. I've never heard of a corporate leadership structure that would, for example, reward the lowest executive/director on the totem pole individually for choosing to do something that has a good chance of limiting revenue from what is legally possible, but for empathetic/moral reasons around "caring about users." And this isn't about some sort of explicit negative incentive against this sort of thing, it's just that the individual incentives to make more money are so much more tantalizing and rewarding. It's not about creating a non-zero incentive out of thin air around moral actions, it's about looking at the overall incentive structure and moving "user empathy" to a higher rung in the overall hierarchy, among things like reducing costs & increasing revenue. You could then argue with me over the appropriate place for "user empathy" in that overall hierarchy, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect mis-aligned incentive structures to produce many cases (always can be outliers...) of someone in a leadership position "doing the right thing" from a moral standpoint outside the numbers of the business.

smallgovt 8y ago
I couldn't agree with this comment more. Outrage may solve these issues on a case by case basis, but it seems more prudent to focus on the larger systemic issue -- capitalistic incentives.

Sylamore 8y ago

I've been in similar meetings and spoken out against similar shadiness. I was told the decision was made and it was happening because a new revenue stream on a process that was otherwise already saving us money was too irresistible and to shut up and do my job, there was a long line of people willing to replace me. I did eventually leave that company and at least one of the specific individuals involved in pushing that decision were ultimately caught embezzling money and fired, but they were not otherwise punished and they had a new job within a week. Hell our CEO from when we were involved in a 880 million dollar accounting scandal got off effectively Scott free despite anyone who ever worked with him knowing he personally directed the accounting fraud that lead to the scandal. Only the CMO got any jail time. My point is that if the rot is from the top down, no amount of speaking up is going to do anything except limit your career path. There is limited recourse for holding the decision makers accountable.

threatofrain 8y ago

Most tech workers are in a position for building and not leading, so their most powerful option is to sabotage. This is similar to asking why a McDonald's worker doesn't think more about American health. A single fast food employee may contribute more to the end product than most engineers. A tech strike is also far less effective. Only people in the region can effectively make your burger. People in Australia can coordinate with people in China to build your software.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

Probably because people did voice those concerns and it wasn't politically the right thing to do in the org at the time, they were labelled "not a team player" and shown the door.

dawhizkid 8y ago

I don't know if "apathy" is the right term. It's more a lack of a moral compass (not uncommon in most profit-seeking business) and a tendency to see people as numbers and data points.

CharlesColeman 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? I think other commenters have covered the futility of speaking up internally (basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine in action), but the question I have is: Why did no one blow the whistle? Instacart's tip stealing code had likely been in place a long time before any external activists noticed it. An ethical developer could have passed word of it and its implications to activists or journalists right as it went into production. That would not have exposed the dev to retaliation (as it'd be publicly observable in PROD), but would have likely torpedoed the feature before it could do much harm to workers.

SilasX 8y ago
The Friedman doctrine wouldn't advocate against doing this either, because it's not within the bounds of law.

dba7dba 8y ago

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything? I am assuming you are saying PM, designers, backend engineers or others who actually had a hand in building the product should protest this. So you are basically saying engineers and designers should stand up and say no. I think the focus is on wrong people. The question should be, why is MBA schools still teaching their students to reduce cost at all cost and increase revenue at all cost. No matter what. Fine, the engineers build what they build. But someone hires/fires people, and signs checks for certain projects. Someone tells the engineers to build something. And who are these people? Let's focus the public anger at the right people. It's not the engineers. It's the graduates of the expensive MBA schools.

Tactic 8y ago

I have spoke up in similar situations several times at a number of companies. Not once was what I said a revelation or surprise. The business people knew already what the possible results would be. They had assessed it and decided to move on regardless. Clearly the potential results were worth the risk in their assessment. I have learned that my code of ethics are just not the same as a number of business persons'. This may explain, in part, why I have two failed businesses.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
Unfortunately, we reward bad behavior by not having the hammer be swung down hard and fast. Look at the ridesharing companies, all of them started by defying local laws. Couple of people get assaulted here and there, doesn't matter as long as Silicon Valley gets it's money.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  The hammer swings down fast in some cases. Look at Robin Hood's checking account debacle. The SEC, FDIC and SPIC do not play around. The problem is where regulations are enforced. At state level results may vary. At local level very few jurisdictions can out-battle a company with millions or billions in VC funding. Uber blocked local regulators in Portland from blocking rides: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-portland/portland-probe-finds-uber-used-software-to-evade-16-government-officials-idUSKCN1BQ08Z https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-portland/portland-pr...
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    At some point, it becomes impossible to argue that taxi regulations were actually benefiting the public. Civil disobedience is a valid option in such cases, whether your name is Travis Kalanick or Rosa Parks.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      Uber and Lyft are hardly Rosa Parks. They mostly use their size to bully around smaller localities that can’t handle the pressure. If they truly believed that taxi regulations were onerous they’d fight them wherever they exist. Uber and Lyft left Austin in protest because they felt a fingerprinting requirement was too onerous, and they didn’t come back until Texas overruled them; but they already comply with such a regulation in New York! And this is before we get into their other controversies, like Uber India obtaining a customer’s medical report after she got raped in one of their cars.

Johnny555 8y ago

I worked for a company that did something similar (they said they sent a portion of profit to a non-profit of the user's choice, which was true, but if the user didn't designate a non-profit, then the company would keep the money... something close to 50% of the users didn't bother to designate a non-profit after signing up). I brought a feature to remind these users to designate their non-profit, but the company had no interest in doing so since it would reduce their revenue. And this came from the top, it wasn't a product manager decision. The company is no longer around, but I didn't stick around long after that, it seemed unethical.

ErikVandeWater 8y ago

Blame the biggest VCs. They have enough market power and smarts to enforce ethics on their portfolio companies, but probably encourage these ideas.

coffee 8y ago

Most likely this did NOT play out as you've described. I'd wager to bet it was a very high level, executive decision that got green lighted and quickly shuffled down to a low-level developer for implementation.

thrwwaydontask 8y ago

I worked at a different crowdsource delivery than DoorDash or Instacart. When this exact situation came up, I loudly voiced these exact concerns. Management said 'hey, no worries, legal department says it's not illegal!'. They did not understand the difference between "this is illegal" and "this is unethical". They just didn't get it. And most of the developers said "wow, that's awful, but I guess there's nothing we can do". I quit. I'm still furious about it. Those who didn't walk when they knew it was wrong are good people- just cowards. That's what really makes me angry. If I publicly discuss it or name names, I'll probably be sued for violating my NDA. They made that very clear. So I'm a coward too. At least I'm not a part of it anymore. The lesson is never tip with an app- use cash. I guess that most of these companies are playing these games now.