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I used to work at Uber. I'll focus on one particular point: allowing drivers to see where riders are going before they accept the trip. Uber, at least when I w

I used to work at Uber. I'll focus on one particular point: allowing drivers to see where riders are going before they accept the trip. Uber, at least when I worked there, was heavily against this functionality as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. That feature is bad for the overall ecosystem. Because of it, you may not be able to get a ride to the airport during rush hour, or home from the bar when you live 30 minutes away from downtown. The overall service becomes less useful if there's doubt as to your ability to be able to use it when you need it.

brendoelfrendo 6y ago
This sounds like it is bad for the customer experience of the rider, but is essential for the driver to be considered a contractor. It makes sense to me as a tradeoff: Uber can decide that the drivers are employees and dictate what routes and fares they must take, or they can decide that drivers are contractors who have the ability to review and decline those fares
- kingnothing 6y ago
  My last point was that it's good for both riders and drivers. If riders come to expect an unreliable service, then they'll use a different method of transit, which leaves the drivers with less work overall.
  - floatrock 6y ago
    > which leaves the drivers with less work overall. ...which is a positive feedback loop that should encourage them to pick up those previously declined routes. Or charge higher rates that better reflect their reluctance for those routes. Isn't that how supply & demand is supposed to work?
    - raducu 6y ago
      But how can you then claim you're better and cheaper than a taxi company?
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        Marketing material does not cause the universe to reassert itself.
msoad 6y ago
I used to work at Lyft. It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing etc. Those PMs have no sympathy for drivers. A driver can end up in an experiment group that totally screws his income. WRT to drivers not going to neighborhood I have a solution for you: let passengers offer higher pricers. This is not a new idea BTW
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing Society as a whole needs to answer the question "is it moral to roll a dice and offer a worse service to people who get an odd number?" In my view, it is. As far as that person is concerned, they can pretend your company doesn't exist and go to another company (and maybe roll another dice) Some other people would say "all businesses must treat all customers equally and fairly". In many ways, I don't see how this can be universally true - there is always the superstore that has run out of a product - why should Mrs Smith who picked up apples at 9am get some, when Mr Jones who tried to buy some at 9:15am finds the shelf empty? Thats unfair. Instead I'd like to see a list of characteristics a business is not allowed to discriminate on (religion, race, etc.), and explicitly allow discrimination based on another list (random number, position in queue, length of service as a customer, etc.). Any other factor, judges can decide which list it falls into.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I think companies run A/B tests because they don't know which option is the worse service.
  - idontpost 6y ago
    This is silly. Companies have ALWAYS had test products that they offer to a subset of customers. There's no legal test to be applied here.
  - grumple 6y ago
    I'm curious about whether a/b testing would be considered human subjects research and therefore governed by federal regulations. [1] I suspect that it will be in some cases. Does Uber have IRBs? What about other big tech companies? If you work in a company and see them doing something immoral and possibly illegal, you should speak up or report the behavior. 1. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-charts-2018/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-cha...
ProAm 6y ago
> as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. This is exactly what being a contractor is though. Accepting contract work you'd like, and turning down work you don't. Otherwise you are an employee.
- kingnothing 6y ago
  In the case of rideshare, I imagine the driver contract agreement has that stipulation in it. You'll agree to pick up a passenger taking a trip to an unknown destination with up to N hours of travel time. If you don't like the terms of the contract, you don't have to work for that company.
  - raducu 6y ago
    How is that different from a regular taxi driver? Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?
    - modeless 6y ago
      Regular taxi drivers are often contractors. At least, they were in the past, I'm not sure how this new stuff is affecting regular taxi companies.
    - olyjohn 6y ago
      This is the thing that really chafes my testes. People need to get real and start calling it what it is. It's a taxi service. This is not ride sharing. The driver was not already going somewhere. The driver was waiting around for a call to pick someone up, and was going to take them where they wanted to go. Nothing is being shared. This is a Taxi service and the Uber app is the dispatcher. If I was already going to work, and I picked someone up along the way, that's sharing a ride. The only thing the driver is sharing is the money they are giving to their mechanic when all the around town driving wears out their car.
      - 6y ago
thatoneuser 6y ago
That sounds like what a roomful of execs would cleverly start talking about to cover there asses, when in reality they knew what they were doing. If uber cared about guaranteeing your trip to the airport, guarantee it will come and guarantee it's worth the drivers time. If uber cared about folks in the suburbs then guarantee a driver won't go 30 miles one way and then hope they'll get a ride that will take then back home instead of possibly further away. This "ecosystem" had many of changes to be fair to the drivers and still guarantee a level of experience for the passengers. But the execs of uber have ALWAYS been fast to shove the burden onto the driver for their profit.
Simulacra 6y ago
Can you change the destination once you get in the car?
SkyBelow 6y ago
The solution would be to increase the amount you are willing to pay until someone agrees to it, not trick a person into doing work they don't want to do by hiding the details of the job until after they have begun.
Slartie 6y ago
I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but here in Germany, the good old taxis have a special obligation that disallows them to decline a rider based on where he wants to go, as long as that target is within the geographic area for which a particular taxi is licensed. The idea is that taxis are part of public transport and thus should have a certain reliability for customers, regardless of how lucrative a particular ride happens to be. I find it laughable to hear that Uber, the arch-enemy of the taxi business, attempts to (secretly, because obviously the customer isn't informed about drivers not seeing the target locations beforehand) rebuild this particular property of the system it aims to replace. And it's doubly laughable that they now stumble over that exact attempt, which they now can't actually continue, because in order to have the necessary authority over drivers they would need to make them official employees.
- valuearb 6y ago
  The law in Germany is a fantasy. Drivers still can and claim a break down, bad cell service, etc.
  - Slartie 6y ago
    Having some people cheat their way around it does not invalidate the law in the first place and neither does it invalidate its intention. The equivalent in Uber's system is a driver cancelling a ride after accepting it and seeing the destination, maybe claiming his car broke down on the way to the pickup location or whatever. The fact that people can pull that off also does not invalidate Uber's original attempt to make drivers accept riders regardless of their destination.
jmchuster 6y ago
At some point, every time I called an Uber to take me home after being out late, the driver would first call me, ask me where I was going, I'd say somewhere far away, and then they'd immediately cancel the ride. So I stopped picking up the phone when someone called right after I called an Uber, and then maybe only half would cancel if I didn't pick up.
oldgradstudent 6y ago
> or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. That just indicates Uber is undercharging for these type of rides.
- randyrand 6y ago
  Its possible that if they charged more ridership and Uber's profits would go down. Incentives are not aligned.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Seems pretty simple - offer financial motive. No one wants to go to airports anyway, they're a nightmare normally and are typically far from city centers and potentially further to a rider - so the fare goes up and you have surge pricing.
WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous to their health and safety. It should be anyone's right to refuse going to dangerous neighborhoods, just like forcing drivers to drive out into nowhere where they have to spend their own money/resources to get back to the network, should be compensated by Uber if they want that feature. It's rather abusive and tyrannical to force people to do things against their will or safety. But I am guessing you live in a dangerous neighborhood because you did not "discriminate" and are paying really low rents since you don't discriminate. Right? … exactly!
- ytpete 6y ago
  > It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous But in a normal employer-employee relationship, this is totally typical. You can't sign up to be a firefighter but then refuse to go into burning buildings that you find too scary. You can't get a job as a developer and then refuse JIRA tickets you find boring, claiming that's your "human right." In those cases, and with Uber as well, your free agency is that you can quit the job if you don't like it. But you have no fundamental right to be retained as an employee or contractor while refusing to do parts of the job you'd signed onto. The employer has their own right to terminate you if so.
  - WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
    You can't seriously be suggesting that knowingly choosing to become a firefighter, where the main task is endangering yourself (for which people are also selected, as you have forgotten), or that not wanting to deal with boring JIRA tickets is the same thing as being sent to dangerous neighborhoods where you could very likely be assaulted and/or killed, when you don't have to because there are also other places where crime is not out of control and a real and measurable risk to one's life and safety does not exist? When you choose to become, e.g., an Uber driver, you are NOT primarily signing up to willingly expose yourself to risk to life and limb, like a soldier, firefighter, policeman. You have a very abusive mentality about that which seems more fitting for some industrial age foreman or something; "you don't want to risk cutting off your arm? You can quit, and dozens of others will replace you!" But I suspect you really don't realize that, because people like you that want to force others into unhealthy, unsafe, and dangerous situations, are usually the ones who live the most privileged, sheltered, and comfortable lives where the biggest risk they see is the possibility of eating non-organic produce.

brendoelfrendo 6y ago

This sounds like it is bad for the customer experience of the rider, but is essential for the driver to be considered a contractor. It makes sense to me as a tradeoff: Uber can decide that the drivers are employees and dictate what routes and fares they must take, or they can decide that drivers are contractors who have the ability to review and decline those fares

kingnothing 6y ago
My last point was that it's good for both riders and drivers. If riders come to expect an unreliable service, then they'll use a different method of transit, which leaves the drivers with less work overall.
- floatrock 6y ago
  > which leaves the drivers with less work overall. ...which is a positive feedback loop that should encourage them to pick up those previously declined routes. Or charge higher rates that better reflect their reluctance for those routes. Isn't that how supply & demand is supposed to work?
  - raducu 6y ago
    But how can you then claim you're better and cheaper than a taxi company?
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Marketing material does not cause the universe to reassert itself.

msoad 6y ago

I used to work at Lyft. It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing etc. Those PMs have no sympathy for drivers. A driver can end up in an experiment group that totally screws his income. WRT to drivers not going to neighborhood I have a solution for you: let passengers offer higher pricers. This is not a new idea BTW

londons_explore 6y ago
> It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing Society as a whole needs to answer the question "is it moral to roll a dice and offer a worse service to people who get an odd number?" In my view, it is. As far as that person is concerned, they can pretend your company doesn't exist and go to another company (and maybe roll another dice) Some other people would say "all businesses must treat all customers equally and fairly". In many ways, I don't see how this can be universally true - there is always the superstore that has run out of a product - why should Mrs Smith who picked up apples at 9am get some, when Mr Jones who tried to buy some at 9:15am finds the shelf empty? Thats unfair. Instead I'd like to see a list of characteristics a business is not allowed to discriminate on (religion, race, etc.), and explicitly allow discrimination based on another list (random number, position in queue, length of service as a customer, etc.). Any other factor, judges can decide which list it falls into.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I think companies run A/B tests because they don't know which option is the worse service.
- idontpost 6y ago
  This is silly. Companies have ALWAYS had test products that they offer to a subset of customers. There's no legal test to be applied here.
- grumple 6y ago
  I'm curious about whether a/b testing would be considered human subjects research and therefore governed by federal regulations. [1] I suspect that it will be in some cases. Does Uber have IRBs? What about other big tech companies? If you work in a company and see them doing something immoral and possibly illegal, you should speak up or report the behavior. 1. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-charts-2018/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-cha...

ProAm 6y ago

> as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. This is exactly what being a contractor is though. Accepting contract work you'd like, and turning down work you don't. Otherwise you are an employee.

kingnothing 6y ago
In the case of rideshare, I imagine the driver contract agreement has that stipulation in it. You'll agree to pick up a passenger taking a trip to an unknown destination with up to N hours of travel time. If you don't like the terms of the contract, you don't have to work for that company.
- raducu 6y ago
  How is that different from a regular taxi driver? Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?
  - modeless 6y ago
    Regular taxi drivers are often contractors. At least, they were in the past, I'm not sure how this new stuff is affecting regular taxi companies.
  - olyjohn 6y ago
    This is the thing that really chafes my testes. People need to get real and start calling it what it is. It's a taxi service. This is not ride sharing. The driver was not already going somewhere. The driver was waiting around for a call to pick someone up, and was going to take them where they wanted to go. Nothing is being shared. This is a Taxi service and the Uber app is the dispatcher. If I was already going to work, and I picked someone up along the way, that's sharing a ride. The only thing the driver is sharing is the money they are giving to their mechanic when all the around town driving wears out their car.
    - 6y ago

thatoneuser 6y ago

That sounds like what a roomful of execs would cleverly start talking about to cover there asses, when in reality they knew what they were doing. If uber cared about guaranteeing your trip to the airport, guarantee it will come and guarantee it's worth the drivers time. If uber cared about folks in the suburbs then guarantee a driver won't go 30 miles one way and then hope they'll get a ride that will take then back home instead of possibly further away. This "ecosystem" had many of changes to be fair to the drivers and still guarantee a level of experience for the passengers. But the execs of uber have ALWAYS been fast to shove the burden onto the driver for their profit.

Simulacra 6y ago

Can you change the destination once you get in the car?

SkyBelow 6y ago

The solution would be to increase the amount you are willing to pay until someone agrees to it, not trick a person into doing work they don't want to do by hiding the details of the job until after they have begun.

Slartie 6y ago

I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but here in Germany, the good old taxis have a special obligation that disallows them to decline a rider based on where he wants to go, as long as that target is within the geographic area for which a particular taxi is licensed. The idea is that taxis are part of public transport and thus should have a certain reliability for customers, regardless of how lucrative a particular ride happens to be. I find it laughable to hear that Uber, the arch-enemy of the taxi business, attempts to (secretly, because obviously the customer isn't informed about drivers not seeing the target locations beforehand) rebuild this particular property of the system it aims to replace. And it's doubly laughable that they now stumble over that exact attempt, which they now can't actually continue, because in order to have the necessary authority over drivers they would need to make them official employees.

valuearb 6y ago
The law in Germany is a fantasy. Drivers still can and claim a break down, bad cell service, etc.
- Slartie 6y ago
  Having some people cheat their way around it does not invalidate the law in the first place and neither does it invalidate its intention. The equivalent in Uber's system is a driver cancelling a ride after accepting it and seeing the destination, maybe claiming his car broke down on the way to the pickup location or whatever. The fact that people can pull that off also does not invalidate Uber's original attempt to make drivers accept riders regardless of their destination.

jmchuster 6y ago

At some point, every time I called an Uber to take me home after being out late, the driver would first call me, ask me where I was going, I'd say somewhere far away, and then they'd immediately cancel the ride. So I stopped picking up the phone when someone called right after I called an Uber, and then maybe only half would cancel if I didn't pick up.

oldgradstudent 6y ago

> or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. That just indicates Uber is undercharging for these type of rides.

randyrand 6y ago
Its possible that if they charged more ridership and Uber's profits would go down. Incentives are not aligned.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

Seems pretty simple - offer financial motive. No one wants to go to airports anyway, they're a nightmare normally and are typically far from city centers and potentially further to a rider - so the fare goes up and you have surge pricing.

WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago

It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous to their health and safety. It should be anyone's right to refuse going to dangerous neighborhoods, just like forcing drivers to drive out into nowhere where they have to spend their own money/resources to get back to the network, should be compensated by Uber if they want that feature. It's rather abusive and tyrannical to force people to do things against their will or safety. But I am guessing you live in a dangerous neighborhood because you did not "discriminate" and are paying really low rents since you don't discriminate. Right? … exactly!

ytpete 6y ago
> It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous But in a normal employer-employee relationship, this is totally typical. You can't sign up to be a firefighter but then refuse to go into burning buildings that you find too scary. You can't get a job as a developer and then refuse JIRA tickets you find boring, claiming that's your "human right." In those cases, and with Uber as well, your free agency is that you can quit the job if you don't like it. But you have no fundamental right to be retained as an employee or contractor while refusing to do parts of the job you'd signed onto. The employer has their own right to terminate you if so.
- WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
  You can't seriously be suggesting that knowingly choosing to become a firefighter, where the main task is endangering yourself (for which people are also selected, as you have forgotten), or that not wanting to deal with boring JIRA tickets is the same thing as being sent to dangerous neighborhoods where you could very likely be assaulted and/or killed, when you don't have to because there are also other places where crime is not out of control and a real and measurable risk to one's life and safety does not exist? When you choose to become, e.g., an Uber driver, you are NOT primarily signing up to willingly expose yourself to risk to life and limb, like a soldier, firefighter, policeman. You have a very abusive mentality about that which seems more fitting for some industrial age foreman or something; "you don't want to risk cutting off your arm? You can quit, and dozens of others will replace you!" But I suspect you really don't realize that, because people like you that want to force others into unhealthy, unsafe, and dangerous situations, are usually the ones who live the most privileged, sheltered, and comfortable lives where the biggest risk they see is the possibility of eating non-organic produce.