11 ms·

UberEats could be underpaying delivery drivers on 21% of trips

224 points by artoonie 6y ago

tossaway842 6y ago
What matters is the aggregate amount over multiple trips. If you underpay on some trips and overpay on others and it is a net wash, then it doesn't really matter for the couriers if the payment algorithm is on the low side on some trips so long as it is on the high side on other trips. Under or overpaying on trips is more of an interest to those engineers trying to optimize marketplace efficiency. Meal delivery businesses have as much of an interest in not underpaying as doing so reduces supply availability and therefore reliability and they have also an interest in not overpaying as that reduces profitability. The ultimate goal is optimal pricing in a three sided market to maximize liquidity as the business model does best when you optimize for volume of transactions. Maximizing liquidity amortizes fixed costs over more transactions. This applies as much to the meal delivery companies as to the restaurants involved. At the end of the day, distance driven is very imperfect as you have issues like poor GPS signal and in cities you have the dilemma of urban canyons and tunnels. Also, drivers don't always take the suggested route. At vehicle speeds, it's hard problem to solve due to time between GPS pings. Another issue besides GPS inaccuracy is clock inaccuracy, especially with round-trip times between server and client and client and server aren't always symmetrical, especially on cellular networks, and this messes up all sorts of clock synchronization strategies. The peanut gallery on HN is seriously underestimating the complexity of measuring distance using GPS. It's pretty darn good when conditions are ideal, but when they aren't, good luck. Another question is the magnitude of the underpayment in the 21% of trips. Are we talking about 1-2%, 5-10%, some other deviation? If it was something like 1-2%, we should all be amazed. Gage repeatability and reproducibility matters.
- Razele 6y ago
  Yeah, and also if Uber was doing this intentionally, they could’ve just as well lowered their $/mile rate if that’s what maximizes profit.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    1. I tend to doubt they did it intentionally. 2. I could see a company with various ethical lapses like Uber not prioritizing an unintentional bug for a speedy fix. 3. In the intentional scenario, it'd be a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing (popularized by Superman 3 / Office Space). Easier to get away with than a public rate cut, with the downside of bad PR if you get caught.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    Lowering the "front page" $/mile rate could make the service immediately less attractive to workers, who can select between multiple services based on the apps on their phone. Lowering mileage paid is much harder for workers to detect, since it requires carefully checking each trip and measuring what's actually paid. This could also be an "unintentional-intentional" bug, meaning its presence was just an accident -- but that the company has chosen to prioritize its engineering resources addressing issues that improve its revenue, rather than decreasing it.
    - tossaway842 6y ago
      In a business that is trying to optimize a marketplace, accurate measurability of everything matters as the performance of every marketplace optimization is degraded by having poor gage repeatability and reproducibility in its measurements. It's like trying to play darts when you're nearsighted and have 20/400 vision. This is process engineering 101 stuff. There's way more money to be made in having accurate measurements than having inaccurate measurements that optimization engineers can't rely on. The more accurate the measurements, the more confidence you have that your marketplace optimization algorithms are producing the desired marketplace dynamics.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    It's probably a bug that no one will fix or talk about fixing because it makes the company money. Standard large company stuff. You don't get promoted for costing the company money.
- SilasX 6y ago
  I strongly suspect that, to a driver, it makes a huge difference that you can't rely on the app to accurately tell you what your take will be, even if you can validate that after 1000 rides, it's all a wash. And even if you don't care about drivers, that introduces a marketplace inefficiency if they don't expect $1 promised compensation to result in $1 actual compensation.
  - tossaway842 6y ago
    Exactly. Besides making the marketplace inefficient, underpaying participants in the marketplace and leaving them disappointed also creates churn. You want, as much possible, for marketplace participants in the system to experience a strong link between effort and reward.
- jariel 6y ago
  If they are running a business, especially something at scale, and they are properly funded - they should be 'paying the right amount', there's really no excuses. If they can snare people into driving for them, there are material switching costs for workers, and 'underpaying' on some level is actually something they can get away with. At the 'low end of labour' workers generally have zero power, much less during covid, so it's not a 'marketplace' in the more broad sense. If it was, we wouldn't even need minimum wage laws, or Medicare for employed people etc.. If the technical challenge is 'insurmountable' then they need to figure something out: minimum guarnatees etc. , even over the aggregate, as you say.
- ruined 6y ago
  Click through businessinsider to the sourced salon article, where they directly interview the driver. His initial case was a 75% underpayment, when he was paid for 1 mile on a 4-mile trip. The interview seems to indicate it's an aggregate underpayment across all trips. The tool is available for examination if you are truly skeptical. edit: also, you seem to have made your account just to comment on this thread. what's up?
  - tossaway842 6y ago
    I'm more interested in the data than the tool. What was the start and end point for the trip and other details. For example, this makes no sense: "I had this one delivery that was an hour-and-a-half long and I got paid $16 and I thought, 'There is no way that's right,'" Armin Samii, an unemployed computer scientist who has been working Uber Eats on the side, told Salon. "I looked into it and found out that Uber paid me for a one mile delivery instead of a four mile delivery. Of course it's all made worse because I'm on a bike and they don't account for that, but that's a separate issue." A 11 mile hill climb of Mount Hamilton with 2700 of elevation gain takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to do. A straight hill climb which you would only find in cities like Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro is like the worst case scenario. A 4 mile trip in pretty much any major city should be maybe 20-25 minutes with stop signs and traffic lights. Not saying there wasn't an issue with that trip, but this makes no sense. I have worked a lot with this stuff in my career, so I'm inclined to want to see the data myself so I can try and reverse engineer what may have happened. Furthermore Armin Samii appears to have worked for a direct competitor of the company he's criticizing while developing this.
bagacrap 6y ago
Hard to know what to make of this without seeing the full data. On 21% of trips, Uber undercounts the miles. What about the other 79%? Spot on, or is there over counting?
- artoonie 6y ago
  Most spot on (within 0.5 mi), some overpayments. Overpayments are much less frequent than underpayments, and regardless: when someone accepts a trip, who knows if they did it because they thought "that amount sounds fair" or thought "that amount given the distance shown sounds fair." The only fair thing for Uber to do here is to rectify all underpayments, and let the overpayments stand. Further: just because Uber couldn't find a route as efficiently as the extension could doesn't mean it was an overpayment. The extension uses Google Maps. If the driver used Uber Navigation to navigate, and Uber navigation was twice as long as Google's - is that really an overpayment?
  - bluesign 6y ago
    Can you share one route uber underpaid by big margin? For the second part I agree, but without seeing outlier, maybe in some cases google couldn’t find the best route, compared to the app. PS: all this stats used Google Maps shortest path or best path?
    - artoonie 6y ago
      https://imgur.com/v4bSD5S https://imgur.com/v4bSD5S I was paid 1 mile, actual distance 3.5-4.0 miles. Previous versions of the app would use the first result returned by Google Directions API, which could have been best not shortest (I'm not sure, anyone know?). Newer version (pending app store review) does shortest always.
      - bluesign 6y ago
        This looks like an obvious bug if it is straight line. Yeah google can show longer but faster route depending on traffic etc. Also one more thing can be, gps location point and address can point to different locations. Not sure how Uber is showing, or calculating from which one.
tempsy 6y ago
not sure why every driver isn't already using another mileage tracker app, at least for occasional trips to keep Uber accountable. theres dozens of those in the app store...
- tossaway842 6y ago
  The question I would ask is how accurate all those other mileage trackers are? If they are based on GPS, then they have all the same issues with fewer engineering resources trying to correct defects. The only mileage tracker that matters is the vehicle odometer on a stock vehicle with stock diameter tires with most of its tread. You'd need a device connected to the vehicle via ODB2 where you can press a bunch at the start and end of each trip.
- artoonie 6y ago
  Because Uber doesn't pretend to pay based on miles traveled for UberEats - they pay on shortest distance. So a GPS tracker is insufficient.
Grustaf 6y ago
This is good news, I thought the business model was to underpay drivers on 100% of trips.
loraa 6y ago
Remember when you would just quit a shitty company. It's interesting how people will look for an easy job that they can easily get, and once inside strategically try to force the company to change to benefit themselves.
nlosti 6y ago
Why do these articles always reach the front page? Does hackernews hate Uber that badly? Or perhaps its profitable for news articles to always rag on them? Why is it profitable? Does everyone want to see them fail? They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company, so I suspect something odd is going on. I dislike corporations in general and want to see them play fair, but Uber changed the way I live life, and I'm constantly worried bureaucrats and angry business/tech nerds are going to regress us back to the taxi stone ages. We're just one law away from having to go back to hailing a cab with our thumbs and trusting their internal GPS.
- fireattack 6y ago
  If frontpage is the indicator (which isn't nearly close to perfect), what I gathered all these years is that HN hates most of big tech companies, of not all.
  - indymike 6y ago
    I've never felt like the community hates the big tech companies... most of us are trying to grow something up to be big one day... BUT it is controversial when we see bad behavior, or potentially bad behavior. The discussions here really become useful in forming my own opinions.
    - fireattack 6y ago
      I don't have any issue with this particular article (or this kind), people should be critical to any company anyway. What shows the "hate" more clearly is when there is "good" news or just an neutral announcement from/about these companies, where you will see most of the comments being negative to a point they are often irrelevant to the article itself.
- dannyr 6y ago
  "They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company" So media should stop reporting on possible bad actions by Uber? Excess coverage or not, the media exposed discrimination and harassments at Uber that led to the company changing for the better.
kaonashi 6y ago
Always deplatform your tips.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Agreed, but keep in mind that the platforms have started making design changes to discourage this. Some of them now surface the tip to the driver which can lead to $0 in-app tips lowering the displayed value of your request so you end up being passed over for other people. If you don't tip in the app you risk waiting a lot longer for service.
dheera 6y ago
On a related note, I don't understand the point of tips on UberEats. (a) I thought the whole point of these apps was to simplify things for the user. I just want to know how much I pay in total, upfront, as I'm selecting food. Include taxes and delivery fees in a big fat "this is what you will pay" display on the screen and I'll be a 10X happier user. Delivery apps were a great opportunity to axe the complexities of tipping culture and they screwed it up IMO. (b) They ask you for tips before they even dispatch your food, which makes zero sense to me. Tips are supposed to be "extra" based on the quality of service, so how are you supposed to blindly give 10% or 15% without even having received service? (I always put 0% when ordering and up it to 10-15% on delivery OR give cash tips, which is how things have always worked before the age of apps, but it's cumbersome to do that.)
- artoonie 6y ago
  (b) you can change your tip afterward if your service was not as expected. Just like in a restaurant: maybe your default tip is 25%, but great service bumps that up, and bad service bumps it down. You go in expecting to pay 25%.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    We bought a second car at the weekend, I phoned up my insurance company and asked them to put it on. They did so, and it was cheaper than the quote I'd got online - £180 for 9 months vs £290 for 12 months. So I immediately tipped the person on the phone £45 How ridiculous does that seem?
    - cm2012 6y ago
      "In boxing I can punch people in the face, but in baseball it got me disqualified! How is that fair?" You're comparing apples and oranges. Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works.
      - iso1631 6y ago
        > Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works. A number of industries (but which industries - how do I tip the person who takes my order at a mcdonalds drivethrough. Do I tip my builder who put in a new window? How about the binman?), in a small number of countries (do I tip in Mexico City? Quito? Brazzerville?) The U.S. seems to have built an expectation of tipping into its economy and tries to export that expectation around the world.
ruined 6y ago
The salon source linked in the article has a bit more (and slightly different?) detailed information, including a link to the tool developed to track mileage https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-is-systematically-underpaying-their-workers/ https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-i... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblheaeakedkbkfhoeepgmfiajjdgn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblhe...
- artoonie 6y ago
  The salon article was posted with about 8 hours of data in Google Analytics. Business Insider has more up-to-date numbers, with about 4 days of data from the Chrome Extension.
- ruined 6y ago
  also, the extension author is on twitter if you have questions https://nitter.net/ArminSamii/status/1295857106080456706 https://nitter.net/ArminSamii/status/1295857106080456706
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
supernova87a 6y ago
Uber is making it harder and harder to get on board with the idea that it's not an employer. Leveling out people's pay over multiple trips or retroactively adjusting the reward per job sure sounds like an employer having very strong control over the work conditions and compensation. And this almost brings back echoes of Doordash (?) when it was caught taking drivers' tips so that their pay was reduced to the minimum hourly promised "wage". It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental legal fight defining what they are. You would think they would go in the opposite direction and pay people such good rates during this controversy, you could hold that up and say, "see? People are clearly much better under this system". But I guess not. On a separate note, I will say that this is pretty expected in terms of how software errors go. Of course programmers at a company will be checking quite diligently that they're not overpaying through their algorithms. But underpaying? Only those who can't easily check your code are harmed by that one. It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental fight defining what they are. I don't think they have a choice. UberEats is fundamentally unprofitable. If it was run profitably, the high(er) prices would drive a large portion of their customers away and into the arms of other "startups" willing to run at a loss or towards picking up the food themselves. Plus Uber can't pretend to be an early-stage startup anymore and their constant quarterly losses are starting to add up. I'm still not convinced this new food delivery industry is viable without constant cash injections.
  - lumost 6y ago
    I don't understand why an investor would fund unprofitable Uber 2.0. Without a massive differentiator there is no reason to believe their trajectory would be any different from Uber's - except with increased capital requirements from being the third(fourth?) mover. Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?
wmab 6y ago
Why would there be a buy in the Eats tracking but not in Rideshare? I'd imagine it's the same underlying GPS tracking/routing software used in both cases. Is it just that the rides are paid differently than Eats deliveries are so they're noticing it differently?
- artoonie 6y ago
  There are some anecdotes that it also happens on Rideshare, but I don't have a car so I can't verify until Uber allows me to pick up passengers on the handlebars of my bike
jacquesm 6y ago
Middlemen are always going to try to increase their take on both sides. It is the only way they can grow the profitability of their business because they can't add more value, they can only subtract.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Agree with the part about profitability, but middlemen can definitely add value. I’d say that Uber’s wide reach is valuable, the fact that they likely exist in the city you’re visiting, the fact that they likely have enough cars to pick you up in under 5 minutes. These are valuable things that don’t come from individual drivers or small taxi companies, but rather from big aggregators.
  - joking 6y ago
    you don't need uber for that, google maps shows you available carpooling ang taxi companies directly when you search for a destination. For uber is good that wide reach, for the end user not so much.
    - novok 6y ago
      So instead of uber, you have google, another large digital service middleman...
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Small taxi companies could still have general dispatchers.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      The best ubering I have ever done is in foreign countries. I don't have to speak the language and get significant reduction on tourist prices. Scale provides tremendous value.
    - danpalmer 6y ago
      Sure, but that dispatch is a "middleman" for the service provider. The bigger that middleman becomes the more they may be able to offer. The dispatcher will take a cut of the taxi fares.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
paganel 6y ago
Not sure about UberEats but just two days ago a I took an Uber ride that was paying the driver about 5.50-6 euros instead of the usual 9-9.50 euros that the ride was usually worth, I felt bad about the driver and so I helped make up the difference in cash, directly to him. I know the sums and the difference itself don't seem that big in nominal terms but I live in Eastern Europe where the difference between 6 euros and 9 euros still counts for lots of people. Anyway, interesting to see that that wasn't an isolated incident when it comes to Uber the company.
mrweasel 6y ago
Shouldn't the drivers be able to make a profit, without the tips?
_heimdall 6y ago
Makes sense. Charging 30% off the top on orders wasn't enough, time to skim a little off the drivers too.

224 points by artoonie 6y ago

What matters is the aggregate amount over multiple trips. If you underpay on some trips and overpay on others and it is a net wash, then it doesn't really matter for the couriers if the payment algorithm is on the low side on some trips so long as it is on the high side on other trips. Under or overpaying on trips is more of an interest to those engineers trying to optimize marketplace efficiency. Meal delivery businesses have as much of an interest in not underpaying as doing so reduces supply availability and therefore reliability and they have also an interest in not overpaying as that reduces profitability. The ultimate goal is optimal pricing in a three sided market to maximize liquidity as the business model does best when you optimize for volume of transactions. Maximizing liquidity amortizes fixed costs over more transactions. This applies as much to the meal delivery companies as to the restaurants involved. At the end of the day, distance driven is very imperfect as you have issues like poor GPS signal and in cities you have the dilemma of urban canyons and tunnels. Also, drivers don't always take the suggested route. At vehicle speeds, it's hard problem to solve due to time between GPS pings. Another issue besides GPS inaccuracy is clock inaccuracy, especially with round-trip times between server and client and client and server aren't always symmetrical, especially on cellular networks, and this messes up all sorts of clock synchronization strategies. The peanut gallery on HN is seriously underestimating the complexity of measuring distance using GPS. It's pretty darn good when conditions are ideal, but when they aren't, good luck. Another question is the magnitude of the underpayment in the 21% of trips. Are we talking about 1-2%, 5-10%, some other deviation? If it was something like 1-2%, we should all be amazed. Gage repeatability and reproducibility matters.

Razele 6y ago
Yeah, and also if Uber was doing this intentionally, they could’ve just as well lowered their $/mile rate if that’s what maximizes profit.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  1. I tend to doubt they did it intentionally. 2. I could see a company with various ethical lapses like Uber not prioritizing an unintentional bug for a speedy fix. 3. In the intentional scenario, it'd be a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing (popularized by Superman 3 / Office Space). Easier to get away with than a public rate cut, with the downside of bad PR if you get caught.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  Lowering the "front page" $/mile rate could make the service immediately less attractive to workers, who can select between multiple services based on the apps on their phone. Lowering mileage paid is much harder for workers to detect, since it requires carefully checking each trip and measuring what's actually paid. This could also be an "unintentional-intentional" bug, meaning its presence was just an accident -- but that the company has chosen to prioritize its engineering resources addressing issues that improve its revenue, rather than decreasing it.
  - tossaway842 6y ago
    In a business that is trying to optimize a marketplace, accurate measurability of everything matters as the performance of every marketplace optimization is degraded by having poor gage repeatability and reproducibility in its measurements. It's like trying to play darts when you're nearsighted and have 20/400 vision. This is process engineering 101 stuff. There's way more money to be made in having accurate measurements than having inaccurate measurements that optimization engineers can't rely on. The more accurate the measurements, the more confidence you have that your marketplace optimization algorithms are producing the desired marketplace dynamics.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  It's probably a bug that no one will fix or talk about fixing because it makes the company money. Standard large company stuff. You don't get promoted for costing the company money.
SilasX 6y ago
I strongly suspect that, to a driver, it makes a huge difference that you can't rely on the app to accurately tell you what your take will be, even if you can validate that after 1000 rides, it's all a wash. And even if you don't care about drivers, that introduces a marketplace inefficiency if they don't expect $1 promised compensation to result in $1 actual compensation.
- tossaway842 6y ago
  Exactly. Besides making the marketplace inefficient, underpaying participants in the marketplace and leaving them disappointed also creates churn. You want, as much possible, for marketplace participants in the system to experience a strong link between effort and reward.
jariel 6y ago
If they are running a business, especially something at scale, and they are properly funded - they should be 'paying the right amount', there's really no excuses. If they can snare people into driving for them, there are material switching costs for workers, and 'underpaying' on some level is actually something they can get away with. At the 'low end of labour' workers generally have zero power, much less during covid, so it's not a 'marketplace' in the more broad sense. If it was, we wouldn't even need minimum wage laws, or Medicare for employed people etc.. If the technical challenge is 'insurmountable' then they need to figure something out: minimum guarnatees etc. , even over the aggregate, as you say.
ruined 6y ago
Click through businessinsider to the sourced salon article, where they directly interview the driver. His initial case was a 75% underpayment, when he was paid for 1 mile on a 4-mile trip. The interview seems to indicate it's an aggregate underpayment across all trips. The tool is available for examination if you are truly skeptical. edit: also, you seem to have made your account just to comment on this thread. what's up?
- tossaway842 6y ago
  I'm more interested in the data than the tool. What was the start and end point for the trip and other details. For example, this makes no sense: "I had this one delivery that was an hour-and-a-half long and I got paid $16 and I thought, 'There is no way that's right,'" Armin Samii, an unemployed computer scientist who has been working Uber Eats on the side, told Salon. "I looked into it and found out that Uber paid me for a one mile delivery instead of a four mile delivery. Of course it's all made worse because I'm on a bike and they don't account for that, but that's a separate issue." A 11 mile hill climb of Mount Hamilton with 2700 of elevation gain takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to do. A straight hill climb which you would only find in cities like Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro is like the worst case scenario. A 4 mile trip in pretty much any major city should be maybe 20-25 minutes with stop signs and traffic lights. Not saying there wasn't an issue with that trip, but this makes no sense. I have worked a lot with this stuff in my career, so I'm inclined to want to see the data myself so I can try and reverse engineer what may have happened. Furthermore Armin Samii appears to have worked for a direct competitor of the company he's criticizing while developing this.

bagacrap 6y ago

Hard to know what to make of this without seeing the full data. On 21% of trips, Uber undercounts the miles. What about the other 79%? Spot on, or is there over counting?

artoonie 6y ago
Most spot on (within 0.5 mi), some overpayments. Overpayments are much less frequent than underpayments, and regardless: when someone accepts a trip, who knows if they did it because they thought "that amount sounds fair" or thought "that amount given the distance shown sounds fair." The only fair thing for Uber to do here is to rectify all underpayments, and let the overpayments stand. Further: just because Uber couldn't find a route as efficiently as the extension could doesn't mean it was an overpayment. The extension uses Google Maps. If the driver used Uber Navigation to navigate, and Uber navigation was twice as long as Google's - is that really an overpayment?
- bluesign 6y ago
  Can you share one route uber underpaid by big margin? For the second part I agree, but without seeing outlier, maybe in some cases google couldn’t find the best route, compared to the app. PS: all this stats used Google Maps shortest path or best path?
  - artoonie 6y ago
    https://imgur.com/v4bSD5S https://imgur.com/v4bSD5S I was paid 1 mile, actual distance 3.5-4.0 miles. Previous versions of the app would use the first result returned by Google Directions API, which could have been best not shortest (I'm not sure, anyone know?). Newer version (pending app store review) does shortest always.
    - bluesign 6y ago
      This looks like an obvious bug if it is straight line. Yeah google can show longer but faster route depending on traffic etc. Also one more thing can be, gps location point and address can point to different locations. Not sure how Uber is showing, or calculating from which one.

tempsy 6y ago

not sure why every driver isn't already using another mileage tracker app, at least for occasional trips to keep Uber accountable. theres dozens of those in the app store...

tossaway842 6y ago
The question I would ask is how accurate all those other mileage trackers are? If they are based on GPS, then they have all the same issues with fewer engineering resources trying to correct defects. The only mileage tracker that matters is the vehicle odometer on a stock vehicle with stock diameter tires with most of its tread. You'd need a device connected to the vehicle via ODB2 where you can press a bunch at the start and end of each trip.
artoonie 6y ago
Because Uber doesn't pretend to pay based on miles traveled for UberEats - they pay on shortest distance. So a GPS tracker is insufficient.

Grustaf 6y ago

This is good news, I thought the business model was to underpay drivers on 100% of trips.

loraa 6y ago

Remember when you would just quit a shitty company. It's interesting how people will look for an easy job that they can easily get, and once inside strategically try to force the company to change to benefit themselves.

nlosti 6y ago

Why do these articles always reach the front page? Does hackernews hate Uber that badly? Or perhaps its profitable for news articles to always rag on them? Why is it profitable? Does everyone want to see them fail? They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company, so I suspect something odd is going on. I dislike corporations in general and want to see them play fair, but Uber changed the way I live life, and I'm constantly worried bureaucrats and angry business/tech nerds are going to regress us back to the taxi stone ages. We're just one law away from having to go back to hailing a cab with our thumbs and trusting their internal GPS.

fireattack 6y ago
If frontpage is the indicator (which isn't nearly close to perfect), what I gathered all these years is that HN hates most of big tech companies, of not all.
- indymike 6y ago
  I've never felt like the community hates the big tech companies... most of us are trying to grow something up to be big one day... BUT it is controversial when we see bad behavior, or potentially bad behavior. The discussions here really become useful in forming my own opinions.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    I don't have any issue with this particular article (or this kind), people should be critical to any company anyway. What shows the "hate" more clearly is when there is "good" news or just an neutral announcement from/about these companies, where you will see most of the comments being negative to a point they are often irrelevant to the article itself.
dannyr 6y ago
"They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company" So media should stop reporting on possible bad actions by Uber? Excess coverage or not, the media exposed discrimination and harassments at Uber that led to the company changing for the better.

kaonashi 6y ago

Always deplatform your tips.

kevingadd 6y ago
Agreed, but keep in mind that the platforms have started making design changes to discourage this. Some of them now surface the tip to the driver which can lead to $0 in-app tips lowering the displayed value of your request so you end up being passed over for other people. If you don't tip in the app you risk waiting a lot longer for service.

dheera 6y ago

On a related note, I don't understand the point of tips on UberEats. (a) I thought the whole point of these apps was to simplify things for the user. I just want to know how much I pay in total, upfront, as I'm selecting food. Include taxes and delivery fees in a big fat "this is what you will pay" display on the screen and I'll be a 10X happier user. Delivery apps were a great opportunity to axe the complexities of tipping culture and they screwed it up IMO. (b) They ask you for tips before they even dispatch your food, which makes zero sense to me. Tips are supposed to be "extra" based on the quality of service, so how are you supposed to blindly give 10% or 15% without even having received service? (I always put 0% when ordering and up it to 10-15% on delivery OR give cash tips, which is how things have always worked before the age of apps, but it's cumbersome to do that.)

artoonie 6y ago
(b) you can change your tip afterward if your service was not as expected. Just like in a restaurant: maybe your default tip is 25%, but great service bumps that up, and bad service bumps it down. You go in expecting to pay 25%.
- iso1631 6y ago
  We bought a second car at the weekend, I phoned up my insurance company and asked them to put it on. They did so, and it was cheaper than the quote I'd got online - £180 for 9 months vs £290 for 12 months. So I immediately tipped the person on the phone £45 How ridiculous does that seem?
  - cm2012 6y ago
    "In boxing I can punch people in the face, but in baseball it got me disqualified! How is that fair?" You're comparing apples and oranges. Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      > Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works. A number of industries (but which industries - how do I tip the person who takes my order at a mcdonalds drivethrough. Do I tip my builder who put in a new window? How about the binman?), in a small number of countries (do I tip in Mexico City? Quito? Brazzerville?) The U.S. seems to have built an expectation of tipping into its economy and tries to export that expectation around the world.

ruined 6y ago

The salon source linked in the article has a bit more (and slightly different?) detailed information, including a link to the tool developed to track mileage https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-is-systematically-underpaying-their-workers/ https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-i... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblheaeakedkbkfhoeepgmfiajjdgn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblhe...

artoonie 6y ago
The salon article was posted with about 8 hours of data in Google Analytics. Business Insider has more up-to-date numbers, with about 4 days of data from the Chrome Extension.
ruined 6y ago
also, the extension author is on twitter if you have questions https://nitter.net/ArminSamii/status/1295857106080456706 https://nitter.net/ArminSamii/status/1295857106080456706
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

supernova87a 6y ago

Uber is making it harder and harder to get on board with the idea that it's not an employer. Leveling out people's pay over multiple trips or retroactively adjusting the reward per job sure sounds like an employer having very strong control over the work conditions and compensation. And this almost brings back echoes of Doordash (?) when it was caught taking drivers' tips so that their pay was reduced to the minimum hourly promised "wage". It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental legal fight defining what they are. You would think they would go in the opposite direction and pay people such good rates during this controversy, you could hold that up and say, "see? People are clearly much better under this system". But I guess not. On a separate note, I will say that this is pretty expected in terms of how software errors go. Of course programmers at a company will be checking quite diligently that they're not overpaying through their algorithms. But underpaying? Only those who can't easily check your code are harmed by that one. It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.

AlexandrB 6y ago
> It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental fight defining what they are. I don't think they have a choice. UberEats is fundamentally unprofitable. If it was run profitably, the high(er) prices would drive a large portion of their customers away and into the arms of other "startups" willing to run at a loss or towards picking up the food themselves. Plus Uber can't pretend to be an early-stage startup anymore and their constant quarterly losses are starting to add up. I'm still not convinced this new food delivery industry is viable without constant cash injections.
- lumost 6y ago
  I don't understand why an investor would fund unprofitable Uber 2.0. Without a massive differentiator there is no reason to believe their trajectory would be any different from Uber's - except with increased capital requirements from being the third(fourth?) mover. Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?

wmab 6y ago

Why would there be a buy in the Eats tracking but not in Rideshare? I'd imagine it's the same underlying GPS tracking/routing software used in both cases. Is it just that the rides are paid differently than Eats deliveries are so they're noticing it differently?

artoonie 6y ago
There are some anecdotes that it also happens on Rideshare, but I don't have a car so I can't verify until Uber allows me to pick up passengers on the handlebars of my bike

jacquesm 6y ago

Middlemen are always going to try to increase their take on both sides. It is the only way they can grow the profitability of their business because they can't add more value, they can only subtract.

danpalmer 6y ago
Agree with the part about profitability, but middlemen can definitely add value. I’d say that Uber’s wide reach is valuable, the fact that they likely exist in the city you’re visiting, the fact that they likely have enough cars to pick you up in under 5 minutes. These are valuable things that don’t come from individual drivers or small taxi companies, but rather from big aggregators.
- joking 6y ago
  you don't need uber for that, google maps shows you available carpooling ang taxi companies directly when you search for a destination. For uber is good that wide reach, for the end user not so much.
  - novok 6y ago
    So instead of uber, you have google, another large digital service middleman...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Small taxi companies could still have general dispatchers.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    The best ubering I have ever done is in foreign countries. I don't have to speak the language and get significant reduction on tourist prices. Scale provides tremendous value.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Sure, but that dispatch is a "middleman" for the service provider. The bigger that middleman becomes the more they may be able to offer. The dispatcher will take a cut of the taxi fares.

deleted 6y ago

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paganel 6y ago

Not sure about UberEats but just two days ago a I took an Uber ride that was paying the driver about 5.50-6 euros instead of the usual 9-9.50 euros that the ride was usually worth, I felt bad about the driver and so I helped make up the difference in cash, directly to him. I know the sums and the difference itself don't seem that big in nominal terms but I live in Eastern Europe where the difference between 6 euros and 9 euros still counts for lots of people. Anyway, interesting to see that that wasn't an isolated incident when it comes to Uber the company.

mrweasel 6y ago

Shouldn't the drivers be able to make a profit, without the tips?

_heimdall 6y ago

Makes sense. Charging 30% off the top on orders wasn't enough, time to skim a little off the drivers too.