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Amazon drivers are hanging smartphones in trees to get more work
- btbuildem 6y agoUnidentified person or entity? Just talk to the guy with a baseball bat hanging out in the vicinity to thwart all the "yay free phones!" folks.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's enough that they wrote this piece, it may very well kill this system - the trick gets less profitable for drivers as more of them participate. That, and being in the news will probably spur companies to combat this.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoOr charging "rent" for hanging your phone on "his" tree
- dpeck 6y agoThis feels more like practical magic/cargo culting than reality. I’ve heard that if you say “bezos bezos bezos” while spinning around counter clockwise in front of an amazon locker your delivery tips will go up 5%
- hehebbssjj 6y agoIf your employment was entirely piece-work driven by "the algorithm", which is completely opaque and subject to change at any time, what other recourse do you have? They're basically trying to reverse engineer the weights of various inputs in Amazon's scheduling algorithm to try and have some control over their lives.
- dpeck 6y agoI think it is a perfectly natural and very human reaction. But that doesn’t make it any less in the realm of superstition.
- rightbyte 6y agoIt is not superstition if you have a valid theory of why it might be. I mean they don't claim the phones in the tree are charms that give good luck as a token sacrifice to Mammon.
- notdang 6y agoIt seems that Amazon selects the closest driver. So they are hanging those phones in the closest tree to the warehouse, while the driver is not there. Doesn't seem like a cargo cult.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sigmaprimus 6y ago>>>"while the driver is not there" How many deliveries is a cell phone worth? I can't imagine a driver would leave a phone for anyone to take just to make 10 bucks or less.
- city41 6y agoThe article suggests one person runs the set of phones, and sells their service to drivers. So I'd imagine that person has tuned the number of phones to be profitable. You can get older used cell phones for dirt cheap.
- eagsalazar2 6y agoThey may be wrong but that doesn't make it superstition or cargo cult (although it may seem satisfying to say it is). They have a decent hypothesis of how Amazon prioritizes and they are trying it out. Sounds creative and smart to me.
- ebg13 6y agoIt seems obviously fabricated that a pile of phones hang from a tree and not one person turns them off, smashes them, or takes them.
- arvindch 6y agoYou reminded me of this old joke: > Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
- ponker 6y agoThe drivers are sitting 10 feet away, they’re not just abandoning them.
- daveFNbuck 6y agoThe article described drivers as walking up and syncing to them to get a job, so they're not always sitting by the phones.
- wutbrodo 6y agoSeems like a trivial extension to the story that one person is sitting nearby keeping an eye on the phone. The advantage still holds, since all the other drivers in the group can spread out.
- RandomBacon 6y agoWalk up to the phones and check to see if you can see any software running? Wouldn't it be a prime target for cell phone theft?
- wutbrodo 6y agoPer the article, one person stands nearby
- RandomBacon 6y agoThen wouldn't they keep the phone in their pocket?
- SomewhatLikely 6y agoI would guess it's a combination of getting it closer to the store and improving cell signal.
- wutbrodo 6y agoYea that's a good question: a pocket wouldn't work, but I wonder why they couldn't just stand next to the store with a bag full of phones.
- wccrawford 6y agoSimple Solution: Treat all phones within X distance of the store as being the same distance away. If the typical parking lot is 1/4 mile away, that's the minimum distance to use.
- adolph 6y agoOne reason Flex contractors do this is to get around the requirements for being a driver, such as having a valid license or being authorized to work in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter. In such cases, someone who meets the requirements downloads the Flex app and is offered a route earning $18 an hour. He or she accepts the route and then pays someone else $10 an hour to do it, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. https://fourhourworkweek.com/ https://fourhourworkweek.com/
- stygiansonic 6y agoDelivery gig arbitrage. Now how long before the cash flow from such operations is securitized and sold off? </sarcasm>
- gumby 6y agoAmazon could do this under an innocuously-named subsidiary to reduce their effective hourly pay costs.
- adolph 6y agoIt might be a valid way around "sticky wages." If one looks at the whole economy, some prices might be very flexible and others rigid. This will lead to the aggregate price level (which we can think of as an average of the individual prices) becoming "sluggish" or "sticky" in the sense that it does not respond to macroeconomic shocks as much as it would if all prices were flexible. The same idea can apply to nominal wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity If Amazon were to open a subsidiary for lower priced delivery services it might be able to maintain its workforce branding and add lower rungs to the wage ladder for the purpose of labor supply development. It might be politically inconvenient for a wealthy company like Amazon to have an acknowledged wage tiering system even if it makes sense on different levels. For example, Amazon probably cannot publicly hire people without workforce documentation--an unacknowledged arms-length subsidiary would be able to provide this service.
- Malic 6y agoWe really are living in a William Gibson novel, aren't we?
- thrownblown 6y agomaybe that's why he stopped writing sci-fi and started writing contemporary fiction
- nr2x 6y agoLast two novels decidedly sci-fi, just not very good.
- munificent 6y agoRelevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/
- xsmasher 6y agoOr Stephenson; > You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.
- nicbou 6y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking about. Snowcrash was a ridiculous (but thoroughly enjoyable) novel, but it feels less and less so every year.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago"Amazon knows about it,” the driver said, “but does nothing.” But why should they as long as from Amazon's perspective, the system is working?
- tzmudzin 6y agoSlavery or child labor would work even „better“. Can you think of a reason they don‘t go that way? Of course you can argue about operating within legal limits, but the lines between employment vs contract work and contract work vs economic slavery blur easily.
- freeone3000 6y agoBecause those are regularly-enforced laws with significant penalties. You can bet that Amazon is going to operate within all regularly enforced laws that meaningfully impact their business.
- mattkevan 6y agoThose laws only exist because people decided that slavery and child labour were bad things. We can decide that this kind of exploitation is bad too. (In fact, the UK only finished paying reparations to slave-owners five years ago, 183 years after it was made illegal.)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> (In fact, the UK only finished paying reparations to slave-owners five years ago, 183 years after it was made illegal.) That is actually slightly incorrect. The UK borrowed money to pay the reparations to the slave-owners at the time of the abolition. They just finished paying off the loan a few years ago. So the people they were paying all this time was not necessarily the slave owners, but the descendants of the creditors who had loaned the money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
- im3w1l 6y agoI can't help but think of the stories from before stock market colocation was a thing. Nowadays the stock exchanges have a fair setup where people can put their machines in the same data center as stock exchange. And everyone gets to connect with an equal length wire. But before this modern solution, it was a free for all with companies trying various tricks to rent space as close as possible.
- centimeter 6y ago> Nowadays the stock exchanges have a fair setup where ... everyone gets to connect with an equal length wire "Everyone" is pretty questionable here - it's quite expensive to rent rack space in an exchange, and not everyone gets to do it. That said, I think basically anyone who has any business doing latency-sensitive trading is probably capable of getting a rack.
- consz 6y agoThe prices are minimal -- at CME I believe it's ~15k/month for a 52U cabinet. You can rent these even as a private individual (several friends have rented individual racks as part of a syndicate group renting the whole cab). Of course, that price isn't insignificant per se, but are minimal for anyone who actually achieves any benefit from having co-located space.
- centimeter 6y agoHmm, my former firm’s colo expenses were quite a bit higher than that would suggest, but I don’t know the breakdown across all the different datacenters.
- bschne 6y agoIsn't this sort of still the case in HFT, where some firms try building e.g. their own microwave radio tower networks to beat others by a few milliseconds?
- Qworg 6y ago
- twoslide 6y agoIt is pretty easy to spoof GPS locations, at least in Android, in a way that is undectable to apps using location services. Might be a better option for these drivers?
- mullen 6y agoThat might require a level of technological sophistication that a lot of drivers don't have.
- dmurray 6y agoSeems like a business opportunity for someone to sell them that service (sell them an app, or personally configure their phones, or both).
- notdang 6y agoIt seems that they use an app to synchronize the tree phones with their real phones. Also the article states that the drivers are using 3rd party specialized apps.
- brianwawok 6y agoMillions of people spoof GPS to play Pokemon. Pretty sure the drivers could figure it out.
- 5etho 6y agoaren't they banned on a large scale? just heard it, not playing
- Havoc 6y agoSounds like the market is just self-optimising in a way? Obviously to the detriment of those left behind.
- wutbrodo 6y agoIt would be self-optimizing if they were just waiting in Whole Foods parking lots, not hanging phones in trees. It's a case of optimizing for the metric, not the objective, by exploiting the divergence between the two. This is generally pretty distinct from a market self-optimizing. The objective is "closest driver", the metric is "closest phone that connects with Amazon's servers", and the divergence is exploited by this multi-phone syncing/dispatch setup. (In this case, the divergence is unavoidable, short of unspoofable, unremovable microchipping of anyone who wants to pick up gig work) Though it seems like a pretty easy fix: just lower the granularity of the location query.
- sigmaprimus 6y agoI have a hard time believing this story, not because the technological explination doesn't make sense but because it is my understanding that there is no shortage of work for Amazon delivery drivers. I have read several stories about Amazon contract drivers being worked half to death, no breaks, long days and constant pressure to deliver more. Several of these stories have been posted in HN. (Just Google "Ycombinator Amazon drivers overworked"). It is possible that the Whole Foods delivery contracts are more lucrative but to imply that due to the recession drivers are desperate to get work doesn't jive.
- wutbrodo 6y agoThe articles I'm reading from that Google search refer to drivers who are FTEs or have set contracts (eg 10-hour shifts with quotas). By contrast, this article is talking about the just-in-time, on-the-fly gig-work market, like lyft and uber's labor markets. This is pretty clear from the fact that it's not really possible for an employer to overwork a gig worker without the gig worker's enthusiastic consent, since they explicitly choose each marginal contract they do (in fact, the theme of gig worker complaints in this area is usually against the restrictions placed on consecutive hours worked).
- crazygringo 6y agoThere's always slack in the system though. E.g. because of the randomness of when orders are ready let's say there's an average 15 minute wait for all the drivers, when things are running at full capacity. Well if you use this then you get, say, 2 minute waits, and since you're paid per-delivery, you make a bit more each day -- maybe you make 25% more deliveries. On the flip side, then drivers not using this might see their average waits grow to 20 or 25 or 30 min. For Amazon it's all the same though.
- bleah1000 6y agoI always wonder in these kinds of articles how many people are doing this. The problem is that it is so sensationalized, that it could be that there are 10 people doing this, and it's not really a big deal. Or it could be that 50% of the people doing this work, do this. For example, the article says that it reviewed photos and videos of phones near Whole Foods and Amazon delivery stations. Okay, so how many phones did they find? How many people do they have personal knowledge doing this? I've noticed that a lot of news articles tend to take a few examples of something outrageous, but never say anything about how widespread the practice is. I find it hard to be outraged or care unless there is some quantification of the problem. In any system, people will find a way to cheat. Amazon is aware and maybe they are working on a way to fix this, but it's not clear Amazon has had much time to figure out what to do. Even if you think Amazon is evil and doesn't care, it takes time to figure out how to defeat this. Maybe they won't care, but at least give them some time to respond.
- charliemil4 6y ago"The public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives" - E.Musk
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> I've noticed that a lot of news articles tend to take a few examples of something outrageous, but never say anything about how widespread the practice is. That's entirely on purpose. Most of such "outrageous" things, including some hot political topics, wouldn't look nearly as outrageous if it were compared against the baseline. So necessary information is not included. Actually informing people "weakens the story".
- Talanes 6y agoDon't underestimate the role of laziness. It's much less work to just find a localized instance of something, and then report it as a phenomenon vs. doing the actual in-the-weeds journalism in order to get a widespread view of the topic.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoIt is no different from traders laying down their own cables and private communications infrastructure to get a millisecond advantage on trades on the DOW.
- ironmagma 6y agoIt is quite different. They are Amazon’s own fleet of workers, competing to get work assigned to them by Amazon.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoNot employed by Amazon since they are "gig" workers , pretty sure there are similar hacks used by Uber/Lyft drivers to get the best paying rides.
- ironmagma 6y agoGig workers are still workers. This whole ridiculousness would be avoided if they just paid them like the employees they should be.
- smabie 6y agoIt's a little different, in that Amazon Flex isn't a two-sided market. But similar? Certainly.
- zeckalpha 6y agoDon’t forget that the stock exchange itself is an entity.
- gimmeThaBeet 6y agoI agree, it seems they saw a bunch of phones hanging in a tree, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt it is an existent phenomenon, but would also question the extent. It's interesting because the case here is that the gig worker wants to behave like an employee, basically polling the system and taking a job without evaluating it is akin to getting assigned it. It feels like the flip side of what you normally see. Now the problem here is the why, that is necessity, desperation. And the who, which is that it seems some parties might be predating here, snapping up the gigs and basically scalping/arbitraging them. The part I grapple with is that it's certainly unfair for companies to utilize gig workers and expect employees. Is it just as wrong for a company to stand by and watch their gig workers sort of organize themselves into employees?
- boogies 6y agoDid you mean for this to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343643?
- gimmeThaBeet 6y agoAh apologies, yes I did. Thanks!
- supernova87a 6y agoIt's just amazingly interesting to see our own societal evolution in action, rapidly spurred on by technology. A company or event or technology changes something, and an evolutionary/behavioral niche newly forms to take advantage of it. People are smart and infinitely adaptable...
- WalterBright 6y agoWe're also seeing free markets adapting to the lockdown and recovering.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoEspecially the stock markets with all the free money and emergency government loans directed to the usual suspects
- kfrzcode 6y agoIs this evolution? I'd say it's just adaptability. Evolution requires generations, I thought.
- im3w1l 6y agoThe word evolution can mean change in a general sense. E.g. an evolving situation.
- Nacdor 6y ago> our own societal evolution I'm not sure I'd call it "evolution" so much as a race to the bottom. The drivers in this article are now forced to pay an intermediary in order to secure work that was previously available for free. It's basically a form of scalping. This is why labor laws are important and why classifying employees as contractors can be so detrimental.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 6y ago
- MattGaiser 6y agoWouldn't Amazon just adjust its algorithm to punish delays in delivery? Penalize drivers who take longer to get there than they should if they were truly nearby?
- UncleEntity 6y agoApparently they are putting the phones in a location that is impossible to be physically closer to in order to get the job first -- park car, walk over to the tree to sync your phone then wait in your car for the next job offer. The trick -- per a previous job -- is to figure out where the computer thinks the address is (on the street, in the middle of the parking lot, &etc...) and get your location as close as you can to that to get an edge over the competition.
- dnautics 6y agoThis reminds me of when I was a Lyft driver and in SF there is a dance studio under the central freeway; sometimes dropoffs would tell you to drop the person off on central freeway and jump down to the building. The bullit room was another tricky one; entrance is on a hotel lobby off of the stockton tunnel, but google maps has you go to a sketchy alley off of bush. It's even trickier for the driver since the sketchy alley is also called "bullit".
- calvano915 6y agoWhy are drivers willing to allow this and not just walking over and destroying these phones? I don't understand the benefit of getting more deliveries but at the cost of a significant percentage of the payment.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoBecause destroying other people's phones is a crime.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoBut the drivers using this technique are truly nearby, they are getting the route on the phone in the tree and then forwarding the route information to their own phone in their car, and they are presumably in the area. They are trying to beat out the other drivers waiting nearby them, not sit at home and only leave the house once they get a route.
- sandworm101 6y agoDoes the amazon brain actually think that the person standing 10/20/50 feet closer is the better person for the job? My first impression was that these phones were being run by people blocks/miles away, but they are actually only a few feet closer. >> That means a phone in a tree outside Whole Foods’ door would get the delivery offer even before drivers sitting in their cars just a block away. That seems ridiculous. Plus or minus what, a minute? There has to be a better way to select drivers.
- z3t4 6y agoThey are probably also measuring by bird distance...
- pmiller2 6y agoI don't mean to be "that guy" correcting someone's English, but you don't seem to be a native speaker, so I hope this will be well received. The actual phrase should be "as the crow flies." If you say "bird distance," you might get confused looks from people. Just trying to help. :-)
- kfrzcode 6y agoYou're right to gently correct here. That said, "bird distance" is going in my lexicon.
- ineedasername 6y agoI like "bird distance". I knew immediately what was meant, and it was more succinct than "as the crow flies"
- Cederfjard 6y agoIn Swedish we say ”the bird way”, as in ”it’s x km going the bird way”.
- 6y ago
- jameshawkins 6y agoI used to work at Uber and we would see similar behavior from drivers at airports. There would be a geofence around the parking lots where drivers had to wait before they could be sent a ride. However, the app would still send a ride to the closest available driver, so they would all lean their phones against the gate to get as close to the edge of the geofence as possible. Ultimately, Uber implemented a FIFO queue at these lots, meaning a driver was added to a waiting list as soon as they entered the lot, thus removing the need for this behavior anymore.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoMost every taxi firm in the uk has a piece of plastic water pipe and a bunch of ping-pong balls. As each driver comes back they take their number from the basket and drop it into the far end of the tube. The next call that comes in, and the despatcher takes the ball out the "near" end. It is an almost foolproof FIFO pipe (literally), simplemfor everyone to understand and very cheap to run.
- smnscu 6y agoThis is it, chief. I work in a place where work used to be pick-up-able instantly and all the pain of that went away when pools were introduced.
- qwerty456127 6y agoI believe FIFO is evil. It encourages people to form queues. I'd rather make it a random pick from the set of those within a reasonable range.
- germinalphrase 6y agoWhy evil?
- qwerty456127 6y agoIf I know it's FIFO - I come as early as I can. This way I both struggle myself (as I never want to go there that early) and harm the others' comfort and convenience by occupying the place, making the queue longer. People also tend to conflict, fighting for their place in the queue (I had to witness and to participate in too many queues in my life, people become nasty there). If I know it's random I come whenever I'm comfortable.
- aaron695 6y ago> to get a split-second jump on competing drivers. Or it uses GPS and sees they are closer rather than the impossible. I get reporters believe this fantastical stuff because they are not in IT and are somewhat more the Arts realm. But they need a way to fix this, like a wiki. Or not. I guess stupid people believe it and click. The core of the story is true somewhat, you do miss out on the idea leaving phones in strange places fools the GPS and you can use this to an advantage. Or why not just GPS spoof. Or is it using the wireless, so why not use a repeater?
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoThis is why humans > AI. The best laid plans of algorithms and men!
- peter303 6y agoI thought I saw an app that would spoof a false location for a mobile device. That app would be more practical.
- aszantu 6y agoCome on. .. someone who can do this can prolly get a better job in IT
- mayama 6y agoApparently they are using some third party app to accept orders.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoInstead of paying their drivers a fair wage regardless of how much they deliver, they're letting them fight amongst themselves while they laugh all the way to the bank. And the drivers actually seem to want this, knowing full well the market is oversaturated. If Amazon were to pay drivers a fixed amount, they'd probably end up with much less drivers.
- tosh 6y agoreminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- todd8 6y agoThe Amazon drivers seem to be far less careful in their deliveries as well. In the past, deliveries were delivered to my porch. Then the started showing up on my drive. Yesterday my wife found a book delivery under a shrub next to the curb.