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Chilling ending to the article: > Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into

Chilling ending to the article: > Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery. Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.

qeternity 3y ago
I don’t really understand why you think having financial incentives to avoid bad ratings and deliver food warm is bad?
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup? Bad driver! Restaurant behind on orders? Bad driver! Something missing from order? Bad driver! Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
  - xvector 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - zztop44 3y ago
      The thing I find offensive is expecting these people to be providing 4.9 level customer service when they’re getting nowhere near commensurate pay. Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every new commit, rated on how long it took compared to how many points on the ticket (which someone else decides). And if your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets (and stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin with.
      - chii 3y ago
        if there was an objective way to value the quality of a commit, rather than how long it took, then yes, this method of rating would work. The length of time is not proportionally related to the quality (it's not even inversely proportional - i think there's no relationship between time taken to do a commit and its quality).
        zztop44 3y ago
        Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit or completed ticket (including taking into consideration how long it took vs how long they think it should have taken). I don’t think many software developers would want to work under such a system. Yet we build them for other people.
        chii 3y ago
        > Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit if the manager is able to know how long something would've taken, it is because the task is simple and already well specified. Therefore, the work will be similar to delivery analogy from the OP. I do believe some places (such as oracle) do this sort of rating (heard from the grapevines). However, most work i find that require a developer isn't simple tasks, but complex cognitive thinking to come up with a solution. I dont believe a rating system works for such work. Peer judgement, as well as long term results (such as a stable, working system that expands as required in a timely manner) work much better. But by the time the long term comes, the developer's contributions would've been diluted if the team expands massively due to success, or have moved on!
        simiones 3y ago
        You are misunderstanding. They are not suggesting this would be a good or objective system. The problem is that ratings for drivers/deliveries/restaurants are just as arbitrary as this. I have seen people give 1 star reviews to a restaurant saying that the food was extraordinary but the waiter told them that it is possible to tip by card without them asking.
    - erinaceousjones 3y ago
      Why are they "double apping", though? Is it perhaps because they are trying to scrape a liveable wage from a flawed gig economy....
      - c22 3y ago
        The insane thing is people trying to make a livable wage off of "gigs". We should stop pretending this is or ever can be reasonable full-time employment. Driving for apps is something you do on the weekend to supplement your day job, or during school hours as a stay at home spouse or whatever.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Yeaaaaaah, remember when the bulk of US manufacturing and industry was offshored a few decades ago and pundits were falling all over themselves to explain how we were transitioning to a "service economy"? Well this is what a service economy looks like.
        DarkNova6 3y ago
        This is such a perfect way to put it.
        addicted 3y ago
        A service economy with proper living wages is absolutely possible. I’m not a fan of such an economy because any country, especially one as large as the U.S., has no reason to be a single sector economy and plus as we saw during the pandemic and are seeing in the Ukraine war, a lack of domestic manufacturing capabilities is a significant strategic threat. However, the gig economy model is a choice. A choice that can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees. The gig economy is little more than a way to get around employee protections, and the sooner we face that obvious reality the better.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        No argument there. Startup culture's ongoing war on low wage workers is a fucking travesty.
    - mFixman 3y ago
      > For instance, the difference between an Uber driver with 4.3 stars and 4.9 stars is consistently obvious. Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. It's the same for 4.3 and 4.9 star restaurants in Google Maps. Reviews make sense if you can read other people's comments, otherwise they are useless. I wouldn't mind if 5-star ratings in service apps were replaced with more detailed "I had a problem" forms.
      - crackercrews 3y ago
        > Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. Literally have never experienced this.
      - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        I’ve taken 100s of Ubers and have never had a single driver ask me to rate them highly. Agree with your point about the comments though
    - John23832 3y ago
      > The vast majority of delays I've seen from these drivers is because they are (very obviously) double-apping, in which case I'm happy to have them be affected by terrible ratings. They are double-apping because you as the consumer are not actually willing to pay what it costs to have someone deliver your food to you as a job. So now you want to enact a punishment on the driver for not making you their sole focus for less than a survivable daily wage. I'm sure you also don't tip.
      - infecto 3y ago
        You don't know if the GP tips or not. I along with some segment of consumers would be happy to pay the true cost of the service. Unfortunately in the last 5 years we are being bombarded everywhere with tips for what should be normal service. It is wildly frustrating. On the flip side I would argue that if a single app is not paying well enough that a gig worker should try something else for work. Gig work like delivery is a commodity and not defensible. At some point gig workers should try something else if its not making them money.
        themaninthedark 3y ago
        So a new restaurant/brewery opened up near me; you order food on the touch screen, it buzzes when ready and you pick it up. When done, you put all your dishes on a counter by the dishwasher. They take your card when they seat you, so all you have to do is walk out. I found out they add 20% tip to your meal as a standard action.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        > I'm sure you also don't tip. In-app tipping should be discouraged regardless of someone's overall opinion on tipping. The market and regulatory environment has already set a precedent that stealing tips is de facto legal, and there are many ways to do so in an undetectable way (without a full source code audit) even if it wasn't legal. If you want to tip, do it cash in hand.
      - bena 3y ago
        The business itself is unsustainable. There isn't any good way to provide delivery of most items to most people at a reasonable cost. Also, the consumer isn't being given the choice, they are provided the cost from the app. The delivery company isn't willing to charge what it costs to have dedicated delivery drivers. That's the real culprit here.
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    Having worked as a server in college, servers get blamed for everything, and it definitely made me avoid and lose most of my confidence in humans other than close friends and family. People can be just mean and horrible for no real reason. Most are nice and patient, however a significant minority are just awful and must lead miserable, empty lives.
- input_sh 3y ago
  May I suggest reading the article you're commenting on?
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    I read the article. I don't think the article made a persuasive case that this policy was bad.
  - qeternity 3y ago
    I did read the article. Hence my confusion. What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  In a vacuum, there’s no problem. Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise risk taking and dangerous driving.
- bagels 3y ago
  They aren't bad in themselves, but the consequences of reckless driving are.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Because it can encourage dangerous behavior.
Aurornis 3y ago
> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot. The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation. Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating. Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time. Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership. Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.
- LocalH 3y ago
  My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1. It's extremely toxic.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    And Ebay, so 20+ years. It was either positive and A+++++ or it's effectively negative.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I remember once I bought a car and the salesman said if I had any reservations about giving him a 10/10 on every question in the survey no matter what it was that I should text or call his personal phone and he'd do whatever he could to fix it, also directly saying that it's better for them to have 95% of people not fill it out at all and get 10/10 from everyone else than to have 100% completion with a single 9/10. I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for God." I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from, everyone I know who has ever been involved with that industry, etc. Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?
happytiger 3y ago
This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person. The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit. This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.

qeternity 3y ago

I don’t really understand why you think having financial incentives to avoid bad ratings and deliver food warm is bad?

lll-o-lll 3y ago
Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup? Bad driver! Restaurant behind on orders? Bad driver! Something missing from order? Bad driver! Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
- xvector 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zztop44 3y ago
    The thing I find offensive is expecting these people to be providing 4.9 level customer service when they’re getting nowhere near commensurate pay. Imagine if software devs got a star rating for every new commit, rated on how long it took compared to how many points on the ticket (which someone else decides). And if your rating drops too low you stop getting tickets (and stop getting paid). And your salary sucks to begin with.
    - chii 3y ago
      if there was an objective way to value the quality of a commit, rather than how long it took, then yes, this method of rating would work. The length of time is not proportionally related to the quality (it's not even inversely proportional - i think there's no relationship between time taken to do a commit and its quality).
      - zztop44 3y ago
        Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit or completed ticket (including taking into consideration how long it took vs how long they think it should have taken). I don’t think many software developers would want to work under such a system. Yet we build them for other people.
        chii 3y ago
        > Do you really think it’s impossible for a manager to rate a commit if the manager is able to know how long something would've taken, it is because the task is simple and already well specified. Therefore, the work will be similar to delivery analogy from the OP. I do believe some places (such as oracle) do this sort of rating (heard from the grapevines). However, most work i find that require a developer isn't simple tasks, but complex cognitive thinking to come up with a solution. I dont believe a rating system works for such work. Peer judgement, as well as long term results (such as a stable, working system that expands as required in a timely manner) work much better. But by the time the long term comes, the developer's contributions would've been diluted if the team expands massively due to success, or have moved on!
        simiones 3y ago
        You are misunderstanding. They are not suggesting this would be a good or objective system. The problem is that ratings for drivers/deliveries/restaurants are just as arbitrary as this. I have seen people give 1 star reviews to a restaurant saying that the food was extraordinary but the waiter told them that it is possible to tip by card without them asking.
  - erinaceousjones 3y ago
    Why are they "double apping", though? Is it perhaps because they are trying to scrape a liveable wage from a flawed gig economy....
    - c22 3y ago
      The insane thing is people trying to make a livable wage off of "gigs". We should stop pretending this is or ever can be reasonable full-time employment. Driving for apps is something you do on the weekend to supplement your day job, or during school hours as a stay at home spouse or whatever.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Yeaaaaaah, remember when the bulk of US manufacturing and industry was offshored a few decades ago and pundits were falling all over themselves to explain how we were transitioning to a "service economy"? Well this is what a service economy looks like.
        DarkNova6 3y ago
        This is such a perfect way to put it.
        addicted 3y ago
        A service economy with proper living wages is absolutely possible. I’m not a fan of such an economy because any country, especially one as large as the U.S., has no reason to be a single sector economy and plus as we saw during the pandemic and are seeing in the Ukraine war, a lack of domestic manufacturing capabilities is a significant strategic threat. However, the gig economy model is a choice. A choice that can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees. The gig economy is little more than a way to get around employee protections, and the sooner we face that obvious reality the better.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        No argument there. Startup culture's ongoing war on low wage workers is a fucking travesty.
  - mFixman 3y ago
    > For instance, the difference between an Uber driver with 4.3 stars and 4.9 stars is consistently obvious. Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. It's the same for 4.3 and 4.9 star restaurants in Google Maps. Reviews make sense if you can read other people's comments, otherwise they are useless. I wouldn't mind if 5-star ratings in service apps were replaced with more detailed "I had a problem" forms.
    - crackercrews 3y ago
      > Yeah, 4.9 drivers explicitly ask for a good rating. Literally have never experienced this.
    - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      I’ve taken 100s of Ubers and have never had a single driver ask me to rate them highly. Agree with your point about the comments though
  - John23832 3y ago
    > The vast majority of delays I've seen from these drivers is because they are (very obviously) double-apping, in which case I'm happy to have them be affected by terrible ratings. They are double-apping because you as the consumer are not actually willing to pay what it costs to have someone deliver your food to you as a job. So now you want to enact a punishment on the driver for not making you their sole focus for less than a survivable daily wage. I'm sure you also don't tip.
    - infecto 3y ago
      You don't know if the GP tips or not. I along with some segment of consumers would be happy to pay the true cost of the service. Unfortunately in the last 5 years we are being bombarded everywhere with tips for what should be normal service. It is wildly frustrating. On the flip side I would argue that if a single app is not paying well enough that a gig worker should try something else for work. Gig work like delivery is a commodity and not defensible. At some point gig workers should try something else if its not making them money.
      - themaninthedark 3y ago
        So a new restaurant/brewery opened up near me; you order food on the touch screen, it buzzes when ready and you pick it up. When done, you put all your dishes on a counter by the dishwasher. They take your card when they seat you, so all you have to do is walk out. I found out they add 20% tip to your meal as a standard action.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > I'm sure you also don't tip. In-app tipping should be discouraged regardless of someone's overall opinion on tipping. The market and regulatory environment has already set a precedent that stealing tips is de facto legal, and there are many ways to do so in an undetectable way (without a full source code audit) even if it wasn't legal. If you want to tip, do it cash in hand.
    - bena 3y ago
      The business itself is unsustainable. There isn't any good way to provide delivery of most items to most people at a reasonable cost. Also, the consumer isn't being given the choice, they are provided the cost from the app. The delivery company isn't willing to charge what it costs to have dedicated delivery drivers. That's the real culprit here.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  Having worked as a server in college, servers get blamed for everything, and it definitely made me avoid and lose most of my confidence in humans other than close friends and family. People can be just mean and horrible for no real reason. Most are nice and patient, however a significant minority are just awful and must lead miserable, empty lives.
input_sh 3y ago
May I suggest reading the article you're commenting on?
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I read the article. I don't think the article made a persuasive case that this policy was bad.
- qeternity 3y ago
  I did read the article. Hence my confusion. What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?
d1sxeyes 3y ago
In a vacuum, there’s no problem. Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise risk taking and dangerous driving.
bagels 3y ago
They aren't bad in themselves, but the consequences of reckless driving are.
JohnFen 3y ago
Because it can encourage dangerous behavior.

Aurornis 3y ago

> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot. The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation. Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating. Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time. Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership. Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.

LocalH 3y ago
My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1. It's extremely toxic.
- ghaff 3y ago
  And Ebay, so 20+ years. It was either positive and A+++++ or it's effectively negative.
- pc86 3y ago
  I remember once I bought a car and the salesman said if I had any reservations about giving him a 10/10 on every question in the survey no matter what it was that I should text or call his personal phone and he'd do whatever he could to fix it, also directly saying that it's better for them to have 95% of people not fill it out at all and get 10/10 from everyone else than to have 100% completion with a single 9/10. I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for God." I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from, everyone I know who has ever been involved with that industry, etc. Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?

happytiger 3y ago

This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person. The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit. This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.