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I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

623 points by apayan 9mo ago

apayan 9mo ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddi... Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
- zzgo 9mo ago
  The comments didn't load, you gotta archive old.reddit.com in order to get 50 comments archived.
rationalist 9mo ago
I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice yesterday. His wish might be granted. > I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
- deepfriedbits 9mo ago
  Yeah that was either a tactical misstep, or a smart move if they fabricated the date or the fact that they put in in their two weeks.
  - hahahahhaah 9mo ago
    Of course they did. You dont use a burner laptop then drop PII in the post. They may also not work for the company and just larp as a combo of stories they heard, or it is all made up for karma or kicks.
- warmedcookie 9mo ago
  Big brain play: he decided to post this when someone on his team put in their two weeks that he did not like.
lispisok 9mo ago
More evidence for my theory that the only reason Uber et al are able to exist is because they have an infinite supply of suckers signing up as drivers. Any McJob pays better now.
- rpcope1 9mo ago
  I remember when everyone was talking how we would all be gig workers and it was going to be the best thing ever. I am eagerly awaiting seeing whose legal department if any poop their pants tomorrow. Maybe if we're lucky we'll even see an 8-K soon.
  - senectus1 9mo ago
    some countries do a better job of protecting their population from corp psychopath companies. Australia is one. but its not enough and the moment the right wing side of Gov gets in they start rolling back a lot of the labor law protections the left wing work at putting in.
    - servo_sausage 9mo ago
      The average gig worker here is a migrant, hard to see how that is protecting Australians.
      - senectus1 9mo ago
        no its more about protecting the people from the corps. not protecting the locals from the immigrants. Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue.
        OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
        > Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue. Immigration quotas should probably be considered part of labor laws though, given the impact immigration can have on wages and the job/housing market for natives.
ilvez 9mo ago
If this would come out for Bolt that my tip won't reach 100% to driver/delivery guy, I would quit using it. Lying to users about especially when they want to be generous is like fake beggars.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  It doesn't matter if 10% of users quit using it if the stolen tips from the other 90% more than cover it. And where are you going to run? The competition isn't any better.
  - rasse 9mo ago
    You don't _need_ the competition, either. Just pretend it's 2005 and acquire food some other way.
  - ilvez 9mo ago
    I think that's very cynical perspective. Probably you are correct, but if they were all corrupted, I could try starting my own. I'm probably naive but I still believe being ethical and profitable at the same time is possible.
    - literallyroy 9mo ago
      If it helps: they do not all work this way
    - em-bee 9mo ago
      being ethical and profitable is possible, but competing against the unethical is another matter. if a company keeps the tips they can charge lower prices. just like some restaurants pay lower salaries when waiters can rely on tipping (which is why i consider tipping itself to be unethical)
  - dartharva 9mo ago
    Just buy food physically, or call up the eatery and order on phone directly?
  - 9mo ago
eleventen 9mo ago
For context, this was removed from 4 other subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/
- winterqt 9mo ago
  Looks like some were automod and some just went into modqueue, only one was actually removed by mods.
- abrookewood 9mo ago
  Yet is seems entirely feasible.
- zzgo 9mo ago
  I got banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism for stating that we shouldn't be ripping on people for having a Coexist bumper sticker. OP getting their post rejected there doesn't surprise me in the least.
auggierose 9mo ago
So are we talking Uber eats here?
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  I'm sure this isn't limited to any single company. It's just typical VC/techbro company playbook.
- another_twist 9mo ago
  For UberEats the listed prices are also different from when you order directly at the restaurant. Its not just he ridiculous service fees.
  - swat535 9mo ago
    Yes, I was chatting with a local resturant and they said they have to put higher prices on Uber to cover the fees.
- jonny_eh 9mo ago
  Doordash has the $2.99 priority optional fee, I dunno about other services.
bilekas 9mo ago
I do use some of these regularly when I'm in a pinch but I would never even think to tip in the app itself. If I don't trust a company to pay the drivers a wage, why would I trust them to give them my tip! Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.
- ramraj07 9mo ago
  It used to be the case briefly (I think) that drivers choose your order after seeing the tip amount so as the poster mentioned, you would get only the truly desperate drivers if you dont tip. If whats written here is true (I honestly have no reason to doubt it) its disgusting and ill definitely not use these apps any further.
  - bilekas 9mo ago
    I'm inclined to believe the poster also, I see no real benefit otherwise. I will say it's not a surprise at the very least, their business model was market 'disruption' to the point there are no alternatives as the customers will all be on the app. It reminds me of a related video of the Last Week Tonight about the food apps. Well worth a 20 min watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII
cedws 9mo ago
Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised people think this is news.
  - ramraj07 9mo ago
    When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      You're not thinking like a techbro: there's nothing unscrupulous about A/B testing or "revenue optimization".
      - hackable_sand 9mo ago
        Techbros don't think, they just do.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - olalonde 9mo ago
    Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but other parts feel implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable. Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some liberties with the truth.
Nextgrid 9mo ago
Another food delivery app anecdote: they will always blame the restaurant for their lack of driver supply. I've had orders stuck on "preparing your food" for an hour but when I called the restaurant they said it's been ready for 40 mins and they're waiting for someone to come pick it up.
- galkk 9mo ago
  What is the chance that they will say things like “oops, we forgot about your order?” “Oops, we didn’t click button that it’s done and could be picked up”. I had situations where my order was forgotten/lost when I literally was sitting in the restaurant and waiting for my order. Yes, I’m sure that those companies have shitty practices, but unconditionally putting blame on them is not productive. The drivers and restaurants aren’t saints either.
AlotOfReading 9mo ago
"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the term "NPCs".
- DharmaPolice 9mo ago
  Human assets doesn't seem that much worse than human resources (other than familiarity).
neilv 9mo ago
If the allegations are true, then I think the writer needs to call up a good state Attorney General's office, and ask who to talk to. Though I'd guess that the alleged scummy company has seen this, and is already preparing their response, trying to purge any incriminating emails and PowerPoints, etc.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Why would an AG care? This is a huge company stealing from poor people. The system is working as designed. They would not be so brazen in doing this (in relative openness with every developer being in on it) if they thought an AG would actually care. They do this because they correctly calculated that they have enough connections and/or bribes to preempt such an action.
  - zzgo 9mo ago
    The California AG in particular wouldn't pass up any opportunity to get his name and accomplishments in the press. I get a weekly newsletter from him extolling his recent successes.
  - neilv 9mo ago
    All the time, I'm reading about companies brazenly doing illegal things. We often see reports of state AGs taking actions against companies. My guess is that bribes of state AG offices would be unusual. (Do you have better information about that?) The questions on my mind would be how much resources an AG's office has to deal with corporate crime, and how a given crime would get triaged.
- another_twist 9mo ago
  Well the company might just donate to a certain library and get away scot free.
tbrownaw 9mo ago
A sprint planning meeting seems like the wrong place to put that topic. I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.
- pdntspa 9mo ago
  Why not? They have to implement the systems that power this. Also, water-cooler gossip
  - zmgsabst 9mo ago
    I suspect it depends on the company — eg, at Amazon the tech team went out of our way to blind ourselves to what the tax analysts were doing; at a fintech startup, we knew intimate details of what clients were doing. This sounds like the kind of big-co where intentional segmentation and blinding would happen.
  - tbrownaw 9mo ago
    It sounds like the sort of thing that would belong where items get enqueued into the backlog, rather than where a batch of things get finalized and dequeued.
- zzgo 9mo ago
  I used to write tests for a cryptocurrency trading platform. I regularly talked to the auditors, as they were the ones who made sure that the crypto we transferred into external wallets made it back into internal wallets after the test. I wouldn't say that I knew a bunch of accounting practices from talking to them, but I _did_ learn that the CTO and director of QA both lied to me during my interview. Sure, we made _some_ money from the spread as claimed in my interview, but in truth, the bulk of our money came from loaning our customer deposits to 3 Arrows Capital. I knew we were fucked _months_ before the company suddenly went under.
  - another_twist 9mo ago
    Yup. Engineers do have visibility into fintech systems that they implement, maybe even more so than the bean counters since they can trace exactly which txns went where. These things are logged.
andrewinardeer 9mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/.JSON https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de... If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.
- thrdbndndn 9mo ago
  Your link is wrong. It must be lower case .json.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    https://archive.is/G2H0V https://archive.is/G2H0V
kombine 9mo ago
Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own food.
hussachai 9mo ago
> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. Why bother using library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop if he doesn't care anymore? Why give out the biggest clue, which is the time of his resignation letter? If the story is real, this company is a straight-up scammer waiting for the biggest headline and lawsuit of the year.
- symbogra 9mo ago
  It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.
  - another_twist 9mo ago
    What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.
    - stingraycharles 9mo ago
      Unfortunately, there is a lot of fiction on Reddit these days, especially on subs like r/confession. I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”. This has been a longstanding issue, particularly in the era of AI-generated content.
    - renewiltord 9mo ago
      I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like that. Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice. Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.
dismalaf 9mo ago
Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really wouldn't surprise me.
5701652400 9mo ago
true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very, very, very toxic.
- g-b-r 9mo ago
  uhm, 13 people upvoted the single comment of this newly created account
  - tzs 9mo ago
    How do you know how many people upvoted it?
    - bcook 9mo ago
      User has one comment and their karma is listed as "14" in their profile.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pixelpoet 9mo ago
    HN is recently absolutely chock full of brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other. The "new" section is repo after repo created a handful minutes ago with AI slop. I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
    - nubinetwork 9mo ago
      > brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not being /r/politics...
renewiltord 9mo ago
[flagged]
- zzgo 9mo ago
  Upvoted for speaking your truth.
  - renewiltord 9mo ago
    It's actually quite enjoyable to just tell tall tales on the Internet.
LostMyLogin 9mo ago
Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m inherently skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping. I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t. > If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first in case of a batched delivery. So, I’m guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders you are paying for normal service. [0][1] Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments so none of this really shocks me. > At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2] Regarding the desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well studied and verified. [3][4] The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered apparently. > In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new limits. > DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps. > In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database, DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5] > Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space. [6] The section on companies subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and led to millions in settlements. > On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.” > Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8] [0] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-different-delivery-options-work?nodeId=b11a4cf0-efb6-4334-96b4-b6ad34481253 https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-d... [1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers-pay-for-priority-delivery-then-both-get-dispatched-to-me-in-a-batch-order.458542/ https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers... [2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash-used-to-increase-its-logistics-experiment-capacity-by-1000/ https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash... [3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wage-discrimination/ https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag... [4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithmic-wage-and-labor-exploitation-in-platform-work-in-the-us https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm... [5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088 [7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-rcna193728 https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r... [8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-must-pay-254-million https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...
adrianwaj 9mo ago
Blockchain and split payments would work here. The transparency would be useful. Maybe even using x402? So buyers should be able to see where and how their money is going to be distributed after payment. How much does the driver get? How much is he/she earning? Comparable drivers can compare metrics. Perhaps unions could build some type of payment app and have gig workers use it as part of their employment contract? So gig workers end up like ebay sellers with a feedback, followers and sales data on display. They can take their profile with them to new employers as well. Buyers get a profile too. Funds could also be held in escrow, and refunds granted where applicable. I don't know.
- dartharva 9mo ago
  This is not a tech problem, it will not be solved by new tech. It is a civil problem coming from institutional degradation and corruption.
  - sodafountan 9mo ago
    I actually disagree; the only way to get to the bottom of any wrongdoing here would be to do an external audit of their systems. That can get expensive and complicated. Using cryptocurrency with on-chain verification of the paper trail could actually solve this problem without having to get auditors and lawyers involved.
    - dartharva 9mo ago
      And who is going to allow upending the entire current infrastructure of payment processing and businesses? That's right, the government. If you were going to go through the government either way, the easier sell is to just make them do their damn job and prevent scammers from scamming.
      - sodafountan 9mo ago
        Yes, but the government is notoriously inefficient and ineffective. Bitcoin was started right under their noses (and I'm not just referring to the U.S government here, but all national governments), and it continues to operate all across the globe. It's kind of what makes it so interesting, you can't really kill it, it's like a good financial virus. I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure of payment processing and business has already been upended by Bitcoin alone. It's only a matter of time before we see layer-2 solutions like the one OP mentioned. Bitcoin might not be the best blockchain to target for small-scale financial transactions like delivery apps, but you catch my drift. Just about any blockchain would do in this scenario.
greatgib 9mo ago
With Deliveroo, I already caught the app lying. One time the order was stuck at "waiting for the restaurant/cooking" for a very unusual time, like 40 mins instead of the usual 10 mins. So I called the restaurant and they told me that the order was ready for like 25 mins but the driver didn't pick it up yet. When I called the custom service after that, they told me that the driver was finishing another delivery and will pick it up soon. But so the drive was trying to pin the delay on restaurant when it was their fault and that in the end you will get cold food.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Same experience here, both with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I'm surprised this doesn't get them in trouble on libel/defamation bases.
joduplessis 9mo ago
> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I smell some bullshit.
- pedrozieg 9mo ago
  “In a library on a burner laptop” - but I’ll narrow it down to people who have handed in their notice on a specific day.
galkk 9mo ago
I can believe in each fact individually, but altogether (and that the author has exposure to all of that) it feels like just a rage bait. Here are red flags for me: 1. Priority delivery. Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people. So dispatch logic must be at least somewhat different. Also from engineering/product perspective the delay between priority and standard could be justified. To give rough analogy: FedEx can deliever package that I drop at 5pm to other side of the country at 9am, if I pay a lot of premium. It doesn’t mean that they can deliver all the packages with that speed and they deliberately slow down all other mail. 2. The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft” 3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business. 4. The benefit fee that goes into some “policy defense” - that I can believe in, actually. But again, emotionally manipulative add on (unions, your delivery guy homeless) 5. Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used. To summarize and repeat my point - I could believe some of the things individually, but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.
- another_twist 9mo ago
  2. tip theft and pay the rent are valid terms here. 3. quite likely something like this will exist and it might not be called that right in the code base but it sounds like something that will show up in Slack conversations. From a pure ML perspective (throwing ethics out the windos, this is a good feature) 4. this one sounds sus because cash flow details may not be something a backend engineer might be privy to. 5. UberEats as well. Either ways its quite difficult to say whether or not this is true. But the post does say that tipping theft works by reducing base pay and having the customer pick up the tab. So its not so straightforward.
- chrisfosterelli 9mo ago
  > 3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business. This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like 'payrate sensitivity factor'
andoando 9mo ago
I can make the same post about one of the top apps on the App store. I was burning with such rage I never did. I supposed I felt in the end itd get no attention at all
charlie90 9mo ago
LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.
- LostMyLogin 9mo ago
  I wonder how many people believe my writing is AI generated because I have always overused em-dashes.
- dartharva 9mo ago
  This "LLM writing style" is how I write manually. Em-dashes could be an auto-correct function of whatever tool the guy wrote it in before pasting (likely Word).
- halapro 9mo ago
  In 2026 it doesn't really matter whether LLM wrote it, because people are lazy and will let AI write/rewrite their own short thoughts.
- Tiberium 9mo ago
  Yeah, it's surprising that people just blindly believe posts like that.
whatever1 9mo ago
Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever. During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride. At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF. From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes. How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.
- anonzzzies 9mo ago
  I know plenty of Uber (and normal taxis) drivers around the airport here who pick up a someone, then ask if they mind taking someone else. Because it is usually vans and business customers, they don't care and actually kind of like talking with other business guys who probably went or are going to the same seminar/conference etc. The driver will then load up whatever fits who are waiting for taxis or drivers and only report 1 person to the service. As this is hotel to airport to hotel, there are not many ways of uber, lyft etc detecting this unless someone rats them out. I asked a driver and obviously he responded with Uber screws me, I screw Uber.
  - KeplerBoy 9mo ago
    How do people pay the driver? I guess cash isn't really a thing anymore in a lot of places. Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?
    - anonzzzies 9mo ago
      Many normal taxis drive also for Uber or Lyft as you need the license anyway over here. Not sure if you can be Uber AND Lyft at the same time. Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.
jacobrussell 9mo ago
I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting: https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416907dc41e/?ucc=U6WpTFqvPbR https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416... Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI detection. This came back as “Fully AI Generated.” It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure how I feel about it! Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things with a grain of salt as always.
- jacobrussell 9mo ago
  Here’s a fun steelman for the post being true: the author intentionally prompted an LLM to write the post in order to further anonymize themselves from their company.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- shaky-carrousel 9mo ago
  If I were a whistleblower, first thing I would do is run my text through an LLM to obfuscate writing style.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  Every time this happens the OP says they're not a native english speaker so they used AI to write it from their language or notes. Wonder if the tool can detect this phenomenon?
kaizenb 9mo ago
Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the operators. Humans such a disappointment.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  >Humans such a disappointment. Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?
  - dxdm 9mo ago
    I think it's okay to be disappointed in the behavior of people who can make informed decisions how to act after taking consequences into account.
  - kaizenb 9mo ago
    I guess I expect better from us, regarding our high intelligence as species. But probably you are right, there is an utopic vision of us in my mind.
HellDunkel 9mo ago
Another reason cash is important. Don‘t give up on it!
rich_sasha 9mo ago
If true (I'm not sure), this is kind of economics in action. There's a monopolistic market maker, screwing every last cent out of providers, with enormous power imbalances. The market maker is semi monopolistic, the labour is low-skilled, with little bargaining power and few better options. The "winners" are shareholders of the company and to some extent the end customers (who, other things being equal, would have to pay more for the labour). In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in. (I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes).
- manuelmoreale 9mo ago
  > In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in. (I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes). I think this is conceptually sound take but at the same time it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these decisions. Accepting to behave like a despicable human being and justify it with "well this is the system I operate in" is not acceptable for me from a moral standpoint. The economic system is awful, sure. But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a personal choice. There is no such thing as "corporations". It's people. From top to bottom. And people are responsible for their own actions.
  - rich_sasha 9mo ago
    > it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these decisions. So I guess, nicer taxi corporations existed, and got turfed out by Uber and Lyft who managed to reduce prices or increase convenience, and are reaping the fruit of their investment. Capitalism in motion. I guess my fundamental point is, you can't fix this by putting pressure on companies to be nicer, because the ones being less nice will ultimately win due to better economics. If you want to fix it, change the law. Anything else is kind of shouting at clouds.
pfannkuchen 9mo ago
> we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison This in particular sounds very fake to me. If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders. In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization behavior, not evil and not what OP is claiming. In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. Which might be fine for a quick A/B test on a subset of customers, but as framed this is basically a psy op to trick customers en masse into thinking the priority order is faster when it really isn’t. To have that effect, you would need to deploy this to all customers long enough for them to organically switch back and forth between priority and regular enough times to notice the difference. That seems like it couldn’t possibly be better than the much simpler option of just implementing the priority behavior and reducing its effect down to zero slowly over time (which would be evil but isn’t the claim).
- michaelt 9mo ago
  > In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. If there are 50 deliveries per driver per shift and I want do deliver everything 5 minutes later, I don't need the driver to idle for 50 × 5 minutes. The driver only needs to start the first delivery 5 minutes later, at a time cost of 1 × 5 minutes. Then they finish it 5 minutes later, and hence start the second delivery 5 minutes later, without standing idle between deliveries. And if I pay the workers per delivery, that 1 × 5 minutes of initial delay doesn't cost me anything except worker morale.
- femto 9mo ago
  Beyond an initial effect when the delay is first implemented, adding a delay would increase the latency (waiting time) but not the throughput (utilisation of the system). It's queuing theory. A way to think of it is that the drivers that are made idle by adding a delay will be kept busy delivering previously delayed orders.
  - 9mo ago
nelsonfigueroa 9mo ago
Obviously the OP has no hard evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all true. I'm sure every major company dreams of dynamically gouging their workers and users like this.
tiku 9mo ago
Stop buying the overpriced slop. My hunger disappears when I see the prices for just a pizza.
nxtfari 9mo ago
Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.
- huhkerrf 9mo ago
  > designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?
  - vermilingua 9mo ago
    It’s not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook together and are more likely to discuss topics “uncomfortable” to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers, they will make noise and move.
  - Dansvidania 9mo ago
    IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms of the Employer/Employee relationship.
  - nxtfari 9mo ago
    I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.
samiv 9mo ago
Lots of people are sceptical of the reddit post. Yes sure the post can be fake but if you consider any gig economy business what incentives would they have for not doing this? Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the table.
- mgraczyk 9mo ago
  The incentives are that a lot of the specific claims would be bad for long term retention and would be embarrassing if made public. That doesn't imply it's fake but it's not obvious any company would be incentivized to behave this way
  - samiv 9mo ago
    Long term? If there was some future backlash and the company would suffer, that is someone else's future problem. The execs today don't care about it as long as they reap their financial benefit today.
written-beyond 9mo ago
These delivery apps are shady, maybe even outright fraudulent. I had my credit card on one of Delivery Hero's apps. Everything looked fine until I went through my credit card statement, I had up to 5 $10 to $15 payments made to delivery hero which were refunded almost instantly. Those charges weren't associated with a single order on the app, no emails, nothing. I assumed they were talking advantage of customers with credit cards on file to line their books. I removed my credit card from their apps, never going to save it in app for faster checkout.
BrenBarn 9mo ago
Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market" are always touting. How to be sure? Transparency requirements. I think we need way more transparency requirements. All sorts of financial and operational data should be publicly available.
- zmgsabst 9mo ago
  I think we should be much more strict with what constitutes “fraud”: If you sell me better service, but don’t treat me any better, you should owe me triple damages for defrauding me. And your executives should be prosecuted for directing fraudulent behavior.
  - akramachamarei 9mo ago
    Wouldn't that be a more loose definition of fraud? It's not clear how the behavior you described has any relation to fraud whatsoever.
mgraczyk 9mo ago
Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The claim is that the benefits fee does not go to the driver, but that is not possible in the only interpretation of the claim that matters. When the law in California was passed that caused these fees to be added. Drivers immediately started receiving benefits required by the legislation. Those benefits are paid by the delivery company. At the same time, the company added this fee. So the only question is, how much fee money is collected relative to the cost of the benefits? From a very coarse BOTEC, it seems that the fees are probably not enough to cover the cost (for doordash), so in fact the fees do go "100%" to the drivers, in the sense that more than the amount collected by the fee is spent on the legally required benefits the the fee is based on
Dansvidania 9mo ago
The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments below this article. The biggest and scariest achievement of this enshittified internet is how divided people are, and how ready they are calling bullshit on very plausible claims. I think the tech fields where companies rely on billions of tiny transactions are more susceptible to this kind of shadiness, but even in B2B saas we (grunt level engineers) were often asked to implement enshittification to either increase customer retention (EG: lets not give the users the API to exfiltrate their data and go to the competition, anyone?) or revenue or some other shit. Do (some of) you really think companies would NOT do this, unless its not only illegal but also strictly enforced? I wish I were living in the same optimistic world as you guys.
dsamarin 9mo ago
This is believable. I have a personal anecdote regarding "Priority Delivery". This was about 2 years ago. After watching the driver go to another business and house before me, I messaged support and they refunded this priority delivery fee. The driving tip and base pay accusation can be easily verified by testing tip amounts and asking drivers what they are awarded.
Fokamul 9mo ago
Library wifi and burner laptop? 1. Any serious IT person knows you don't need burner laptop with VM 2. Doxxed himself to said company in the same paragraph, nice. Fan fiction or really bad opsec. Also, anyone who drives for any food app in any country, knows it sucks.
phito 9mo ago
So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on, this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how you whistleblow effectively. To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge, passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.
gethly 9mo ago
I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the big bucks at the end of the month.
paulus_magnus2 9mo ago
Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing? I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.
Y-bar 9mo ago
Mostly believable. Even though I have never seen anything like it, I have worked with managers and product owners who have voiced a desire to do similar things. It is also clear that companies today (including the one I work at) often incentivise the dilution of responsibility so that nobody is cleanly attributable as the person who caused the system to be not just amoral, but actively detrimental to customers and other users in the long term.
HelloUsername 9mo ago
In case the reddit post gets deleted, here's the text: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust. Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless. And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.
forinti 9mo ago
There's very good restaurant in my neighbourhood that I order from regularly. I tried ordering directly from them after hearing about how nasty the delivery app company was. I thought they would appreciate it: they wouldn't have to pay the intermediary. But it turns out they prioritise the app and my orders took longer to arrive. So I'm back on the app...
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  I ask them what they prefer, sometimes they say call, sometimes they say app.
- dueyfinster 9mo ago
  It may be that they have no choice since it's their biggest source of customers. I spoke to a hotel receptionist before and she said the order of upgrades was: booked direct, booking.com, Expedia and all the rest after. The hotel couldn't afford to piss off booking as they would suffer a lot in occupancy, the other platforms couldn't match. I think it's worth giving the feedback to the restaurant direct and see if they can fix it. It's always a delicate balance depending on time and the app may penalize them.
  - ponector 9mo ago
    Once I've walked into the hotel and asked for a room. They said price 20% higher than listed on booking.com. When asked about this the receptionist said I can book there.
    - therealdrag0 9mo ago
      Booking.com maybe pre-booked the room and was willing to take less profit or even sell it at a loss where the hotel itself wouldn’t.
armchairhacker 9mo ago
Most of OP's claims can be supported or refuted by randomized trials. For example: > If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. Find lots of drivers. Ask some to log on at 10 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3PM and only accept high-paying orders, etc. See what kind of orders they receive after a while. The drivers you select are biased towards enrolling in trials, but I doubt that's significant. Even if so, the algorithm showing certain drivers different orders, who don't clearly perform "worse" in a way the study could observe, already seems wrong. EDIT: > If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. This is much easier. A single driver can provide strong evidence to support or refute this by showing the base pay and tip for their recent orders (AFAIK all apps show drivers these metrics). Unless someone (even a single person) has done this (on one of the delivery subreddits), there's strong evidence that OP is lying.
scoofy 9mo ago
I mean, regardless of whether or not this is true, the death of the consumer surplus is upon us. When that goes, the entire point of efficient markets goes with it.
anovikov 9mo ago
Isn't artificially delaying "normal" orders same thing as speeding up priority ones? I mean, it means executing priority ones out of queue. Unless they just force the deliverymen sit and do nothing for extra 5-10 minutes, which would be a waste of time and money for the company way above $2.99 so i don't think they do that.
StrLght 9mo ago
And so another myth was born, thanks to an anonymous fiction writer from Reddit! People still believe that "Uber raises prices when your battery is low!", and now they'll be parroting this for years to come. Great job.
everdev 9mo ago
Why is this flagged? Because it's anonymous? As a dev and a driver, I know these delivery companies are doing shenanigans like this.
rjrobinson 9mo ago
Dark Gamification. i wrote a whole blog post about this.
nunez 9mo ago
Ragebait or not, this post convinced me to delete my DoorDash account today. I'm the weird contrarian that really likes tipping. I didn't know that DoorDash uses tips to offset hourly wages. Abusing my wanting to give hard-working drivers extra is where I draw the line, and it's a damn shame that this is legal. I hope this gets more air time and lights a fire under these food delivery companies like the sex scandals did to Uber (a service I'm also seeking alternatives for, though that's another reply for another post).
- resonious 9mo ago
  I guess a cash tip is the way to go.
  - nunez 9mo ago
    No disrespect to you, but this solution is unacceptable. The onus should not be on customers to workaround corporate wrongdoing. DoorDash states that 100% of the tip goes to drivers. They conveniently omit that some of their base wages will be covered by the tip. That should be illegal, and paying drivers under the table gives DoorDash the right to keep acting badly, my convenience be damned. But let's say I was willing to gloss over this. The extra logistics just aren't customer-friendly. Drivers see te tip before they accept the delivery mission. I would have to tip normally (so that drivers will deliver to us), take out cash (which I almost never use), add logistics for giving them a cash tip, then drop the tip to zero post-delivery (which could mess with my rankings and threaten our future with the service). Tipping in cash is easier with something like Uber, where you'll already have cash on hand (because you're already out) and the money can change hands at the end of the ride. (To be clear: I'm not giving Uber a pass here. They also do shady stuff with driver payouts.)
    - njwi332 9mo ago
      The OP wasn't about doordash though, it was about uber (poster mentions the ride-sharing part of the business in a comment elsewhere). I don't believe DD is lying about 100% of tips going to drivers, particularly given Tony Xu also publicly denied this behaviour was happening at DD on his twitter
gverrilla 9mo ago
If people think what this guy is reporting is too much, they live in a fantasy world.
markus_zhang 9mo ago
Wow this is flagged, no wonder...
subculture 9mo ago
This was debunked by Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/ https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax...

623 points by apayan 9mo ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddi... Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com

zzgo 9mo ago
The comments didn't load, you gotta archive old.reddit.com in order to get 50 comments archived.

rationalist 9mo ago

I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice yesterday. His wish might be granted. > I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

deepfriedbits 9mo ago
Yeah that was either a tactical misstep, or a smart move if they fabricated the date or the fact that they put in in their two weeks.
- hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  Of course they did. You dont use a burner laptop then drop PII in the post. They may also not work for the company and just larp as a combo of stories they heard, or it is all made up for karma or kicks.
warmedcookie 9mo ago
Big brain play: he decided to post this when someone on his team put in their two weeks that he did not like.

lispisok 9mo ago

More evidence for my theory that the only reason Uber et al are able to exist is because they have an infinite supply of suckers signing up as drivers. Any McJob pays better now.

rpcope1 9mo ago
I remember when everyone was talking how we would all be gig workers and it was going to be the best thing ever. I am eagerly awaiting seeing whose legal department if any poop their pants tomorrow. Maybe if we're lucky we'll even see an 8-K soon.
- senectus1 9mo ago
  some countries do a better job of protecting their population from corp psychopath companies. Australia is one. but its not enough and the moment the right wing side of Gov gets in they start rolling back a lot of the labor law protections the left wing work at putting in.
  - servo_sausage 9mo ago
    The average gig worker here is a migrant, hard to see how that is protecting Australians.
    - senectus1 9mo ago
      no its more about protecting the people from the corps. not protecting the locals from the immigrants. Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue.
      - OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
        > Arguably, the latter isn't really a labor law issue, its an immigration quota issue. Immigration quotas should probably be considered part of labor laws though, given the impact immigration can have on wages and the job/housing market for natives.

ilvez 9mo ago

If this would come out for Bolt that my tip won't reach 100% to driver/delivery guy, I would quit using it. Lying to users about especially when they want to be generous is like fake beggars.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
It doesn't matter if 10% of users quit using it if the stolen tips from the other 90% more than cover it. And where are you going to run? The competition isn't any better.
- rasse 9mo ago
  You don't _need_ the competition, either. Just pretend it's 2005 and acquire food some other way.
- ilvez 9mo ago
  I think that's very cynical perspective. Probably you are correct, but if they were all corrupted, I could try starting my own. I'm probably naive but I still believe being ethical and profitable at the same time is possible.
  - literallyroy 9mo ago
    If it helps: they do not all work this way
  - em-bee 9mo ago
    being ethical and profitable is possible, but competing against the unethical is another matter. if a company keeps the tips they can charge lower prices. just like some restaurants pay lower salaries when waiters can rely on tipping (which is why i consider tipping itself to be unethical)
- dartharva 9mo ago
  Just buy food physically, or call up the eatery and order on phone directly?
- 9mo ago

eleventen 9mo ago

For context, this was removed from 4 other subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/

winterqt 9mo ago
Looks like some were automod and some just went into modqueue, only one was actually removed by mods.
abrookewood 9mo ago
Yet is seems entirely feasible.
zzgo 9mo ago
I got banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism for stating that we shouldn't be ripping on people for having a Coexist bumper sticker. OP getting their post rejected there doesn't surprise me in the least.

auggierose 9mo ago

So are we talking Uber eats here?

Nextgrid 9mo ago
I'm sure this isn't limited to any single company. It's just typical VC/techbro company playbook.
another_twist 9mo ago
For UberEats the listed prices are also different from when you order directly at the restaurant. Its not just he ridiculous service fees.
- swat535 9mo ago
  Yes, I was chatting with a local resturant and they said they have to put higher prices on Uber to cover the fees.
jonny_eh 9mo ago
Doordash has the $2.99 priority optional fee, I dunno about other services.

bilekas 9mo ago

I do use some of these regularly when I'm in a pinch but I would never even think to tip in the app itself. If I don't trust a company to pay the drivers a wage, why would I trust them to give them my tip! Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.

ramraj07 9mo ago
It used to be the case briefly (I think) that drivers choose your order after seeing the tip amount so as the poster mentioned, you would get only the truly desperate drivers if you dont tip. If whats written here is true (I honestly have no reason to doubt it) its disgusting and ill definitely not use these apps any further.
- bilekas 9mo ago
  I'm inclined to believe the poster also, I see no real benefit otherwise. I will say it's not a surprise at the very least, their business model was market 'disruption' to the point there are no alternatives as the customers will all be on the app. It reminds me of a related video of the Last Week Tonight about the food apps. Well worth a 20 min watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII

cedws 9mo ago

Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
Knowing the tech industry it sounds entirely plausible. I'm surprised people think this is news.
- ramraj07 9mo ago
  When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    You're not thinking like a techbro: there's nothing unscrupulous about A/B testing or "revenue optimization".
    - hackable_sand 9mo ago
      Techbros don't think, they just do.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- olalonde 9mo ago
  Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but other parts feel implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable. Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some liberties with the truth.

Nextgrid 9mo ago

Another food delivery app anecdote: they will always blame the restaurant for their lack of driver supply. I've had orders stuck on "preparing your food" for an hour but when I called the restaurant they said it's been ready for 40 mins and they're waiting for someone to come pick it up.

galkk 9mo ago
What is the chance that they will say things like “oops, we forgot about your order?” “Oops, we didn’t click button that it’s done and could be picked up”. I had situations where my order was forgotten/lost when I literally was sitting in the restaurant and waiting for my order. Yes, I’m sure that those companies have shitty practices, but unconditionally putting blame on them is not productive. The drivers and restaurants aren’t saints either.

AlotOfReading 9mo ago

"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the term "NPCs".

DharmaPolice 9mo ago
Human assets doesn't seem that much worse than human resources (other than familiarity).

neilv 9mo ago

If the allegations are true, then I think the writer needs to call up a good state Attorney General's office, and ask who to talk to. Though I'd guess that the alleged scummy company has seen this, and is already preparing their response, trying to purge any incriminating emails and PowerPoints, etc.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
Why would an AG care? This is a huge company stealing from poor people. The system is working as designed. They would not be so brazen in doing this (in relative openness with every developer being in on it) if they thought an AG would actually care. They do this because they correctly calculated that they have enough connections and/or bribes to preempt such an action.
- zzgo 9mo ago
  The California AG in particular wouldn't pass up any opportunity to get his name and accomplishments in the press. I get a weekly newsletter from him extolling his recent successes.
- neilv 9mo ago
  All the time, I'm reading about companies brazenly doing illegal things. We often see reports of state AGs taking actions against companies. My guess is that bribes of state AG offices would be unusual. (Do you have better information about that?) The questions on my mind would be how much resources an AG's office has to deal with corporate crime, and how a given crime would get triaged.
another_twist 9mo ago
Well the company might just donate to a certain library and get away scot free.

tbrownaw 9mo ago

A sprint planning meeting seems like the wrong place to put that topic. I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.

pdntspa 9mo ago
Why not? They have to implement the systems that power this. Also, water-cooler gossip
- zmgsabst 9mo ago
  I suspect it depends on the company — eg, at Amazon the tech team went out of our way to blind ourselves to what the tax analysts were doing; at a fintech startup, we knew intimate details of what clients were doing. This sounds like the kind of big-co where intentional segmentation and blinding would happen.
- tbrownaw 9mo ago
  It sounds like the sort of thing that would belong where items get enqueued into the backlog, rather than where a batch of things get finalized and dequeued.
zzgo 9mo ago
I used to write tests for a cryptocurrency trading platform. I regularly talked to the auditors, as they were the ones who made sure that the crypto we transferred into external wallets made it back into internal wallets after the test. I wouldn't say that I knew a bunch of accounting practices from talking to them, but I _did_ learn that the CTO and director of QA both lied to me during my interview. Sure, we made _some_ money from the spread as claimed in my interview, but in truth, the bulk of our money came from loaning our customer deposits to 3 Arrows Capital. I knew we were fucked _months_ before the company suddenly went under.
- another_twist 9mo ago
  Yup. Engineers do have visibility into fintech systems that they implement, maybe even more so than the bean counters since they can trace exactly which txns went where. These things are logged.

andrewinardeer 9mo ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/.JSON https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de... If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.

thrdbndndn 9mo ago
Your link is wrong. It must be lower case .json.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  https://archive.is/G2H0V https://archive.is/G2H0V

kombine 9mo ago

Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own food.

hussachai 9mo ago

> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. Why bother using library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop if he doesn't care anymore? Why give out the biggest clue, which is the time of his resignation letter? If the story is real, this company is a straight-up scammer waiting for the biggest headline and lawsuit of the year.

symbogra 9mo ago
It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.
- another_twist 9mo ago
  What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.
  - stingraycharles 9mo ago
    Unfortunately, there is a lot of fiction on Reddit these days, especially on subs like r/confession. I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”. This has been a longstanding issue, particularly in the era of AI-generated content.
  - renewiltord 9mo ago
    I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like that. Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice. Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.

dismalaf 9mo ago

Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really wouldn't surprise me.

5701652400 9mo ago

true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very, very, very toxic.

g-b-r 9mo ago
uhm, 13 people upvoted the single comment of this newly created account
- tzs 9mo ago
  How do you know how many people upvoted it?
  - bcook 9mo ago
    User has one comment and their karma is listed as "14" in their profile.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- pixelpoet 9mo ago
  HN is recently absolutely chock full of brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other. The "new" section is repo after repo created a handful minutes ago with AI slop. I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
  - nubinetwork 9mo ago
    > brand new accounts agreeing with and upvoting each other Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not being /r/politics...

renewiltord 9mo ago

[flagged]

zzgo 9mo ago
Upvoted for speaking your truth.
- renewiltord 9mo ago
  It's actually quite enjoyable to just tell tall tales on the Internet.

LostMyLogin 9mo ago

Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m inherently skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping. I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t. > If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first in case of a batched delivery. So, I’m guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders you are paying for normal service. [0][1] Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments so none of this really shocks me. > At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2] Regarding the desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well studied and verified. [3][4] The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered apparently. > In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new limits. > DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps. > In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database, DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5] > Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space. [6] The section on companies subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and led to millions in settlements. > On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.” > Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8] [0] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-different-delivery-options-work?nodeId=b11a4cf0-efb6-4334-96b4-b6ad34481253 https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-d... [1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers-pay-for-priority-delivery-then-both-get-dispatched-to-me-in-a-batch-order.458542/ https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers... [2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash-used-to-increase-its-logistics-experiment-capacity-by-1000/ https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash... [3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wage-discrimination/ https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag... [4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithmic-wage-and-labor-exploitation-in-platform-work-in-the-us https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm... [5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088 [7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-rcna193728 https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r... [8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-must-pay-254-million https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...

adrianwaj 9mo ago

Blockchain and split payments would work here. The transparency would be useful. Maybe even using x402? So buyers should be able to see where and how their money is going to be distributed after payment. How much does the driver get? How much is he/she earning? Comparable drivers can compare metrics. Perhaps unions could build some type of payment app and have gig workers use it as part of their employment contract? So gig workers end up like ebay sellers with a feedback, followers and sales data on display. They can take their profile with them to new employers as well. Buyers get a profile too. Funds could also be held in escrow, and refunds granted where applicable. I don't know.

dartharva 9mo ago
This is not a tech problem, it will not be solved by new tech. It is a civil problem coming from institutional degradation and corruption.
- sodafountan 9mo ago
  I actually disagree; the only way to get to the bottom of any wrongdoing here would be to do an external audit of their systems. That can get expensive and complicated. Using cryptocurrency with on-chain verification of the paper trail could actually solve this problem without having to get auditors and lawyers involved.
  - dartharva 9mo ago
    And who is going to allow upending the entire current infrastructure of payment processing and businesses? That's right, the government. If you were going to go through the government either way, the easier sell is to just make them do their damn job and prevent scammers from scamming.
    - sodafountan 9mo ago
      Yes, but the government is notoriously inefficient and ineffective. Bitcoin was started right under their noses (and I'm not just referring to the U.S government here, but all national governments), and it continues to operate all across the globe. It's kind of what makes it so interesting, you can't really kill it, it's like a good financial virus. I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure of payment processing and business has already been upended by Bitcoin alone. It's only a matter of time before we see layer-2 solutions like the one OP mentioned. Bitcoin might not be the best blockchain to target for small-scale financial transactions like delivery apps, but you catch my drift. Just about any blockchain would do in this scenario.

greatgib 9mo ago

With Deliveroo, I already caught the app lying. One time the order was stuck at "waiting for the restaurant/cooking" for a very unusual time, like 40 mins instead of the usual 10 mins. So I called the restaurant and they told me that the order was ready for like 25 mins but the driver didn't pick it up yet. When I called the custom service after that, they told me that the driver was finishing another delivery and will pick it up soon. But so the drive was trying to pin the delay on restaurant when it was their fault and that in the end you will get cold food.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
Same experience here, both with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I'm surprised this doesn't get them in trouble on libel/defamation bases.

joduplessis 9mo ago

> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I smell some bullshit.

pedrozieg 9mo ago
“In a library on a burner laptop” - but I’ll narrow it down to people who have handed in their notice on a specific day.

galkk 9mo ago

I can believe in each fact individually, but altogether (and that the author has exposure to all of that) it feels like just a rage bait. Here are red flags for me: 1. Priority delivery. Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people. So dispatch logic must be at least somewhat different. Also from engineering/product perspective the delay between priority and standard could be justified. To give rough analogy: FedEx can deliever package that I drop at 5pm to other side of the country at 9am, if I pay a lot of premium. It doesn’t mean that they can deliver all the packages with that speed and they deliberately slow down all other mail. 2. The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft” 3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business. 4. The benefit fee that goes into some “policy defense” - that I can believe in, actually. But again, emotionally manipulative add on (unions, your delivery guy homeless) 5. Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used. To summarize and repeat my point - I could believe some of the things individually, but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

another_twist 9mo ago
2. tip theft and pay the rent are valid terms here. 3. quite likely something like this will exist and it might not be called that right in the code base but it sounds like something that will show up in Slack conversations. From a pure ML perspective (throwing ethics out the windos, this is a good feature) 4. this one sounds sus because cash flow details may not be something a backend engineer might be privy to. 5. UberEats as well. Either ways its quite difficult to say whether or not this is true. But the post does say that tipping theft works by reducing base pay and having the customer pick up the tab. So its not so straightforward.
chrisfosterelli 9mo ago
> 3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business. This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like 'payrate sensitivity factor'

andoando 9mo ago

I can make the same post about one of the top apps on the App store. I was burning with such rage I never did. I supposed I felt in the end itd get no attention at all

charlie90 9mo ago

LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.

LostMyLogin 9mo ago
I wonder how many people believe my writing is AI generated because I have always overused em-dashes.
dartharva 9mo ago
This "LLM writing style" is how I write manually. Em-dashes could be an auto-correct function of whatever tool the guy wrote it in before pasting (likely Word).
halapro 9mo ago
In 2026 it doesn't really matter whether LLM wrote it, because people are lazy and will let AI write/rewrite their own short thoughts.
Tiberium 9mo ago
Yeah, it's surprising that people just blindly believe posts like that.

whatever1 9mo ago

Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever. During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride. At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF. From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes. How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.

anonzzzies 9mo ago
I know plenty of Uber (and normal taxis) drivers around the airport here who pick up a someone, then ask if they mind taking someone else. Because it is usually vans and business customers, they don't care and actually kind of like talking with other business guys who probably went or are going to the same seminar/conference etc. The driver will then load up whatever fits who are waiting for taxis or drivers and only report 1 person to the service. As this is hotel to airport to hotel, there are not many ways of uber, lyft etc detecting this unless someone rats them out. I asked a driver and obviously he responded with Uber screws me, I screw Uber.
- KeplerBoy 9mo ago
  How do people pay the driver? I guess cash isn't really a thing anymore in a lot of places. Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?
  - anonzzzies 9mo ago
    Many normal taxis drive also for Uber or Lyft as you need the license anyway over here. Not sure if you can be Uber AND Lyft at the same time. Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.

jacobrussell 9mo ago

I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting: https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416907dc41e/?ucc=U6WpTFqvPbR https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416... Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI detection. This came back as “Fully AI Generated.” It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure how I feel about it! Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things with a grain of salt as always.

jacobrussell 9mo ago
Here’s a fun steelman for the post being true: the author intentionally prompted an LLM to write the post in order to further anonymize themselves from their company.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
shaky-carrousel 9mo ago
If I were a whistleblower, first thing I would do is run my text through an LLM to obfuscate writing style.
mlrtime 9mo ago
Every time this happens the OP says they're not a native english speaker so they used AI to write it from their language or notes. Wonder if the tool can detect this phenomenon?

kaizenb 9mo ago

Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the operators. Humans such a disappointment.

mlrtime 9mo ago
>Humans such a disappointment. Compared to what, and idealized versions of ourselves? Or animals who rip the throats out of other mammals to eat?
- dxdm 9mo ago
  I think it's okay to be disappointed in the behavior of people who can make informed decisions how to act after taking consequences into account.
- kaizenb 9mo ago
  I guess I expect better from us, regarding our high intelligence as species. But probably you are right, there is an utopic vision of us in my mind.

HellDunkel 9mo ago

Another reason cash is important. Don‘t give up on it!

rich_sasha 9mo ago

If true (I'm not sure), this is kind of economics in action. There's a monopolistic market maker, screwing every last cent out of providers, with enormous power imbalances. The market maker is semi monopolistic, the labour is low-skilled, with little bargaining power and few better options. The "winners" are shareholders of the company and to some extent the end customers (who, other things being equal, would have to pay more for the labour). In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in. (I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes).

manuelmoreale 9mo ago
> In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in. (I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes). I think this is conceptually sound take but at the same time it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these decisions. Accepting to behave like a despicable human being and justify it with "well this is the system I operate in" is not acceptable for me from a moral standpoint. The economic system is awful, sure. But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a personal choice. There is no such thing as "corporations". It's people. From top to bottom. And people are responsible for their own actions.
- rich_sasha 9mo ago
  > it's way too kind towards the people who are on the field making these decisions. So I guess, nicer taxi corporations existed, and got turfed out by Uber and Lyft who managed to reduce prices or increase convenience, and are reaping the fruit of their investment. Capitalism in motion. I guess my fundamental point is, you can't fix this by putting pressure on companies to be nicer, because the ones being less nice will ultimately win due to better economics. If you want to fix it, change the law. Anything else is kind of shouting at clouds.

pfannkuchen 9mo ago

> we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison This in particular sounds very fake to me. If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders. In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization behavior, not evil and not what OP is claiming. In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. Which might be fine for a quick A/B test on a subset of customers, but as framed this is basically a psy op to trick customers en masse into thinking the priority order is faster when it really isn’t. To have that effect, you would need to deploy this to all customers long enough for them to organically switch back and forth between priority and regular enough times to notice the difference. That seems like it couldn’t possibly be better than the much simpler option of just implementing the priority behavior and reducing its effect down to zero slowly over time (which would be evil but isn’t the claim).

michaelt 9mo ago
> In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. If there are 50 deliveries per driver per shift and I want do deliver everything 5 minutes later, I don't need the driver to idle for 50 × 5 minutes. The driver only needs to start the first delivery 5 minutes later, at a time cost of 1 × 5 minutes. Then they finish it 5 minutes later, and hence start the second delivery 5 minutes later, without standing idle between deliveries. And if I pay the workers per delivery, that 1 × 5 minutes of initial delay doesn't cost me anything except worker morale.
femto 9mo ago
Beyond an initial effect when the delay is first implemented, adding a delay would increase the latency (waiting time) but not the throughput (utilisation of the system). It's queuing theory. A way to think of it is that the drivers that are made idle by adding a delay will be kept busy delivering previously delayed orders.
- 9mo ago

nelsonfigueroa 9mo ago

Obviously the OP has no hard evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all true. I'm sure every major company dreams of dynamically gouging their workers and users like this.

tiku 9mo ago

Stop buying the overpriced slop. My hunger disappears when I see the prices for just a pizza.

nxtfari 9mo ago

Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

huhkerrf 9mo ago
> designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?
- vermilingua 9mo ago
  It’s not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook together and are more likely to discuss topics “uncomfortable” to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers, they will make noise and move.
- Dansvidania 9mo ago
  IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms of the Employer/Employee relationship.
- nxtfari 9mo ago
  I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.

samiv 9mo ago

Lots of people are sceptical of the reddit post. Yes sure the post can be fake but if you consider any gig economy business what incentives would they have for not doing this? Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the table.

mgraczyk 9mo ago
The incentives are that a lot of the specific claims would be bad for long term retention and would be embarrassing if made public. That doesn't imply it's fake but it's not obvious any company would be incentivized to behave this way
- samiv 9mo ago
  Long term? If there was some future backlash and the company would suffer, that is someone else's future problem. The execs today don't care about it as long as they reap their financial benefit today.

written-beyond 9mo ago

These delivery apps are shady, maybe even outright fraudulent. I had my credit card on one of Delivery Hero's apps. Everything looked fine until I went through my credit card statement, I had up to 5 $10 to $15 payments made to delivery hero which were refunded almost instantly. Those charges weren't associated with a single order on the app, no emails, nothing. I assumed they were talking advantage of customers with credit cards on file to line their books. I removed my credit card from their apps, never going to save it in app for faster checkout.

BrenBarn 9mo ago

Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market" are always touting. How to be sure? Transparency requirements. I think we need way more transparency requirements. All sorts of financial and operational data should be publicly available.

zmgsabst 9mo ago
I think we should be much more strict with what constitutes “fraud”: If you sell me better service, but don’t treat me any better, you should owe me triple damages for defrauding me. And your executives should be prosecuted for directing fraudulent behavior.
- akramachamarei 9mo ago
  Wouldn't that be a more loose definition of fraud? It's not clear how the behavior you described has any relation to fraud whatsoever.

mgraczyk 9mo ago

Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The claim is that the benefits fee does not go to the driver, but that is not possible in the only interpretation of the claim that matters. When the law in California was passed that caused these fees to be added. Drivers immediately started receiving benefits required by the legislation. Those benefits are paid by the delivery company. At the same time, the company added this fee. So the only question is, how much fee money is collected relative to the cost of the benefits? From a very coarse BOTEC, it seems that the fees are probably not enough to cover the cost (for doordash), so in fact the fees do go "100%" to the drivers, in the sense that more than the amount collected by the fee is spent on the legally required benefits the the fee is based on

Dansvidania 9mo ago

The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments below this article. The biggest and scariest achievement of this enshittified internet is how divided people are, and how ready they are calling bullshit on very plausible claims. I think the tech fields where companies rely on billions of tiny transactions are more susceptible to this kind of shadiness, but even in B2B saas we (grunt level engineers) were often asked to implement enshittification to either increase customer retention (EG: lets not give the users the API to exfiltrate their data and go to the competition, anyone?) or revenue or some other shit. Do (some of) you really think companies would NOT do this, unless its not only illegal but also strictly enforced? I wish I were living in the same optimistic world as you guys.

dsamarin 9mo ago

This is believable. I have a personal anecdote regarding "Priority Delivery". This was about 2 years ago. After watching the driver go to another business and house before me, I messaged support and they refunded this priority delivery fee. The driving tip and base pay accusation can be easily verified by testing tip amounts and asking drivers what they are awarded.

Fokamul 9mo ago

Library wifi and burner laptop? 1. Any serious IT person knows you don't need burner laptop with VM 2. Doxxed himself to said company in the same paragraph, nice. Fan fiction or really bad opsec. Also, anyone who drives for any food app in any country, knows it sucks.

phito 9mo ago

So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on, this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how you whistleblow effectively. To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge, passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.

gethly 9mo ago

I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the big bucks at the end of the month.

paulus_magnus2 9mo ago

Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing? I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

Y-bar 9mo ago

Mostly believable. Even though I have never seen anything like it, I have worked with managers and product owners who have voiced a desire to do similar things. It is also clear that companies today (including the one I work at) often incentivise the dilution of responsibility so that nobody is cleanly attributable as the person who caused the system to be not just amoral, but actively detrimental to customers and other users in the long term.

HelloUsername 9mo ago

In case the reddit post gets deleted, here's the text: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust. Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless. And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.

forinti 9mo ago

There's very good restaurant in my neighbourhood that I order from regularly. I tried ordering directly from them after hearing about how nasty the delivery app company was. I thought they would appreciate it: they wouldn't have to pay the intermediary. But it turns out they prioritise the app and my orders took longer to arrive. So I'm back on the app...

mlrtime 9mo ago
I ask them what they prefer, sometimes they say call, sometimes they say app.
dueyfinster 9mo ago
It may be that they have no choice since it's their biggest source of customers. I spoke to a hotel receptionist before and she said the order of upgrades was: booked direct, booking.com, Expedia and all the rest after. The hotel couldn't afford to piss off booking as they would suffer a lot in occupancy, the other platforms couldn't match. I think it's worth giving the feedback to the restaurant direct and see if they can fix it. It's always a delicate balance depending on time and the app may penalize them.
- ponector 9mo ago
  Once I've walked into the hotel and asked for a room. They said price 20% higher than listed on booking.com. When asked about this the receptionist said I can book there.
  - therealdrag0 9mo ago
    Booking.com maybe pre-booked the room and was willing to take less profit or even sell it at a loss where the hotel itself wouldn’t.

armchairhacker 9mo ago

Most of OP's claims can be supported or refuted by randomized trials. For example: > If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. Find lots of drivers. Ask some to log on at 10 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3PM and only accept high-paying orders, etc. See what kind of orders they receive after a while. The drivers you select are biased towards enrolling in trials, but I doubt that's significant. Even if so, the algorithm showing certain drivers different orders, who don't clearly perform "worse" in a way the study could observe, already seems wrong. EDIT: > If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. This is much easier. A single driver can provide strong evidence to support or refute this by showing the base pay and tip for their recent orders (AFAIK all apps show drivers these metrics). Unless someone (even a single person) has done this (on one of the delivery subreddits), there's strong evidence that OP is lying.

scoofy 9mo ago

I mean, regardless of whether or not this is true, the death of the consumer surplus is upon us. When that goes, the entire point of efficient markets goes with it.

anovikov 9mo ago

Isn't artificially delaying "normal" orders same thing as speeding up priority ones? I mean, it means executing priority ones out of queue. Unless they just force the deliverymen sit and do nothing for extra 5-10 minutes, which would be a waste of time and money for the company way above $2.99 so i don't think they do that.

StrLght 9mo ago

And so another myth was born, thanks to an anonymous fiction writer from Reddit! People still believe that "Uber raises prices when your battery is low!", and now they'll be parroting this for years to come. Great job.

everdev 9mo ago

Why is this flagged? Because it's anonymous? As a dev and a driver, I know these delivery companies are doing shenanigans like this.

rjrobinson 9mo ago

Dark Gamification. i wrote a whole blog post about this.

nunez 9mo ago

Ragebait or not, this post convinced me to delete my DoorDash account today. I'm the weird contrarian that really likes tipping. I didn't know that DoorDash uses tips to offset hourly wages. Abusing my wanting to give hard-working drivers extra is where I draw the line, and it's a damn shame that this is legal. I hope this gets more air time and lights a fire under these food delivery companies like the sex scandals did to Uber (a service I'm also seeking alternatives for, though that's another reply for another post).

resonious 9mo ago
I guess a cash tip is the way to go.
- nunez 9mo ago
  No disrespect to you, but this solution is unacceptable. The onus should not be on customers to workaround corporate wrongdoing. DoorDash states that 100% of the tip goes to drivers. They conveniently omit that some of their base wages will be covered by the tip. That should be illegal, and paying drivers under the table gives DoorDash the right to keep acting badly, my convenience be damned. But let's say I was willing to gloss over this. The extra logistics just aren't customer-friendly. Drivers see te tip before they accept the delivery mission. I would have to tip normally (so that drivers will deliver to us), take out cash (which I almost never use), add logistics for giving them a cash tip, then drop the tip to zero post-delivery (which could mess with my rankings and threaten our future with the service). Tipping in cash is easier with something like Uber, where you'll already have cash on hand (because you're already out) and the money can change hands at the end of the ride. (To be clear: I'm not giving Uber a pass here. They also do shady stuff with driver payouts.)
  - njwi332 9mo ago
    The OP wasn't about doordash though, it was about uber (poster mentions the ride-sharing part of the business in a comment elsewhere). I don't believe DD is lying about 100% of tips going to drivers, particularly given Tony Xu also publicly denied this behaviour was happening at DD on his twitter

gverrilla 9mo ago

If people think what this guy is reporting is too much, they live in a fantasy world.

markus_zhang 9mo ago

Wow this is flagged, no wonder...

subculture 9mo ago

This was debunked by Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/ https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax...