alt Hacker NewsI'm a developer for a major food delivery app
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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).
> 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.
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.
Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddi...
Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
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-d...
[1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers...
[2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash...
[3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag...
[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm...
[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088
[7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r...
[8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...
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.
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.
I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting:
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.
true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very, very, very toxic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the term "NPCs".
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.
The worst bit was when, at my major food app, we had a “cancer patient” score where we would just not deliver food to sufficiently terminal patients because we knew that they would be dead before the appeal process completed and we could reject and ask for arbitration. We’d win almost everything.
But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really wouldn't surprise me.
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.
Another reason cash is important. Don‘t give up on it!
> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.
I smell some bullshit.
Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own food.
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.
> 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).