alt Hacker NewsA confession from a mainstream food delivery app engineer
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Priority delivery has nothing to do with "speeding you up" on Uber Eats. It means you won't get bundled with another order and come second. So far I have never gotten that when I used it, and I did when I didn't. So that rings false. Also his other complaints are literally just every business in the world and how they act. As long as I value the service they give more than the total end money they take out of my account I can pay attention to the fees for myself. I know they aren't my friend.
"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, [..]"
The first paragraph already triggers all the red flags that the story is made up.
While I'm happy to believe any/all of that might be true, accepting unsubstantiated stories like this isn't a great idea. You really need to start with the assumption that all stories like this are fake until some kind of evidence is provided.
If I was going to do some kind of exposé of my employers I'd at least include some semi-obfuscated screenshots to add some credibility to any claims I might make. Sure, things like that can be faked but it at least would require more effort to do all that (and make them appear credible) vs just a bunch of raw claims.
(I also don't think it's a great idea to judge claims based on how believable you personally find them. That often just leads to confirmation bias as you're just reinforcing your own biases).
Probably spam. Author spread it across a lot of subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/
It was removed from all but one, so no mods of any community were able to verify identity (stuck in automod queue for some).
> 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.
It isn't at least for Wolt, which sells it as "delivery direct to you from the restaurant", rather than the delivery driver also doing other deliveries in parallel. This is quite easy to confirm given the realtime tracking of driver (and your food not being cold because they stopped at another restaurant on the way and had to wait 20 minutes).
> 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.
If you didn't care, you'd post the names
Takeaways:
Always tip in cash and never through the app
Don’t use priority delivery
Is unionizing in the Gig economy possible?
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563
Also, why did the URL not change to old.reddit?
its an awful coincidence that this sounds exactly like what id imagine the output of chat gpt to be after prompting to write creatively about the topic at hand
Unfortunately this is the end state for many gig for hire apps, uber, tasktabbit etc, I think food delivery is probably the worst because the customer does not interact with the contractor at all, compared to other apps, so you can’t even hear if the driver is getting ripped off on their end.
The tip stealing thing felt very similar to one thing I noticed last night during NYE was certain friends who used uber more had to pay higher for the same rides as me who never uses the app. There’s so much data singling both drivers and consumers out to maximize returns, it’s crazy