> 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.
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.
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.
Except the part the algorithm marks you as more desperate and from now on pays you less.
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)
Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.
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.
Well worth a 20 min watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII
- Terminology is realistic
- Everything mentioned is feasible and more or less thats how a business works on the idea of extracting maximum profit
- Caveat is, whatever has been called out is most likely legal so the company is legally playing by the rules, its just some ones moral compass that does not wants to accept it
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.
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.
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.
I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.
Also, water-cooler gossip
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.
If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.
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.
I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”.
This has been a problem for years, even more so in the age of AI generated content.
I would say what they describe about their employer is probably true. I’ve had similar experience of companies making every last buck off their “human assets” but thats how profit works: you take money off others in exchange for promised benefits.
Libraries are a haven of safety for leaking material once only. Burnout does not imply incompetent opsec. Neither does drunk; after all, it would horrify non-tech folks to realize how often impaired / intoxicated workers are using root privileges to fix an incident.
> The algorithm is a gigantic neural network, and as such essentially a black box, incomprehensible to the human mind.
Yeah right
I imagine this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Most political threads on HN are the same way, despite HN not being /r/politics...
But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.
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...
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.
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.
I smell some bullshit.
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.
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.
This is a good point. It'd almost certainly be called something like 'payrate sensitivity factor'
There is also a good chance that this person only has 2nd and 3rd hand information and much of the post is only partly true.
Re: 100% of tips going to the driver
I have heard that many of the services are required to at least pay minimum wage. Let's say that this is $20/hr. If they receive $15 in tips during that hour, the company reduces their wage to $5. Driver gets $20 for the hour, $15 in tips, $5 in wages. Yes, 100% of the tips goes to the driver. No, the driver isn't economically better off depending on your tip, unless you are a very generous tipper.
In California, there's AB578 [1], which makes that practice illegal. The poster's algorithm (set the wage before the tip, based on the predicted tip) seems like it might be an attempted workaround for that law. I think it adds credibility that the poster has insight on that algorithm, since they aren't claiming just the publicly known offsetting tactic.
Those are accurate descriptions of what's going on.
> With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.
Not at all unrealistic. These are meant to be internal.
> (unions, your delivery guy homeless)
When was the last time you took an Uber? They don't smell that well, and it's a known fact _a lot_ of drivers live in their cars.
> 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.
This only means that the entire tip amount goes to the driver, which is accurate. It doesn't preclude their other sources of revenue from being reduced, as described by OP.
> but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.
Very plausible he/she does. I worked for a similar company and as a software engineer of no particular rank I had access to everything, incl. code, documents describing features, cross-team meetings where those were discussed, etc. I also had friends across the teams who would talk about what they are working on all the time.
What occurs if your order is placed in a bucket of other priority deliveries? Doesn't that simply become a regular order? Also, AFAIK based on some digging, the drivers are not alerted to priority orders they are simply routed for it. That could have changed though.
> The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”
"New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a $16.75 million settlement with delivery platform DoorDash for misleading both consumers and delivery workers (known as “Dashers”) by using tips intended for Dashers to subsidize their guaranteed pay. Between May 2017 and September 2019, DoorDash used a guaranteed pay model that let Dashers see how much they would be paid before accepting a delivery. An Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that under this model, DoorDash used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned. DoorDash will pay $16.75 million in restitution for Dashers and up to $1 million in settlement administrator costs to help issue the payments." - https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-...
> 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.
This was proven out multiple times in court with millions in settlement fees across different companies. For example, one suit alleges Instacart “intentionally and maliciously misappropriated gratuities in order to pay plaintiff’s wages even though Instacart maintained that 100 percent of customer tips went directly to shoppers. Based on this representation, Instacart knew customers would believe their tips were being given to shoppers in addition to wages, not to supplement wages entirely.”
Leading the CEO to release the following:
“After launching our new earnings structure this past October, we noticed that there were small batches where shoppers weren’t earning enough for their time,” Mehta wrote. “To help with this, we instituted a $10 floor on earnings, inclusive of tips, for all batches. This meant that when Instacart’s payment and the customer tip at checkout was below $10, Instacart supplemented the difference. While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips as a part of this guarantee was misguided. We apologize for taking this approach.”
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? Insane.
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.
apayan•2h ago
Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com
zzgo•1h ago