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.
> It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing.
That's not exactly what they said. They said normal orders get artificially delayed and priority deliver orders get sent right away. They were clear that the real issue is that priority only exists because they actively made normal orders worse (I'd guess they actually took a few months of slowly backing off normal order time to get customers accustomed to the extra wait).
Yea, idk why this is even surprising. It's all sort of the obvious conclusion that these sorts of companies get to.
Facebook, dating apps, etc all do similar things with affinities and desperation to boost engagement.
The pearl clutching is just cope from people who haven't yet internalized that our industry encourages and glorifies deploying scummy practices at a huge scale.
Not sure its justified to put it in any bucket right away for couple reasons
- 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
The biggest red flag to me is the confident claims about where the money is going. I really don't think it's plausible to any extent that a backend developer for a major app would have any idea whatsoever to what account any particular fee is being deposited (they might know the account number if they worked on that area, but knowing that the account represents a legal fund or whatever is extremely unlikely).
You don't need to know the account or account number, just need to know the transaction logic, which most backend developer will know of as long as they work in that area.
If the product managers keep boasting about their new strategy (which I have seen in almost all companies I have worked for), even the juniors will know what's going on.
Except this is complete bullshit. Money is anonymous. Why would they have some kind of pipeline account that goes directly from the fees to political spend? Why wouldn't the fees just go to a generic revenue account and the lobbying would come out of the same account?
This is like claiming someone set up a special account where all their paychecks on rainy days get spent directly on weed. It makes zero sense.
Stick around any corporation (especially one that is heavily regulated and has a revolving door with the government) and you'll hear all kinds of stories.
I'd put this into that bucket of "someone I trust told me they heard the story from someone they trust". It means the story may not be true and they don't have any hard evidence, but they found it believable enough to repeat.
By that same token, couldn’t someone say, without evidence, your response is obfuscation and don’t trust someone telling you food deliver services are not taking advantage of people using an algorithm? Not that I think you are but neither response proves identity or motive.
Including evidence in a public post will out them to the company and make the upcoming lawsuit against them more serious by giving ammo to the company. The evidence should be given to the journalist OP will soon talk to.
