A confession from a mainstream food delivery app engineer
reddit.comUnfortunately 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
Uber charges more when you use gift cards. All of these companies are scum and need a heavy regulatory slap down.
> certain friends who used uber more had to pay higher for the same rides
That's why you always pit the techbros against each other and have at least 2 competing apps that you distribute your rides across.
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.
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).
And why use a libraries public WiFi on a burner laptop when giving so much specific information that basically doxx's yourself
well the post did say they were drunk and agree and "hopes they sue [them]" which would explain things not being well though-out
if it's a throwaway reddit account, the majority of subreddits have automatic rules that require a certain amount of karma before people can post
> 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"...
This is what made it feel fake to me. Even the most naive startups don't discuss these kinds of details with the dev team (or sometimes even the senior management) because it's not relevant to getting the work done. This alleged business is likely much larger and naturally siloed. Intent is not a success criteria, and things are always subject to change so why bake it into the code? Sounds like a terrible idea.
What would make way more sense is asking the dev team to expose configuration and stats. Dashboards are not suspicious because they are genuinely useful to the entire business, not just some evil inner group trying to squeeze a few percent.
I have had PMs and POs spend hours with the dev team spilling all the tea because they think it will help the devs better craft their vision. This particular aspect is very plausible to me.
yeah I've worked at a startup where there was one PM that tried really hard to get all the rest of the PMs to stop talking business with the engineers but it just didn't stick. It's too easy to talk about and especially an easy way for newer PMs to bond and gain acceptance with the devs
It's Reddit; of course it's fake.
I do congratulate this author, though. If posted it to a different site, I would believe it.
While management usually tries to hide the evil parts of the business, the nature of eyeing incremental gains is very typical of silicon valley where data cited numbers is the requirement for promotions
It's not even about trying to hide anything! It's not easy to coordinate any business unless there's a single source of truth external to any particular team.
It necessarily has to be need-to-know and decisions have to be based on dry explanations where the intent isn't clear at all unless you're sitting in on many meetings across many teams. This is just how things scale. I question where some people have worked that are commenting.
I've literally never worked anywhere that works like this, and I've worked everything from startups to very large companies. Product always gives both description and intent to software engineering so that engineering can make appropriate choices.
In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
If you're the builder working on an evil mastermind's evil lair, you may not be told, specifically, that you're building a piranha pit. But they will have to disclose that it they need a pit, which is also a freshwater aquarium with a means of keeping large carnivorous fish alive. Also that there has to be a hidden trap door big enough for a human to fall through when a button is pushed.
And even if it is given a codename like "the justice room" or something, during the months of design and building no doubt some people will slip up and call it "the piranha pit" in your presence.
> In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
I don't think we're talking about the same topic at all. It sounds like OP is so curious that they made the whole thing up, and I think you might be out of touch with businesses that have plenty of tech workers, but aren't a tech company (most businesses around the world).
I think you're starting from the conclusion that the poster made it up and working back from there.
Nothing in that article reads implausible to me, both that they were building things like "desperation score" (probably not called that, probably called something like "commitment" or something) and that any reasonably intelligent and curious engineer would have understood what he was building.
"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.
Maybe read more than just the first paragraph :]
I did. Didn't raise my confidence in the story.
"Burner laptop", really? Then "I put in my two weeks yesterday". Why put in the effort for a burner laptop and then dox yourself in the next sentence?
Nah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies pocket the tips, but this story smells.
> 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 $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.
It isn't at least for Wolt, which sells it as "delivery direct to you from the restaurant", rather than the delivery driver also doing other deliveries in parallel. This is quite easy to confirm given the realtime tracking of driver (and your food not being cold because they stopped at another restaurant on the way and had to wait 20 minutes).
Yeah, that seems utterly made up.
I live in an urbanish area, and if i don't set Priority Delivery then there's probably a 2 in 3 chance I'm stuck in a queue with "waiting on other delivery to complete".
About the only way to get my food while it's still warm enough to eat (because few of these drivers use heat bags) is to set priority delivery. And when I do, I can track it straight from store to my place. No 'waiting on other delivery' messages, not even blips of disconnectedness while the driver fulfills orders from other apps. Just straight to me.
This fee, I find, works better than tipping. Which is sad because in my imagination, I suspect the platform is keeping the fee rather than the driver. Incentives are completely messed up for gig deliveries.
If you care about your food being warm enough to eat, why not just pick it up yourself?
I got a glimpse of this "delivery economy" myself last week, so
Self pick-up was:
>2x faster (20min vs ~40min estimate, probably more in the end), could be better if I actually knew the area and picked a better parking spot
>1/3 cheaper (total dropped from 30$ to 20$. I'm not from the US, and make roughly 6$/hr, so the sum is more significant than it seems)
>food was probably generally more fresh, but I don't eat sushi much, so can't tell the difference
>also, food was probably less banged up, because I'm not on the clock and don't drive like a madman
some counterpoints:
> we were already driving home from somewhere, the place was the opposite way though
> we live in a dense city, but not too dense, so owning a car and driving it around is possible even on a not so large income, but everything is pretty close
Generally, my family never stopped doing things "the old way", we barely use any delivery services, taxi, and everything the gig economy is involved in. Likely saves us good amount of money in subtle ways. Also, specifically not giving money to those platfoms is a minor benifit in my book.
I get there are people who are disabled, busy (parents with small children, ...), and so on, but it seems to me that for most people the barrier is psychological, and is about task/mode switching more than actual time and effort.
All of these are trade offs people who get food delivered are aware of, its not new information.
The only one I disagree with is the "2x faster". Yes, the time from when you start thinking about food to eating food might be halved, but food delivery is basically zero time. I dont need to do the getting the food portion. So, 0 minutes vs 20 minutes.
Both can be true - in periods of high contention the priority delivery works as you'd expect, but in periods of low contention (where orders are not bundled anyway) the priority delivery option is still there, still costs the same, but doesn't do anything.
> 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
another takeaway is to just not trust these unregulated gig economy apps
Venture Capital subsidized gig economy apps until the dinosaurs of the previous economy (taxis, delivery services if any existed?) went extinct. So what now? Wait for regulation to catch up in an opaque at-will-employment industry with no unions?
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563
Also, why did the URL not change to old.reddit?
Saying “we call them human assets in the database” is a dead giveaway the author is lying.
No sensible food delivery company would do such a thing - it’s a scandal waiting to happen - so the maximum number of companies that would ever do such a thing is either zero or one. Therefore claiming they’re called “human assets” in the database would instantly uniquely identify the company and the company could then correlate with recent resignations and sue the crap out of this individual for violation of the NDA that they are making very clear they’re aware of and are knowingly violating.
Any sensible engineer would know all of this and would not divulge such a conspicuously specific tidbit. No matter how drunk they are.
Therefore, nothing else this person says is credible. Therefore I call bullshit on the whole thing.
This is why I give cash to delivery drivers.
No I will not tip in app, that is obviously a scam.
Is unionizing in the Gig economy possible?
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
There’s a tendency to treat the recent Uber revelations as uniquely egregious, but this framing misses the more important point: the egregiousness is not new, only the vector has changed.
Consider the nomenclature. Even during the Kalanick era, when “move fast and break things” was operational doctrine, you would not have seen internal naming this careless. I was there. We called drivers “supply” and riders “demand.” Clinical, yes, but accurate and apolitical. The language reflected the business model without editorializing about the humans within it.
What’s worth examining is not whether Uber engaged in questionable practices. Of course they did, and of course they still do. The real question is why the practices look different now.
Growth stage vs. profitability stage.
Uber in 2013-2016 was optimizing for growth. Uber in 2025 is optimizing for profitability. These are fundamentally different objective functions, and they produce fundamentally different behaviors. The perverse incentives remain constant; the tactics they generate do not.
Here’s the key distinction: growth-stage illegality and profitability-stage illegality carry asymmetric risk profiles. When Uber was in growth mode, the company had optionality. Infinite capital and public goodwill meant the growth team could deploy aggressive guerrilla tactics to enter new markets, absorb the legal consequences, and move on. The expected value calculation favored action.
Profitability-stage Uber has no such luxury. The levers available to a mature company fighting for margin are few, and they all point in the same direction: the humans. Drivers. The “assets.” When you squeeze there, you’re not circumventing a government. You’re directly degrading the livelihoods of your own platform participants. The reputational and regulatory exposure is immediate and personal.
This brings me to Spain.
When Spain blocked Uber from operating, we did not wait for lawyers to navigate the legal system. We shipped a technical solution. I watched this happen in real time.
Here’s what we actually built:
The goal was simple: keep the Uber app functional for Spanish drivers and riders despite the government blocking our server IPs at the network level. We needed a system that could rapidly distribute new, unblocked IP addresses to every app in the country without requiring an app store update.
The solution was a Lua interpreter embedded in the Uber app paired with a gossip protocol for peer-to-peer distribution. The Lua compiler allowed us to push executable code to the app dynamically. No app store approval needed. It was essentially a remote code execution backdoor into our own app, which was both brilliant and terrifying in hindsight. When a user opened the app, it would fetch and execute Lua scripts that contained the latest routing logic and server whitelist.
The workflow once it was live: when Spain blocked a batch of our IPs, our infrastructure team would publish a new IP whitelist. That list would seed into the gossip network, where each active Uber app became a node, sharing the updated configuration with other nearby apps. The propagation was exponential. Within hours, millions of devices had the new routing information. The Lua script would compile the updated whitelist and redirect all trip service requests to the unblocked servers.
The tech stack was essentially a censorship-circumvention system: Lua for remote code execution, gossip protocol for decentralized distribution, and a dynamically compiled IP whitelist that the app used to route around the blockade. Same playbook Tor uses for bridge distribution or how Telegram distributes proxy servers to users in Iran and Russia.
The Spanish government quickly realized they had exhausted their options. We forced the outcome, Uber was unbanned, and operations resumed legally.
Here’s the part that matters: it was illegal, but the illegality accrued to Uber’s benefit without harming users. Drivers kept driving. Riders kept riding. The Spanish government got cast as the obstruction, and Uber was welcomed back as the protagonist.
That’s the difference between growth-stage rule-breaking and profitability-stage rule-breaking. One makes you the hero. The other makes you a landlord squeezing tenants.