Uber's experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice drivers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have to say that as a USER, I've noticed this change (I think it's been fairly recent) that they assign you a driver who hasn't yet finished a trip.
What ends up happening is Uber tells you an "estimate" of 3 minutes to arrival before you book. Then it assigns the driver and says "10 minutes" to arrival, but the driver hasn't even dropped off their last passenger yet. So, what's happened multiple times is that the 10 minute estimate ends up staying at "10 minutes" for 5-10 minutes straight and 15-20 minutes after I booked, the driver shows up.
I would understand this if I ordered an Uber pool, but I ordered a black car and it still operated like that.
I'm not sure when they made this specific change, but I've noticed it a lot more in 2017 and overall I've been really disappointed with the uber app this year as they seem to be trying to over-optimize everything to the hilt and it's starting to backfire
So, they give you a pie-in-the-sky estimate, you wait ten minutes, realize it's still gonna be an extra 10 minutes and then cancel because you can grab a taxi right there and they want to charge you a cancellation fee.
I understood that when they were at least close on their estimate times, but now it just seems like they're intentionally being difficult.
This would need to stop - how many of the clients file a dispute? Maybe a large percentage of HN readers - but not so much from the general public. Uber wins money it never was entitled to. No service provided, no pay.
I see now why legislation might have been the better choice, after all.
People in that demographic tend to, in my experience, not put forward the effort to get things like that refunded. Even though the money is important to them, it's frequently conditioned that it will take hours of time and effort to recoup the $5, and that's hours and effort they simply don't have.
Whether or not it actually takes that amount of time is irrelevant. The problem is that people expect it will take too much of their time to deal with and simply let the money go.
This is yet another example of Uber treating their customers like shit. If it's easy enough for them to determine that the cancellation was legitimate and issue the refund, they should do so proactively. Waiting for customers to complain before returning money they collected for a service they did not provide is as user-hostile as anything else they do.
I will never give another dollar of my money to Uber.
I reckon a class action regarding this scummy behaviour will be filed soon.
Whether it works out in favor of consumer is a question. I would probably not use uber in the first place.
The difference between the two might be less than many would think.
Also with dispute, you are sending business a message: if they charge you for their mistakes (in scheduling), you'll look for disputing (which costs them around 25$/dispute, i believe?).
Grab Taxi has now taken much of the market and do not require a credit card. I will never use a hailing service requiring a credit card, and as such I can never be charged a cancellation fee.
Furthermore, when the estimates are more than a couple of minutes off as GP suggests, Uber waives the cancellation fee.
In general, I find Lyft is wholly more pleasant, both as an app and as a customer.
I've also had times where the charge was more than it showed upfront. I think what's going on there is I'm let off and the driver marks it as the location I left, which is a tiny bit away from the original destination, so it recalculates the fee and no longer uses the fixed fee. They should be able to tell if the dropoff location is within say 1000 feet of the expected destination and not charge more.
Each time this happened on a busy Manhattan avenue where I watched empty yellowcabs fly past for 15 minutes. Totally infuriating. Used to take a few per month but now haven't taken an Uber since September.
Occasionally this behavior will be described as linked to riders in annoying locations or with low ratings but usually it's uber they're targeting
I suppose the bar set by cabs is really low, since I've never worried about an Uber driver mugging me or kicking me out in an empty industrial park, but it's still ugly. I'd pay more for something that was just "cabs, but we actually don't scam you".
Maybe its worth having a cup of coffee in hand to drop on the upholstery if the driver tries that trick.
You can contact support for a refund, but I don't know if that data is connected back to the drivers doing it - I doubt it if the trick is still popular.
Maybe things have improved recently but their corporate behavior hasn't given me much reason to start using the app again.
I'm not sure why they don't just decline the fare, but maybe they don't see the destination until they accept and they don't want to go there, or maybe Uber penalizes them for declining too many fares and this is a hack around that.
Okay fine. Whatever. Get to my place, and oh, it's 80 bucks. Seriously?! Okay fine. I tipped him anyway because that's what you do. Threw 20 bucks down for an even 100. Not the worst I've been screwed. And getting to smoke in the car on the way home was kind of nice.
Fucker charged me $140.
Read all the other complaints here. There is very little difference between Uber and Lyft and the age old cab companies.
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It's been my experience that, when calling, I've never waited less than 20 minutes for a cab and often have waited an hour. It's amazing that taking the bus is quicker than calling a cab. Once I actually was unable to even get through. I was in a small hotel lobby and the owner offered to give me a ride instead. Later on, in another hotel lobby, I paid it forward and offered to give a lady a ride to the airport when she was having trouble getting a cab on the phone.
I guess my point is, for all its flaws, Uber is still better than a taxi in less populated areas....
I was in a rush to the train station and accidentally booked a pool. I cancelled within a few seconds and booked an Uber X, but they still charged a cancellation fee.
And I was in a rush because the first pool I booked that morning didnt show up (he called and asked me to cancel).
They'll pop a message saying something like "Sorry about that your driver had to cancel. But don't worry there are other drivers". But then you check your ride history and you've been charged $5.
Downright unethical and should be illegal.
I don't think this feature has much to do with behavioral science, more to do with combating the previous behavior which was drivers starting a Lyft ride as they get near the end of a Uber trip and vice versa.
They give you 3 times that are all not the same thing (but are obviously insinuated to be).
1) It gives you the 3 minute estimate. 2) Then says that Joe is completing a ride 5 minutes away 3) And then he drops the person and they say he's 5 minutes away (this is 5 minutes after you initially requested).
You could make a case that they're technically not lying because [1] is an estimate, [2] is a truth and [3] is the actual, real ETA but the whole thing is obviously confusing, deceitful and makes for a terrible user experience.
Uber has been like Teflon so far, and Lyft is no Budweiser, but do I wonder if there's a tipping point.
[0] http://www.philcooke.com/the-schlitz-mistake-and-what-beer-c...
I've stopped using Uber because this happened to me the last 4 times I've tried to book one.
I feel like it's bait and switch. I have better luck to just walk toward a busy road and hail a taxi.
I started using Lyft because they allowed me to tip the drivers after a ride. So I preferred Lyft whenever I knew I would be a difficult passenger (like when I have to take my cat to the Vet or my wife is sick and she might have (and did) throw up in the car). The idea was that I would just tip the driver at the end of the ride for the extra trouble caused.
Months later when my ratings were tanked, some driver told me that I had really low rating on Lyft and that I seemed like a nice guy to have the low ratings. It turned out Lyft pooled the tip money together and paid the driver at the end of the week. So now tipping had no meaning other than 'just give your driver some extra money anonymously'.
I attribute this behavior to simple stupidity on the part of Lyft. Since then I just use Uber and pay all my tips in cash everytime I think it would be a problem.
this is the type of organization uber likes to run. these are the types of experiments they're comfortable with green-lighting. i wonder what else they're concocting.
I have noticed this over the weekend as well. Got an estimate of 15 minutes (which is much more than usual). After 7 minutes the car was still 15 minutes away and it was even further! Had to cancel, got charged, used my own car as I was already late.
This has happened in Vilnius. What fascinates me most is that how a single shift in software behaviour has an instant impact on people lives around the world. Makes me think what economical impact would happen if it unexpectedly stopped working (or worse behaving as expected).
I looked up from my phone and found a cab within 10 seconds. $8 ride. Nice guy.
Unfortunately, we are starting how easily small changes to the business model can impact user experience at companies like Lyft and Uber. Ride surcharges, cancellation charges, getting connected to over-busy drivers...It seems simple in concept but the execution is really hard, as taxi cab companies are aware. They just don't have billions in VC money to cover up the problems.
This just seems so crazy to me. A company who's very foundations are built on its number one assets: drivers has been neglecting them. It's like an airline neglecting its pilots or hospital neglecting its surgeons. Without drivers, Uber dies. I know they're investing in self-driving vehicles, but self-driving Uber's are a long way off after a spate of incidents and the pending Waymo lawsuit. It's going to take many more millions and countless lobbying to adopt laws for self-driving vehicles.
Seems to me that Uber see their drivers as temporary pawns in a long game of chess. Eventually, Uber hopes to replace their drivers with self-driving vehicles a dream they've been aggressively trying to make happen. What a horrible business.
This is such a mindblowing thing to me; as you can't throw a rock without finding site after site, blogpost among blogpost among forum post among social media share/tweet/post of this-among other instances of Uber conducting some very ugly, clandestine business that screws drivers over and because they're so damn convenient people just ignore it completely at best-shoot the messenger with a .50 caliber barrage at worst.
None of this is more prevalent than in my city subreddit of /r/austin where people are convinced that the city banned Uber/Lyft when every news outlet in the city wrote at length how the former bought a referendum over fingerprinting rules (which Uber complies with in more profitable cities), lost said referendum vote, and then left of their own volition after targeting a(n admittedly unpopular) councilwoman.
That hasn't stopped the overriding narrative that we forced the company out unfairly.
It's a weird phenomenon to behold. They treat their workers like utter crap; I wonder if you took some of the tactics they employ, apply them to any other sector and make them as public as Uber's have been-if anyone would stand for it. Or does the convenience factor of Uber compared to a cab make it easier for people to engage in rampant whataboutism?
Yes you can. Here in Australia literally nobody that doesn't browse HN gives a fuck. I can't name one person I know IRL that knows anything about Uber other than that it's 1000x better and more convenient than the taxi service here.
I know a lot about how Uber works, and I still use them, because the experience is so much better.
What stands out for you in Ubers? I actually prefer the atmosphere of a cab - I really dislike the whole "let's be friends haha have a mint what music do you like I'm a Cool Guy™" Uber thing, I find it super corny and transparent. You're not my friend if I'm paying you for a service, and I know you're just gaming me to get your stars or a tip.
They thought they'd get to self driving cars pretty quick. They didn't (yet).
Sorry but that's a really bad comparison. In Europe pilots go on strike all the time due to the abuse.
Uber is still built on vc rounds and it's foundation is the idea that they might be a monopoly if they can survive enough to drive all competitors out of business.
That foundation is shaking, but they're not ready yet to compete at market prices. I fully expect more shenanigan involving messing with drivers, as they are not ready to pull out the veil they put in front of the customers yet.
Works incredibly well on mobile devices too.
Obviously a lot of the things in this article are gross (why the hell does Uber give out badges?), but forward dispatch makes a lot of sense. It convinces drivers to work longer hours by making them more money. Driver downtime is uniformly terrible - it delays rides, diminishes Uber's revenue, and cuts drivers' wages. It's textbook market inefficiency (unmet supply and demand at once), and reducing it is a win for everyone.
Some of the things surrounding forward dispatch are messy, yes. It makes for inaccurate estimates, activating it every login is ugly, and deploying it without a pause button was malicious or idiotic (remember that drivers take hits for rejecting rides). But why is a central piece of this article a claim that a driver-requested, wage-increasing feature really just undermines self-control?
This is the exact reason why I find it hard to take seriously anything anyone says about Uber on the internet. The completely one-sided 'discussion' is so divorced from reality - if there was really nothing positive to say about Uber, why do people still choose to use and drive for them?
If Uber is an improvement over status quo, stop trying to bring them down for not being perfect. Sure, talk about how Uber could be better. But 'Uber is evil ZOMG never use them' is counter-productive.
It's also a little much to suggest that Uber is merely "not perfect". Its business model has always been predicated upon the near-term advent of self-driving car technology, which has clearly not occurred quickly enough to make the company sustainable. That being so, Uber's instead been forced to fall back on tactics toward its drivers and customers which are widely regarded with what we might charitably call considerable distaste. As such, Uber itself has become ripe for disruption, and I think that's the intent toward which "Uber is evil ZOMG never use them" is ultimately directed - the underlying reasoning being that Uber, having been designed around an unsustainable model, is pretty much screwed no matter what happens, and the question now is how to limit the extent of damage it can do before its inevitable collapse and replacement in the market by more sustainable competitors and successors.
if there was really nothing positive to say about Comcast, why do people still choose to use them?
Uber have had mapping cars for quite some time - they also acquired Bing Maps from Microsoft in 2015.
I didn't see any mention on d3.js in the js libraries being pulled in, so not sure.
I wasn't set up all that well to begin with. Long day at work, tired. My phone was close to dead. So euphemism for hooking up or not, I went home with her. And she's legit trying to move stuff. So I start helping out. She has a lot of art, and she's telling me really specifically about where to put stuff. I take one painting and put it where I thought she wanted it.
That was not where she wanted it. Because the way I placed it in the closet it was touching some of her clothes. This was not okay. And she flips the fuck out on me and starts screaming at me about how I don't care about her things.
Okay, okay. I'm sorry. We're cool now, right honey bunny? We're cool. She's cool. So then we're trying to move her biggest piece out of the living room. It's an 8'x15'-ish mural. Large. Heavy. We get it off the wall hooks holding it up, and she straight up drops her end of it, causing the corner of the thing I was holding over my head to crash down on my face. The corner landed straight on my left eye and cut me on the eyebrow before sinking into the eye itself.
And then she starts screaming again about how this is what I deserve for disrespecting her art.
At this point, I'm out. I just left. I left my man purse and everything. Did not care. Just wanted out. Because this woman is crazy.
I had about 5% on my phone at that point, and I tried to get an uber to take me home. Got a connection to a driver, and my phone died. About this time, I started feeling really sketchy. Like something was wrong. Not wrong in a "I've had too much to drink." but more like, "There are probably drugs involved here." And I don't do drugs.
Uber driver never showed up. I woke up in my apartment about 8 hours later. Have no idea how I got there. Judging from the way my legs felt, I suspect I walked the whole way home from Williamsburg to Ditmas Park. My entire face was caked in blood, and I had to get 6 stitches put in my left eyebrow and a badly blackened eye. Also ruined my favorite sweater and jeans. I mean, it was a date. I was dressed up nice.
Bonus points to Uber for charging me the cancellation fee. I get it, they are not an ambulance service or a medical team. But come on, you have to have a better solution to a user whose phone dies than, "fuck you. give me five bucks."
I don't know Android well enough to say, but my instinct is that every mobile device capable of running the Uber app has a low power mode. The app should be able to query the state of the phone to determine whether or not the user is likely to lose power before the pickup occurs.
But of course, doing that would require that the Uber app was honest about when the driver is actually going to get to the rider.
There are solutions to this problem. I don't know what all of them are, but I guarantee you that they exist. It's not that hard of a problem.
And we also don't know how much of a problem that cancellations are in reality. And we don't know how much of this hypothetical problem is actually caused by drivers fucking with things.
So, I dunno, I think your question involves a lot of assumptions that aren't really correct. Like, not even remotely. You're pretending there's a legit problem, where we have no evidence of one.
> I don't know Android well enough to say.
> It's not that hard of a problem.
Even if you could get this to work it's not at all obvious that it's desirable. Right now the system is simple, you order a car and for some reason the app turns off, you get charged a cancellation fee. That's a hard problem to solve.
What if you have one Uber and two customers who'd like to order it, one with 3% battery and one with 97%? Should the risk of sending the car to the user with 3% battery purely be assumed by Uber?
So its not whether its possible to do this or not. It's whether its something you want to do. An elegant middle ground can be attained by putting phone in power saving mode or by asking for an alternative phone number ( of your date ??) in case the battery is dangerously low .
[0] "'We absolutely don’t use that to push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting psychological fact of human behaviour.'” - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/05/22/uber-app-can-...
My team claims the brisket was worth it.
Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got home? Was that because of the injury?
As far as Uber charging cancellation fee, I don't think they have a way to know if your phone died. For them, it's equivalent to the driver being unable to contact you.
I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose.
As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve.
Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP.
In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee.
That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks.
That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.
User agreements are irrelevant--or at least a cheap cop out--for defining how a distributed system behaves in failure cases. In this particular case, I was where I was supposed to be, but I had an actual network partition event. My phone died. It's not really an analogy at this point. It's an actual P partition event. And Uber's default choice in that case is to assume the rider is no longer there. That's a bad practice, in reality.
No one would tolerate a data store that behaves this way.
It should be obvious that a network of drivers and riders and a coordinating piece of software that links the two of them up has every characteristic of a distributed network.
Instead of considering an abstract CS theory, let's talk about reality. Reality is that you ordered a service and then weren't Available to receive that service, so the other Party was due some of your Cash because that's the user agreement you signed. Saying this is a copout won't get you very far in the real world of law.
I was at the right place at the right time. Uber assumed I wasn't because my phone ran out of juice.
Reality is that in a case of a literal network partition, Uber says, "Fuck you. And by the way, pay us 5 dollars."
Since you were in the right place, you shouldn't have been charged, and I agree Uber is wrong how they treat this. The phone dying case is an interesting twist because the driver couldn't call you, but s/he shouldn't have needed to.
I was definitely in the right place, but my phone died. Is it the correct response to assume the rider is either not at the right place or was and has moved on?
I don't think that's the right approach. We wouldn't do that with a distributed system. A node in a network that isn't getting response from other nodes--particularly slave nodes--doesn't mean the node is down. It might just be busy with something else. You don't know. Assuming that it's not accepting data is the wrong way to handle this scenario. It's a problem.
In this case, I'd call it a committed write that wasn't successfully transmitted to the rest of the system. I was told a driver was on the way. I was there, and the partition tolerance said, "Aww fuck this guy." to Uber's system. That's pretty bad.
If you want to think of it in human terms or in business terms, that's fine. But I think that CAP theorem is the best way to handle these situations from a tech point of view.
The driver didn't need to contact me. All the driver had to do was go to the agreed location and pick me up. But Uber prevented that by cancelling the trip when my phone was no longer in service. That seems broken to me.
If you have some money though, you can just use a nice car service which will come with a professionally dressed driver and doesn't smell like cigarettes.
- Pay workers more during rush hours, and less during other times. This could be surge pricing, or the platform choosing to not take a commission during rush hour, and take a higher commission than normal during off-peak hours.
- Tell workers they should be available from 8 AM to 11 AM and 5 - 8, at least four days of every work week, but are free at other times to work or not work.
I don't think it's necessary to have employees to make them available at certain times.
Edit: typo
Supply and demand -- what will those crafty manipulators at Uber dream up next? The author makes it sound like some kind of voodoo magic.
1. When driver's are about to log off, it tells them that they are very close to reaching an earnings target, such as "You are $6 away from making $40 net earnings". The target is set by Uber, and is always just out of reach.
2. Uber suggests to drivers that they should go to a certain area for better chance of finding riders. The article says this might be an example of where Uber benefits at the expense of drivers because Uber does not prefer surge pricing.
3. Uber prompts drivers to accept the next fare opportunity before the current ride is over.
4. Uber tells new drivers when they are 50% towards the goal of 25 first rides. At 25 rides Uber will pay a 'signing on' bonus.
5. Some Uber employee's would pretend to be women when communicating with the (overwhelmingly male) drivers.
6. Lyft did a split test of two different calls to action: (a) "You're losing $15 per hour by driving on Tuesday mornings instead of Friday evenings"; and (b) "You would make $15 per hour more by driving on Friday evenings instead of Tuesday mornings". They found that (a) was more effective, but eventually decided not to use this approach [for reasons not explained in the article]
7. Uber provides non-cash rewards to drivers in the form of 'badges' like "Above and Beyond", "Excellent Service" and "Entertaining Drive". It also gives drivers stats like how many trips they have taken in the current week, how much money they have made, how much time they have spent logged on and what their overall rating from passengers is.
2) Also how driver get the most rides helping to maximize their earnings. In fact isn't this the whole point of surge in the first place? To push drivers to high surge areas? I would hardly call this a "psychological trick" and is very reasonable.
3) How is this a "psychological trick"? This clearly is in the drivers' benefit as it helps maximize the number of rides they take. All their time becomes productive if they get dispatched to another trip ahead of their current trip ending. Also, it's clear this makes Uber more efficient as a platform as they can treat occupied cars as active supply.
4) Is this not simply providing transparency of the bonuses/incentives Uber is offering?
5) Weird but even weirder that it works. Not the first time I've heard of this. Apparently works on emails too. A number of companies use this. A quick google show's it's well known.
6) Not shocking. Seems like relatively standard A/B testing of copy.
7) Some of this is gamification and some is transparency. All standard.
This article to me largely seems like an attempt to play on the recent many bad deeds of Uber for a click-bait article that deliberately perturbs some facts to fit the narrative. This article could very easily have been written about any other company in the world. But writing it about Uber now, generates clicks and upvotes.
Parents manipulate their kids a lot, but with the kids' very best interests in mind (mostly :)).
In Uber's case, they let drivers work whenever and wherever they want, but give them strong suggestions about where they should be.
Obviously employment law wasn't designed to account for the kinds of businesses we have today, and I think a strong case could be made that it needs to be rethought entirely, but regardless, Uber is certainly benefiting a great deal from their relationship With their drivers and how they are able to use data to motivate them as opposed to outright telling them what to do.
That is sort of odd. Most people can tell male and female from voice alone ... plus it would be easier to hire women as they dont need to pretend to be women.
This is a pretty troubling way to phrase using behavioral science to manipulate your employees.
Encouraging drivers to locate in busy areas does not require behavioral science.
Isn't this pretty common across all companies? Can the HN modifying the ranking of articles be categorized as user manipulation and evil?
Were there any other signs that things were gonna turn out like they did with that lady, before the picture escapade?
I'm starting to think that born and raised in NYC is itself a flag.
Anyway it all depends on the contents of the conversation, how he request was made etc.
^^^ I find it incredibly sexy when someone attractive does me a nice favor.
I got drugged by a woman on OkC as well. It was in Seattle however and no furniture removal was involved, but it was an equally bad situation.
It's okay to laugh about it in retrospect.
No one got raped. And I learned a lesson. Sort of. I kind of want to hang out with her again. That kind of crazy is a little hot.
I mean, sometimes you just need to put your dick in crazy. Even when you know it's bad idea.
(I'm trolling you, by the way. I can't not troll you. You're like my boss who hates it when I shoot him in the crotch with a nerf gun in client meetings. I just have to do it. 38-year-old me will never stop acting like a 12-year-old. But trolling is nicer than downvoting.)
Given that there was no consequences for this woman's actions, what are the chances she did or will do this again to another person?
maybe you should take a look at this [1]
/petpeeve
If common sense triggered my pet peeves that much I'd have to stay out of internet comments.
you are policing what people are allowed to laugh at, no one claimed it wasnt fucked up, but that doesnt mean they cant laugh, laughter is one of many ways to cope with trauma.
you are either being intellectually dishonest by trying to reframe my argument incorrectly, or you didnt understand it in the first place
I'd say it's a tad intellectually dishonest to frame my argument that way in the first place.
I don't know, as a pretty recent transplant from Texas to NYC, I find a lot of things to be fucked up here. I have a choice about how to respond. I can get very deeply upset by how messed up everything is, or I can accept responsibility for my choices, realize when I've made a bad one, and find some humor in the situation while I make a mental note to not do that again.
Did you ever file a police report or anything? Sure, it could be your fault for getting yourself in that situation, but this person sounds violent/dangerous.
Glad you're ok. What a strange occurrence.
But outside of that context, given the drug part, it does seem that this "crazy" woman's actions were likely on the same moral level as armed robbery or attempted rape, so all else being equal, I would prefer that someone called out any external brushing-aside of that aspect. Being white and privileged does not a legal victim make ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Either is possible though.
For those that didn't google her. The first hit I got was a blog post about her sexual harassment at Uber.
After reporting the incident: "I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense")."
Corresponding Hacker News submission.
Also, there was no externally substantiated non-anonymous evidence backing up her assertions.
The fact that a blog post with no evidence can still linger in peoples' minds is troubling.
Classic. Men are predictable, and Uber is predictably amoral.
"Ya shoulda tarned bak dare, ya fakkin twit! Now you're making me recalculate! Whazza matta wit ya?"
I decided to go the HackerNews of that particular industry, except instead of using my own account, I decided to make a fake one with an avatar of an attractive but non-famous female. Basically it looked like it was a genuine personal photograph rather than a professionally shot photo you would've found in a magazine. I basically posted one post, introducing myself and asked if anyone had an idea of salary ranges for that city given a specific job position.
Holy. Crap. The number of replies I got was unbelievable. I think on average threads on that news site had double digit responses but this one had over 100. I even had people private message me to say they wanted to interview me despite not including any links to a personal website or resume.
I've had to explain to a few people (including my wife) that it's not a gender confusion thing at all, it's purely for the perks.
It's ridiculous how far people will go to help a "woman" online.
(Serious question by the way, this is an interesting idea)
People seem to start from a more eager position of "How can I help this person?" rather than the more typical "Does this person deserve help?" attitude support channels tend to have. The nature of the discussion is more clarifying than patronizing.
I suspect the idea of a female disarms the typical competitive "Which of us knows more?" attitude discussions tend to take in IT circles and without that in the way things are more productive for both parties.
He told me apparently he gets a lot more replies and conversions using a female persona for the support address - double interesting given that in many places you can place an order without contacting them.
Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);
Where did you get these from? Especially the second one.
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick
Sure, but I am asking where it even came from to begin with. Like sadism, what bullet point does it apply to on the top comment?
> .. but there is evidence that psychopaths feel relaxed when others are not.
Also, sure it might be true but why do you even bring this point into the discussion? Does the article or comment mention anything about "calmness" (or similar)? I didn't find it but I might be missing.
Why do people repeatedly do things that are bad for others and generally considered unethical, likely even being aware of that? In my opinion this needs no further explanation.
Don't see the reason for the heavy down voting. The post refers to the often suggested relatively high percentage of aggressive, sociopathic managers at Uber.
EDIT: OTOH, after looking at his profile, this seems took be a template answer.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020489 and marked it off-topic.