Uber donates $1M to Meals on Wheels | Hacker News Reader

Uber donates $1M to Meals on Wheels

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46 pointsdayve26 comments

If you can't generate positive user perception, at least you can buy it. I'm glad this is happening, but it's hard to see it as a fulfillment of the company's mission rather than a cheap ploy to get some positive media attention.

In general, how can you distinguish between heartfelt philanthropy and PR moves?

Heartfelt philanthropy is usually starts before a company is mired in scandal. It is something that a company leader talks about before unpleasant videos of them being an asshole are on TMZ. People tend to be able to see through bullshit and this effort by Uber is completely transparent.

Uber employee here:

Give some thought to what you'd expect to see over time if the company genuinely had changed internally. Hold Uber to it. I suspect it'll meet that bar.

You don’t put a monetary value on non-cash donations in your press release for purely heartfelt philanthropy.

Serious.

Fortunately, food purchased as a PR move tastes just as good and is just as nutritious as the same food purchased out of heartfelt philanthropy.

We care about what people think because we care about what people do.

In general, I don't believe it's necessary to distinguish one from the other. An organization can simply leverage the former to achieve the latter, can they not?

Regardless of whether it's "heartfelt" or not, Meals on Wheels benefits equally.

How can you distinguish either from a move to funnel money to avoid taxation?

Ploy or not, I'm not happy with TC blindly passing along the "$1M donation" meme, clearly meant to suggest a pure cash donation... when, when you read a few lines down, you find out that "a part cash, but part (read: presumably mostly) credits toward unused inventory" donation --

-- as the vast majority of BigCorp "donations" to noble causes reveal themselves to be, when you scratch the surface.

I'm not sure of the split but say it's $X of cash an $1M - $X of non-cash credits. I'll take that over just the $X cash any day of the week. This isn't like out PCs to schools to market to the schools/students down the road, this is a pure charity where they happen to have a good that they can directly offer without long term commitment. It's no different than a sandwich shop sending their excess inventory to a soup kitchen at the end of the day.

Oh the donation by itself is perfectly fine.

It's just a bit disappointing that media outlets (like TC in this case) consistently allow themselves to get pulled into spinning a lot these as pure cash donations (by emitting headlines that say "XCorp donates $Y" with no other qualifiers), as if that's what they actually were. Which, most of the time, they quite plainly aren't.

(Disclaimer: I work at Uber)

I received an internal email about this. It turns out there's more than just monetary donations. Employees have also taken the time to personally volunteer with meal deliveries themselves, and there's even been engineering effort put into the app to support this commitment.

Say what you will about evil faceless corps, but in the short time I've been here, I've actually been pleasantly surprised that there's an unusually high number people here who genuinely care about their local community and helping people, compared to other places I've worked in the past.

It's a paradox to me, since everyone i meet at any place seems really nice and want to make the world a better place. And yet, at some point, a company's mandate causes externalities that harm (usually for a profit motive). It's not a single individual that "did it" - it's more a collective force, like the tide.

I'm also an uber employee, have been for a while. I totally understand the bad will against uber, but things inside the company have changed an insane amount since the january '17 stuff (deleteUber and fowler blog post), and with Travis out the new CEO Dara in, it feels like much... better company. Happy to talk more if there are specific questions.

I think there are two different aspects to this. The first is about what I'd call "active" vs "passive" caring (using the terms loosely, here). I'd say that passive caring is like when you, by principle, avoid looking for a job in the tobacco industry, or when your helping of people happens through your job. For example, I used to work in pharma marketing and you could say that it helped people find the right treatments or clinical trials for their conditions.

But then there's active caring: for example, when people spontaneously organize a volunteer drive. I admit that I'm more of a "passive caring" type of person myself, and I think the vast majority of people I've worked in the past fell in that category.

What I'm saying though, is that I literally hear people say they joined Uber _because_ they want to use the company's leverage to help people. This is something I'd never have heard in my previous jobs.

The second aspect is about sense of ownership. I feel that in previous companies, it was often easy to fall into a state of complacency because it wasn't clear if anyone higher up was listening to employees' concerns. At Uber, we have weekly all-hands meetings where literally _anyone_ in the company can ask Dara _any_ questions. We definitely had times earlier this year where people were a bit doubtful of the leadership team (especially around the first half of this year) and there were times people felt that positive changes were happening too slowly, but I think that overall there is a feeling that changes are indeed happening and that employees that want to make things better do have the power to make it happen.

Anyways. Not trying to toot Uber's horn. Just my personal opinion :)

> What I'm saying though, is that I literally hear people say they joined Uber _because_ they want to use the company's leverage to help people. This is something I'd never have heard in my previous jobs.

Quite a common reason to go for a civil servant job which pays bad, such as police (at least in my country, YMMV).

> [...] or when your helping of people happens through your job [...]

Uber provides a service, just like the police dept., the hospital, the fire dept., Lyft, and Google search.

Its just that some of these also profile you.

It makes no difference whether Uber is owned by the US government as an official service, or whether it is a private company. Its still a service, regardless.

> At Uber, we have weekly all-hands meetings where literally _anyone_ in the company can ask Dara _any_ questions.

Which suggests this wasn't true with Travis.

(disclaimer: I also work at Uber)

I think the paradox comes from seeing a company as a collective. Really Uber is a group of 15,000 individuals.

The company can only be successful if those individuals work together. But if one or two people do something bad, then people see it as Uber doing something bad.

As an engineer at Uber, I can only do so much to help make Uber better. But if I make one mistake I can bring down the app. It would be my mistake, but people would see it as Uber's fault.

There are processes and checks a company can put in place to prevent disasters (code reviews, tests, etc). But no matter what, individuals can and will make mistakes. I don't think it's fair for people to blame an entire company/culture for every mistake its individual employees make.

I think this is true of all companies (and societies/cultures). If one person does something wrong, it's that person's fault, not necessarily the fault of the entire company/culture.

Many people who work at Uber are probably very good people.

Uber's leadership, though, has shown time and time again that they are evil. I very much hope the company fails.

Edit:

I am very much aware of Kalanick stepping down. That does not change the fact that the leadership has done many illegal and shady things, ranging from the Greyball which allowed it to operate where it was not permitted and its program for taking away drivers from competitors to their lobbying to classify their drivers as self-employed rather than employees of Uber.

You can't get rid of one person and then say that all of the evil is gone.

Uber's leadership just recently changed hands.

I've continued to see press which leads me to believe that it was more of a cosmetic, public opinion change than a deep-seated shift to not being an evil company after the change in CEO. I stand by my statement.

Sexual misconduct is very far from Uber's only ethics problem.

Do you have some press links?

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/20/uber-colorado-fine/

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-uber-wag...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16150902/uber-ftc-complai...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/nyregion/new-york-taxi-me...

The last article is more about unintended consequences and how Uber has had success by skirting regulations others have to follow, but the rest are all post-Kalanick issues which are due to its moral failings.

I worked at Microsoft over the summer — we had a week where we could work for a variety charities and volunteer groups, while at the same time Microsoft matched $25 per hour we volunteered. I think all the interns in total raised over $100,000 in donations.

If you want to read a fascinating paper on how MoW used to do vehicle routing, without a computer but still in a pretty efficient way [that will blow your mind and can also be used to shoot lasers at ICBMs], read this:

http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jjb/research/mow/mow.pdf

Thanks SoftBank!

So now they're in the business of shifting runway money from VC to nonprofits.

Bold! I like it.

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