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Comment by crushcrashcrush | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example in my opinion of the apathy we need to combat as technologists.

Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

"This is wrong/greedy/will have blowback."

No one voiced concerns? Or, more specifically, if they did, no one listened? They didn't think this would leak out, with all the hatred regarding wage stagnation, income inequality, corporate greed?

A marketing pro, PR specialist, or frankly anyone in touch with culture and human beings would have throw up a flare that this is a terrible idea.

What is going on with culture at these companies?

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I have spoke up in similar situations several times at a number of companies. Not once was what I said a revelation or surprise. The business people knew already what the possible results would be. They had assessed it and decided to move on regardless. Clearly the potential results were worth the risk in their assessment.

I have learned that my code of ethics are just not the same as a number of business persons'. This may explain, in part, why I have two failed businesses.

Unfortunately, we reward bad behavior by not having the hammer be swung down hard and fast.

Look at the ridesharing companies, all of them started by defying local laws. Couple of people get assaulted here and there, doesn't matter as long as Silicon Valley gets it's money.

The hammer swings down fast in some cases. Look at Robin Hood's checking account debacle. The SEC, FDIC and SPIC do not play around.

The problem is where regulations are enforced. At state level results may vary. At local level very few jurisdictions can out-battle a company with millions or billions in VC funding. Uber blocked local regulators in Portland from blocking rides: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-portland/portland-pr...

At some point, it becomes impossible to argue that taxi regulations were actually benefiting the public. Civil disobedience is a valid option in such cases, whether your name is Travis Kalanick or Rosa Parks.

Uber and Lyft are hardly Rosa Parks. They mostly use their size to bully around smaller localities that can’t handle the pressure.

If they truly believed that taxi regulations were onerous they’d fight them wherever they exist. Uber and Lyft left Austin in protest because they felt a fingerprinting requirement was too onerous, and they didn’t come back until Texas overruled them; but they already comply with such a regulation in New York! And this is before we get into their other controversies, like Uber India obtaining a customer’s medical report after she got raped in one of their cars.

Uber and Lyft are hardly Rosa Parks. They mostly use their size to bully around smaller localities that can’t handle the pressure.

Which would never have worked if customers were satisfied with existing solutions.

If they truly believed that taxi regulations were onerous they’d fight them wherever they exist

It can take decades to correct the law if you insist on playing by its own rules, especially given the historical corruption associated with taxi regulation. As Americans, we have a cultural responsibility to resist unjust laws... and at least IMHO, taxi regulations fall squarely into that category.

And riders get their cheap rides. Why are we not blaming the customers who can simply choose an alternative even if it's less convenient. We don't need Uber or Lyft or Instacart or Door dash. Why are these companies even in business after breaking laws repeatedly and with impunity? May be there lies the answer. If customers don't care enough to put a dent why would the business people care about it?

The customers don't have perfect information of a company's full behavior and dealings. Fully checking every company you ever interact with would be exhausting and nonproductive - so people rely on news and word of mouth, but even then the information doesn't reach every potential customer.

Companies that facilitate business checking, have their own problems too. E.g. yelp, BBB, et al.

These infractions have been in the news forever though. I agree with you but this is not either or. Yes, the business decisions have to be better but when there's no blowback - nothing material at least - why would we think the behavior will change?

I've spoken up and actually had decisions reversed (or at least dropped), but I did so with hard data that the "better" (ethically) decision didn't materially hurt the bottom line, or that there were other actions we could take that would win back any lost revenue.

I've never known a company to make the ethical call when doing so materially hurts their earnings. To do so (and have it made public) would invite a shareholder lawsuit, so even if they did, they'd always couch it in language around long-term profitability or retaining employees. (Like Google did when they pulled out of China the first time, or when they repriced options for all their employees in 2009.) If you want companies to do the right thing, figure out how to become powerful enough that you can hold a metaphorical gun to their heads; their is no such thing as a "right thing" in business beyond that.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

Who's to say someone didn't? All we know is they decided to steal tips, not that everyone thought it was a great idea.

I would believe that someone did/has. If you look at things like Project Maven at Google people did speak out, or the Chinese search engine. Speaking out doesn't help if you're not in a position to modify the plan though. I've been in both places, both where I could keep a bad idea from going through and times when I could only share my concerns.

For me, it was situations like this that gave me the motivation to get better at pitching (and shooting down) ideas. Using the tip fiasco as an example, you can argue it at the social justice level which will be ignored by the Chief Product Officer because they don't care about social justice, so for them you argue it at the product angle,

"This policy/product is going to stain our product and make us look like greedy chumps, look at how our competitors product idea to do <x> resulted in so much bad publicity they had to pay <y>, which totally negated any value to the company. Do you want to be the guy that costs this company that money? Are you ready to be out on the street looking for a job where your last idea turned out to be reviled by press? It will be you because the CEO certainly isn't going to take the blame for it, they are going to fire you and say 'See? We thought it was horrible too and we fired the person responsible.', and that is going to be you. Think about that before you move forward on this product idea, kthx bye."

That makes is personal to someone in a position to actually stop it from going out the door. If you can show them the risk in a way they will understand, then, and only then, do you get any traction in stopping it.

I totally agree with this, and I think this makes the point that social outrage can sometimes play a positive role.

In an ideal world, we could get people to act ethically because it's the right thing to do: if we can't do that, at least we can appeal to their self interest and point out how horribly this could backfire if people found out.

This is also literally the claim that libertarians use to justify deregulation. "We don't need laws, if a company does bad things consumer would just naturally avoid them!"

One would hope laissez-faire proponents are siding with the angry workers and disgusted customers in this case.

Consumers don't generally have sufficient information to avoid bad actors. Classic market theory, especially in its pop culture form, seems to largely ignore information imbalance -- market efficiency presumes buyers can make informed decisions, but sellers have no incentive to provide buyers with honest and complete information unless they believe doing so will result in a sale. Regulations that address this information imbalance arguably make markets more efficient, and I tend to be suspicious of any anti-regulation argument which takes the form of "compelling sellers to disclose information to consumers will raise prices and is therefore anti-consumer."

I wish I could upvote you twice, and I'm stealing your quoted paragraph as essentially a template for when these situations appear in future meetings.

I address that later in my comment...

Is this a function of schooling? MBA programs? Corporatism?

I mean ultimately it's the executives that call the shots. I've seen people stand up to executives over things like this and then they get fired and it's business as usual.

Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers, especially when you feel powerless to actually stop it from happening. I mean it's so socially acceptable we've even coined the term "gig economy"

Chances are the people that really feel strongly about these things just refuse to work for those companies in the first place.

Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers

Ironic that they may have ended doing long term damage to their careers as a result.

Did they? Can you name the people to blame? If someone shows up with Instacart on their resume, is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision?

I'd definitely discount applicants on that basis.

is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision?

No, but fooling me if I want to know is a different matter.

In what way? The vast majority of employers want cogs. They don't want rebels.

Hard to say exactly without being privy to their conversations, but the aggressive growth pressure that young companies with VC funding face almost always factors in somehow.

It's hard to truly expect companies to make the correct ethical decision in this scenario when the survival of founders is dependent on raising more and more money. The "grow now, profit later" model truly puts pressure on execs to take whatever they can. And in this case, they clearly thought either nobody would notice or care.

Who polices the VCs? It seems like they have no accountability, even financially speaking. If one investment fails they have nine more to reallocate towards, so to speak.

> Who polices the VCs?

Great question. They benefit tremendously by minimizing their own risk and maximizing the leverage they have over founders they invest in.

The market, obviously. If they invest in shit startups, then eventually they will lose all of their money.

Now the problem is, what if people still use something and give their money to even if that service/company is unethical?

Is it unethical to make very bad employment deals with people who have no better opportunities on the job market?

Well, now that's where again people come in. Some people say, no, because if they don't like the job, they can start their own company (ehm, ehm, maybe that's why we are here, too many people trying to start stupid companies built on almost stealing from each other). Some people say, fuck no, that's just a race to the bottom Somalia.

Some people pitch NIT (negative income tax, a form of universal basic income). Some full blown direct action style socialism/anarchism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Technically LPs, but they're more-often-than-not large, faceless funds only interested in returns and mostly insulated from any blowback so moral considerations don't always concern them.

Its a function of money. The people who make the decisions (CEO, board) are judged on how much money the company makes. They are paid based on it. They keep their job only if they make more money.

Basically imagine you are an investor who spent $70 million on this company. That money could represent anything. Money can be used for anything so people can imagine it will all be used for altruistic purposes if they want. Sometimes a portion of it is. It can represent 50 or 500 or 5000 people who are counting on that money to grow.

The point being, it is very easy for a person in charge of a large sum of money to come up with a moral justification for maintaining or increasing that sum of money. The least of which is keeping their job or social standing -- but that one alone is usually enough for people to justify many things.

In this case, they will probably just say something like "well, its not our responsibility to make sure that people earn a good wage". In the end, the only thing they are really being held accountable for is how much money they make.

It's just greed, plain and simple. It doesn't have to be more complex than that.

The Excel models all look a lot nicer if you take the tips!

It is the ancient philosophy of nickel-and-diming employees in low-margin hospitality sector businesses.

I don't have access to the financials, but at no point has 'on demand food delivery' seemed to be anything other than a highly risky business servicing an extremely price-sensitive market.

As an MBA, I really take issue with this cynicism of MBA programs. It's not like we're cold greedy bastards. Stop generalizing. People can make great and terrible decisions, regardless of grad school degree choice.

Someone signed off on that feature that stole $4 from a $5 tip given to a person making minimum wage.

Was that person an MBA graduate or not?

Let's blame all males if that was their gender too!

I don't care about all that gender stuff.

The point is someone signed off on that. And in a business, it's usually someone with an MBA.

I can't imagine a business of that popularity having someone making business decisions without an MBA under their belt.

Hah. Well it's obviously a case where the consumer habit of tipping for delivery means that on a $100 order there may be $105 that the customer is willing to (or used to having to) pay. Thus leaving that $5 on the table is perhaps a stupid business decision. I should hope an MBA would point that out, so long as another MBA pointed out that the user experience may be more important than the few extra dollars.

An MBA would point out that in the this isn't a sustainable strategy, regardless of any concept of fairness.

Backlash from customers and workers is virtually guaranteed to hurt long-term profits.

Serious question: are ethics taught in MBA programs, and if so, how?

Generally speaking, how are MBA's taught to avoid making this very mistake?

Pardon my interruption, but I think a perfectly adequate response would be to counter by asking if ethics are taught in CS/CE programs (or what curricula have ethics prereqs)

Yes, ethics are a required component of the ABET CS model curriculum.

That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment. I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites. Plenty of engineering schools offer compute ethics courses as electives, but then again, plenty of business schools offer business ethics electives in MBA programs.

> That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment.

The mechanism for enforcement is ABET accreditation. When I was at Cal Poly SLO, our CS program was up for re-accreditation, and yes, we were required to take an ethics course, mostly due to remarks from prior accreditation reviews.

Edit:

> I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites

ABET accreditation allows for ethics to be covered as part of other courses in the curriculum. IIRC, it requires at least 4 units worth coursework to focus on ethics. Schools are allowed to cover this as part of a software engineering capstone series, for example.

This has digressed a bit. Let's recap: someone asked if ethics were an MBA requirement. I responded by asking if it was CS/CE requirement. Then someone brought up the ABET model curriculum, and now here we are.

The general point is that it started with a altogether too common dig at MBAs. I think those are usually unwarranted without any further examination. But I also found some studies that indicate leadership in a corporation is neutral to positive on corporate social responsibility (didn't share it earlier, but here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25782028).

The ABET model curricula is admirable, but the ethics requirement is not overly stringent. And there are very prominent CS/CE programs that are not accredited (http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx, I won't name names, but they are top 10 schools, easily).

It would be great if every damn high school student had to take semester of secular ethics, let alone MBAs or Engineers. I could easily see any degree having a 1 or 2 credit hour course in profession specific ethics.

But to the original point, I just don't like people getting high and mighty over people with MBA degrees for no good reason (I don't have an MBA).

ps - and to bring it all the way back around, there were many, many people involved in this. UX design, backend development, PM, project management, testing... it's just lazy scapegoating to pin this on a hypothetical MBA pulling all the strings.

I agree that ethics should be taught in school, it's pretty universally applicable in the workforce.

However, I do disagree slightly with your point regarding the many people involved in this. While it's true that it takes several types of skills to build a product like Instacart, most companies don't give their engineers/designers the ability to push back against features that they're not comfortable building. You're paid to execute on a vision that's dictated higher up the food chain. That doesn't mean it's coming from an MBA per se, but just because an engineer wrote the code doesn't mean that they're culpable here, especially given our aversion to pushing back and whistle-blowing in corporate culture.

Speaking out against corrupt/unethical leadership can very easily cost you not just your job, but your career as well. This is one area I would love to see improvement in.

So you knew you were throwing off the conversation and then went at far to call the conversation as off topic?!

MBA's should have a stronger ethics focus, they are in places of influence in power that many don't attain.

https://www4.kellogg.northwestern.edu/coursecatalogschedule/...

Speaking for myself, though, that wasn't a course I felt I needed to take. But every professor certainly expects you to approach problems from an ethical perspective, just like in any other degree...

I think in this case the ethical issue is not disclosing the policy more directly. I suppose why would anyone tip $5 if the driver would only get $1.

My guess is that this isn't really an ethical issue with Instacart, which I view as a very well run company.

More likely, the model is a fairly cleverly designed tip jar that accepts tips and then brings up the average wage so that workers have a higher guaranteed minimum, in exchange for some tips not going directly toward their own pay.

This is a clever system, which likely derived from the optional "service fee" which Instacart used to incorporate, which was used to fund additional employee benefits.

The problem is that when you call it a "tip" then people expect it to work a specific way and so the underlying clever idea is lost and the company appears to have done something shady.

Look at the history of Instacart's explorations of a service fee and you'll see that what's going on. I think Instacart deserves credit for trying to find a better solution to this problem than what had existed before, though I think a smarter way to do it would be to let customers optionally contribute to the "bonus till" that is paid out companywide to customer-facing staff who have the best star ratings.

So you're suggesting that this is a dark pattern to direct users into thinking that they're leaving a tip when they're not?

If Instacart chooses to adopt a system that isn't universally understood and transparent to both shoppers and customers, the onus is on them to make sure that users of the app understand what's going on. If they fail to do so, they should be held responsible for it.

Seeing as how thousands of shoppers have organized and signed petitions about this "feature", a clear misunderstanding on the part of shoppers and customers exists here, which demands an explanation as to why Instacart would implement such a confusing, opaque tipping system in the first place.

How does that sound like a well-run company to you?

> My guess is that this isn't really an ethical issue with Instacart, which I view as a very well run company.

I can't agree with that. A well run company doesn't steal $4 from a $5 tip originally given to some poor person making minimum wage.

>More likely, the model is a fairly cleverly designed tip jar that accepts tips and then brings up the average wage so that workers have a higher guaranteed minimum, in exchange for some tips not going directly toward their own pay.

That doesn't make any sense. If the minimum wage is $1000. There are 10 workers and this month there is $1000 in the tip pool. Then the company won't pay out $1100. The company still takes the $1000.

If what you said was true then they wouldn't deduct from the wage. They would deduct from the tip and say that it's added to a tip pool.

In the US, "tip" has a legal meaning and tips are subject to specific rules.

Not sure if it's a required curriculum unit, but I audited some MBA courses and Leadership & Ethics was one of the available courses. It consisted largely of reviewing and discussions based on case studies and ethically complex scenarios.

We don't have corporatism (corporate crony capitalism, which is a bit redundant, but not corporatism which is a completely different thing; the corpora referred to in corporatism is the body formed by the whole of society, not each individual firm as a corporation.)

The argument, especially for low-margin businesses like these delivery startups, is that the company might go under if financial tricks aren't in place.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well take the path of least embarrassment and hope no one calls out the tricks.

So maybe your business model is flawed? If you can't survive without robbing your employees then you shouldn't survive at all. This would easily be solvable by building growth organically, or having companies that hook into your service willingly to offer delivery at lower cost to them than hiring a full time employee. This would necessarily limit usefulness to larger population centers, but would make it more viable long term.

I'd have more sympathy if there were also giving equity to the people they are stealing from.

> Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Surely that should be "Business goes under if you don't, executives go to jail for mass fraud if you do."

I'm not a lawyer, but I do wonder what the legal threshold between "following ethics" and "fiduciary duty" is.

I think it is more, "Why does this keep happening?" and "What can we do to stop it?"

True, but once someone knows something illegal or deeply unethical is going down and sticks around, they can't complain about getting part of the blame for it.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

This is a really silly assumption. As a UI/UX designer, I have brought up many times at previous companies when they were trying to do sketchy/dark-patterns/etc. to users. At the end of the day, a lot of times, you get classified as someone who is not being a "team player", or are just being "negative." It sucks, but I can bet you that people there probably did speak up about this, but it got now where and they didn't want to risk their career over it. If you were in their shoes, would you quit your job over this if you spoke up and they still didn't listen? It's easy to answer that from the outside, but not everyone has the ability to do that. It's much more complicated.

I don't do crooked stuff, that started in primary school for me, and I don't envy the people who are obedient, they had some short-term gains, sure, but long-term they end up with nothing to say, nothing to do and to be. If one has to be crooked to not risk it, what kind of career is it in the first place?

> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

That's a great speech but you would have to stand up to your boss, tell him he did something wrong, and then quit your job. So if you actually did that then I would buy your argument.

No, all I have to do is to never collude with and to call out crooked shit, which I did and do. It takes much less courage to never kiss the ring in the first place, than to "revolt" after already having kneeled. I don't care if you "buy" that.

In the one really shitty job I had for a short while, I simply didn't do the things I considered crooked. I didn't lie about that either, nor did I get fired for it. I was still better than most brownnosers there, and they were leaking people anyway. Once I told a coach that if the food he eats was prepared as careless as he just told me to do my job to make more money, he would be dead in a month. Hahaha. I did end up quitting after getting sick of the politics and exploitation there, but I didn't have to quit to not take part in crooked stuff, I simply did that by not taking part in it. I simply said "make me", and they didn't bother to try. "The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance."

People who think everybody in the world is fake, broken and gave in, are proving only that they themselves are. If they weren't, they wouldn't assume everybody just "has" to accept all sorts of things. We have to die eventually, that's all anyone of us has to do. The rest are at best choices, at worst excuses.

The people in positions of power to make these sorts of decisions are almost never incentivized to do anything other than make the maximum possible amount of money for investors/shareholders. I've never heard of a corporate leadership structure that would, for example, reward the lowest executive/director on the totem pole individually for choosing to do something that has a good chance of limiting revenue from what is legally possible, but for empathetic/moral reasons around "caring about users."

And this isn't about some sort of explicit negative incentive against this sort of thing, it's just that the individual incentives to make more money are so much more tantalizing and rewarding. It's not about creating a non-zero incentive out of thin air around moral actions, it's about looking at the overall incentive structure and moving "user empathy" to a higher rung in the overall hierarchy, among things like reducing costs & increasing revenue. You could then argue with me over the appropriate place for "user empathy" in that overall hierarchy, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect mis-aligned incentive structures to produce many cases (always can be outliers...) of someone in a leadership position "doing the right thing" from a moral standpoint outside the numbers of the business.

I couldn't agree with this comment more. Outrage may solve these issues on a case by case basis, but it seems more prudent to focus on the larger systemic issue -- capitalistic incentives.

I'm on the IEEE P7010 Standards working group, which is part of the larger P7000 series that is focused on addressing ethical concerns when building software.[1]

As a body, we're going through painstaking effort to build a firm footing for how and why systems designers should build an ethics decision process into their workflow.

However I keep struggling to see why any software developer would care to follow our standards. They don't seem to generally follow any other standards, or even generally know they exist.

I can't think of anything more formalized that would help either, because the monetary incentives of ignoring or never learning about standards just aren't there. If you're just out there winging it, trying to make as much money as possible, what short term incentive do you have to adopt ethics? I'm trying to help find or create real incentives that aren't easy to ignore, so if anyone has any good ideas I'm open.

[1] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7010.html

[2] https://standards.ieee.org/project/7000.html

I think you're missing the point.

The problem is not that developers don't care about standards. And its not that developers are just trying to make as much money as possible.

Most developers have financial obligations that require them to keep their jobs.

The people making unethical decisions are their bosses.

The developers cannot contradict their bosses in this way and keep their jobs.

However, if you make the standards an organization-level thing and tie management and legal into it, it may be come to be that it is some developer's job to report on standards infringement. In which case they could say "no, this is illegal" and if there were legal precedent showing criminal charges or penalties had been applied, the management might consider following the standard. Although at first even if those standards existed, I assume sometimes management would just fire the messenger and hire another one who would claim the standards were upheld.

I'm not missing the point. Ethics isn't negotiable. This is not a place to be cynical.

"Just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse.

You either quit or you're complicit. It's pretty straightforward actually.

What we're trying to get to is a place where there is some incentive for organizations to do the process you described. At a certain point we're just going to legislate it, so we can wait for that blunt hammer to happen, or we can get our collective act together.

This sort of process where you shame a group of people into collective action just isn't realistic within the day to day lives of working class people in any society on this planet.

Corporate legislation and profit motives are the only real incentives in business, I don't care how much you try to isolate individuals taking part and shame them for complicity. It's not about people capable of making the right choice instead choosing the wrong choice. It's an inevitability of the incentive structures of capitalism and commerce. If someone chooses to take an action that sacrifices profit for ethics, they will be driven out of the market by people who take the "more profit" option. It is not the same players making good choices and bad choices. The only way to actually change the paradigm is if you can figure out a way to align incentives so that the person making the moral choice also makes the most money. This is the only way that the structures we've put in place will play out in the way you want. This has nothing to do with individual choice or free will, it is simply the output of a function.

I'm increasingly convinced that there is no non-coercive way to do it, hence the question: Can anyone think of another way to align incentives other than legislating ethics?

I think the current state was inevitable, assuming there wasn't some coercive legislation preventing it. Even then, would people just go do business somewhere else and continue what they are doing because the new system is just viewed as a cost?

No simple answers.

Definitely agree with you that we need legislation.

>"Just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse.

>You either quit or you're complicit. It's pretty straightforward actually.

I meant that I don't really agree with this part of your rhetoric where you are trying to shame people into behaving ethically in business or quit their job. What happens if everyone capable of thinking about morals quits? Do the companies just disappear in a poof of smoke? How does this fix anything, regardless? You have to understand that the situation is not this black and white for 99% of people.

My intent isn't to shame, but to state a position about immutability of virtue and consistency with respect to an ethic.

Practically I understand full well that it's not black or white, however if we argue how many shades of grey exist, rather than take bold action, history seems to indicate that little progress will happen.

How does them staying with the company fix anything?

It's naive to believe that 'if the good one stay it is better than if they leave' as if they could change the company from within.

A company is not a democracy. They won't change shit.

If you think that's true then there is no reason for the "good guy" to leave.

You'll have to explain that one to me.

Assuming the business can find new people then basically the ethics-focused opposition is gone and nothing prevents the company from doing worse and worse things.

> You either quit or you're complicit. It's pretty straightforward actually.

Not all people have that option.

Developers execute. They can't deny a boss his request based on opinions. These things are okay for the one and not okay for someone else.

The boss is paid to be responsible

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed a paycheck to pay rent and you had to either miss rent or do something less than ethical that your boss was telling you to do?

I've been in worse situations than that and refused orders. So, yes.

There are costs involved in taking a stand. If any group has the capacity to take a financial hit in service to an ethical framework it's software engineers.

Or maybe their managers or executives who are paid much more?

IEEE could start by making standards free as in zero cost to download.

I've been in similar meetings and spoken out against similar shadiness. I was told the decision was made and it was happening because a new revenue stream on a process that was otherwise already saving us money was too irresistible and to shut up and do my job, there was a long line of people willing to replace me.

I did eventually leave that company and at least one of the specific individuals involved in pushing that decision were ultimately caught embezzling money and fired, but they were not otherwise punished and they had a new job within a week.

Hell our CEO from when we were involved in a 880 million dollar accounting scandal got off effectively Scott free despite anyone who ever worked with him knowing he personally directed the accounting fraud that lead to the scandal. Only the CMO got any jail time.

My point is that if the rot is from the top down, no amount of speaking up is going to do anything except limit your career path. There is limited recourse for holding the decision makers accountable.

Most tech workers are in a position for building and not leading, so their most powerful option is to sabotage.

This is similar to asking why a McDonald's worker doesn't think more about American health. A single fast food employee may contribute more to the end product than most engineers.

A tech strike is also far less effective. Only people in the region can effectively make your burger. People in Australia can coordinate with people in China to build your software.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

That person probably did speak up, which was probably followed by that person getting pushed out and/or quitting. When some greedy jackass with questionable ideas on how a business should be run gets into a position of power, capable people who dont agree with Captain Jackass aren't going on Captain's team very long.

I worked at a different crowdsource delivery than DoorDash or Instacart. When this exact situation came up, I loudly voiced these exact concerns. Management said 'hey, no worries, legal department says it's not illegal!'. They did not understand the difference between "this is illegal" and "this is unethical". They just didn't get it. And most of the developers said "wow, that's awful, but I guess there's nothing we can do".

I quit. I'm still furious about it. Those who didn't walk when they knew it was wrong are good people- just cowards. That's what really makes me angry.

If I publicly discuss it or name names, I'll probably be sued for violating my NDA. They made that very clear. So I'm a coward too. At least I'm not a part of it anymore.

The lesson is never tip with an app- use cash. I guess that most of these companies are playing these games now.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

I think other commenters have covered the futility of speaking up internally (basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine in action), but the question I have is:

Why did no one blow the whistle? Instacart's tip stealing code had likely been in place a long time before any external activists noticed it. An ethical developer could have passed word of it and its implications to activists or journalists right as it went into production. That would not have exposed the dev to retaliation (as it'd be publicly observable in PROD), but would have likely torpedoed the feature before it could do much harm to workers.

The Friedman doctrine wouldn't advocate against doing this either, because it's not within the bounds of law.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

Meetings are rarely open-ended forums for arbitrary ideas or feedback and more often venues for agreeing with and carrying out decisions that were already made.

Anyway, I think it's far from settled that the amount of "blowback" from decisions like these actually hurt a company in the typical case.

I worked for a company that did something similar (they said they sent a portion of profit to a non-profit of the user's choice, which was true, but if the user didn't designate a non-profit, then the company would keep the money... something close to 50% of the users didn't bother to designate a non-profit after signing up).

I brought a feature to remind these users to designate their non-profit, but the company had no interest in doing so since it would reduce their revenue. And this came from the top, it wasn't a product manager decision.

The company is no longer around, but I didn't stick around long after that, it seemed unethical.

I am currently working under Grubhub, Doordash, Uber Eats and several other food delivery services.

None of them communicate, none of them tell you what is going on, none of them are controlling the conversation their employees are talking about on Facebook.

It is PR 101 to control the conversation... but every one of them fail at this when it comes to contractors.

Is Uber Eats or Grubhub (or PostMates) better than DoorDash in terms of how they handle tipping? Or can you even tell? I imagine the payments are so opaque it can be hard to tell.

I'm not using DoorDash anymore, not that I used them much before, but I feel ripped off. If I choose to use a delivery service, I'd at least like to know it's one that hasn't been lying to me. I realize that probably means Uber is right out :)

I think the simplest way to tell is if the app requires you to tip before or after the order has been placed.

I've read in other HN threads that Uber Eats tip policy is what we as customers expect, but don't take my word for it.

It would be just as easy to implement a process where a tip after-the-fact still reduces the "employee"'s normal pay.. Do just mean, in practice, that's not the way it's normally implemented?

You're right I didn't consider them making it up on the backend somehow. I still believe that forcing a "pre-tip" is a clear indication of something sketchy going on. I can't think of any other valid reason for forcing it.

This driver isn’t paid until after the delivery anyway, so that shouldn’t be a factor.

When deciding to tip before or after the service is rendered, these are the considerations likely to be weighed:

Pros for asking for tips before delivery:

1. Tips are more likely (eliminates scenario where user ignores the app after the delivery and never sees request to tip).

2. Tips are larger (user may perceive that the tip will influence the quality of service).

Cons:

1. Tip option increases perceived cost of order (or guilt if not tipping), so this additional step reduces number of completed orders.

With the DoorDash policy this article is referencing, where the company probably only makes a profit if you tip, it makes sense to ask for tips upfront. For the Uber/Lyft policy where tips are more for the benefit of the driver, it makes sense to tip after the ride.

I think that is the big issue. It's ok as a payment scheme, but it's fraud to say 100% of the tips go to the Dasher if a separate payment is reduced based on the tip amount.

> No one voiced concerns? Or, more specifically, if they did, no one listened?

Based on experience I would say that the engineers had concerns but they knew that upper management was not interested. It's all about that short-term profit!

Worth noting as well that they call the workers 'shoppers' which helps distance them from the concept of doing work.

You mean we have to pay them just to shop all day? /s

As a marketer, I fully blame a marketer for this. Woof.

Unfortunately, it's the hacking mindset when it's applied to the treatment of other humans.

I've been in growth hack meetings (usually around customer acquisition and retention) this screams to me like a former PwC consultant came in and delivered PPT presentation with some sort of finance speak of "Leveraging In-App Tips to Dynamically Improve Cash Flow via User Behavior Arbitrage" or some other such nonsense.

My guess is this was a top down decision from the CFO/COO or head of product.

Betting on CFO/COO. Head of Product should be more in touch with... humans.

No - almost by definition, they get to be in that position be being in touch with what the founders want, and how they tick.

Not for being in touch with "humans".

Probably because people did voice those concerns and it wasn't politically the right thing to do in the org at the time, they were labelled "not a team player" and shown the door.

I think they did. They got shot down.

I was at the meeting at payday lender when we discussed some ways how to extract maximum money from people who are delinquent. People do speak up, they get shot down.

I don't know if "apathy" is the right term. It's more a lack of a moral compass (not uncommon in most profit-seeking business) and a tendency to see people as numbers and data points.

Most likely this did NOT play out as you've described.

I'd wager to bet it was a very high level, executive decision that got green lighted and quickly shuffled down to a low-level developer for implementation.

> Why did NO ONE in any meetings when designing this "feature" or process say anything?

I am assuming you are saying PM, designers, backend engineers or others who actually had a hand in building the product should protest this. So you are basically saying engineers and designers should stand up and say no.

I think the focus is on wrong people.

The question should be, why is MBA schools still teaching their students to reduce cost at all cost and increase revenue at all cost. No matter what.

Fine, the engineers build what they build. But someone hires/fires people, and signs checks for certain projects. Someone tells the engineers to build something. And who are these people?

Let's focus the public anger at the right people. It's not the engineers.

It's the graduates of the expensive MBA schools.

Blame the biggest VCs. They have enough market power and smarts to enforce ethics on their portfolio companies, but probably encourage these ideas.

I am sure someone would have said that. The problem is that Instacart and Door Dash are very low margin business and through tactics like this, they can probably stay afloat or make some (small) profit. I know it is difficult to empathize with their behavior and assume the worst but when you are competing with deep pockets such as Amazon and Uber Eats, it is important to ensure that your unit economics work out and that the next fund raising happens successfully. Otherwise, they will eventually die anyways.

If you can't survive without grossly misleading your customers then you have no right to survive at all.

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