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Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at Uber.

I'll focus on one particular point: allowing drivers to see where riders are going before they accept the trip. Uber, at least when I worked there, was heavily against this functionality as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. That feature is bad for the overall ecosystem. Because of it, you may not be able to get a ride to the airport during rush hour, or home from the bar when you live 30 minutes away from downtown. The overall service becomes less useful if there's doubt as to your ability to be able to use it when you need it.

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> as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider.

This is exactly what being a contractor is though. Accepting contract work you'd like, and turning down work you don't. Otherwise you are an employee.

In the case of rideshare, I imagine the driver contract agreement has that stipulation in it. You'll agree to pick up a passenger taking a trip to an unknown destination with up to N hours of travel time. If you don't like the terms of the contract, you don't have to work for that company.

How is that different from a regular taxi driver?

Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?

Regular taxi drivers are often contractors. At least, they were in the past, I'm not sure how this new stuff is affecting regular taxi companies.

This is the thing that really chafes my testes.

People need to get real and start calling it what it is. It's a taxi service. This is not ride sharing. The driver was not already going somewhere. The driver was waiting around for a call to pick someone up, and was going to take them where they wanted to go. Nothing is being shared. This is a Taxi service and the Uber app is the dispatcher.

If I was already going to work, and I picked someone up along the way, that's sharing a ride.

The only thing the driver is sharing is the money they are giving to their mechanic when all the around town driving wears out their car.

What about UberPOOL?

Only misguided journalists use ridesharing anymore. Its been "ridehailing" the best past 3-4 years now.

"Taxi with a logistics app"

A ride is more like a task. I've been a contractor and I couldn't refuse jira tasks. You've signed a contract with the company, you should do all the jira tasks they throw at you.

Many people argue that those kinds of contractors are employees. Often your an employee of the contracting firm AFAIK too, so you have to follow the implicit orders of the contracting firm.

I am a "contractor", but yeah, if you only work for one company for X months, you should be an employee.

If all your money comes via a single company, even if you phisically work at a different place each day, you should be an employee of that company.

That's kinda the problem with ride-sharing though. Many (most) drivers are driving with multiple apps.

Many, many people in the US are employed with multiple companies at a time. Everyone who "works two jobs". Employment is not exclusive.

I was responding to a comment about "only working for one company for X months".

But you could have refused the customer in the first place. Nobody forced you to make a contract with him. Of course, once you did, you are compelled to keep up your end of the bargain, and that probably included you doing those jira tasks (you could have probably refused to do entirely different work, like walking the dog of the manager, when you were originally contracted for doing IT development work).

A true contractor in the rideshare space would have an individual contract with each rider, and could of course reject riders based on the terms of the contract (of which the target location is one). However, once a customer is accepted based on the agreed-upon terms (fare, target, number of passengers etc.) he wouldn't be able to throw the passenger out in the middle of the ride for no good reason.

If you now want to say that a rideshare contractor should not be able to reject a customer based upon the terms of the ride, I ask you: why shouldn't he? With whom does he have a contract that binds him? And you say: with Uber. And I say: yeah, and that's why your analogy is fundamentally flawed, why he isn't an individual contractor for each customer but simply an employee of Uber, with whom he has a contract that mandates him to accept all customers that Uber deems acceptable. Exactly like a plumber working at a plumbing company who also has to do plumbing work at any customer his boss sends him to, while his individually contracting plumber colleague can decide to decline or accept customers at his own discretion.

Alternatively, the contract is between the driver and the rideshare platform. The driver is a participant in the platform and is contractually expected to behave within the rules and bounds of the platform. This does not require defining the driver as an employee.

When the driver activates uber driver mode, they are initiating a contract which states they will work within the bounds of the app. The driver is able to terminate that contract at will and at any time, and reactivate it at will and at his leisure. When the contract is active, the driver has committed to operate within the pricing, pickup and dropoff structure of the platform - as in the driver has committed to minimize discrimination of their rides and accept the platform's rider oriented pricing structure.

I am pretty sure that you cannot "activate" a work contract by opening an app. What is the notion of "activating" a contract anyway, I mean legally. Does something like that exist in US law?

I would doubt that, and I would also doubt that you can simply define opening an app as the beginning of a legally binding, entirely new contract with as many implications as Uber's driver contracts have. I am pretty sure that in reality, Uber signs a contract once with a new driver, after checking his background, driver license and everything, and that contract is active from that point in time until explicitly terminated by either party. Just closing the app does not terminate it, neither does opening the app create a new contract. Closing the app just amounts to the driver leaving his "workplace", opening it again amounts to the driver entering his "workplace", but the contract under which that work takes place is the same and active all the time, it just gives the driver a lot of leeway with regard to how many hours he wants to work.

That is a generous employment, but it is an employment nevertheless in nature.

Which is why I'm vehemently opposed to classing Uber drivers as contractors.

This sounds like it is bad for the customer experience of the rider, but is essential for the driver to be considered a contractor. It makes sense to me as a tradeoff: Uber can decide that the drivers are employees and dictate what routes and fares they must take, or they can decide that drivers are contractors who have the ability to review and decline those fares

My last point was that it's good for both riders and drivers. If riders come to expect an unreliable service, then they'll use a different method of transit, which leaves the drivers with less work overall.

> which leaves the drivers with less work overall.

...which is a positive feedback loop that should encourage them to pick up those previously declined routes. Or charge higher rates that better reflect their reluctance for those routes. Isn't that how supply & demand is supposed to work?

But how can you then claim you're better and cheaper than a taxi company?

Marketing material does not cause the universe to reassert itself.

I used to work at Lyft. It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing etc. Those PMs have no sympathy for drivers. A driver can end up in an experiment group that totally screws his income.

WRT to drivers not going to neighborhood I have a solution for you: let passengers offer higher pricers. This is not a new idea BTW

> It is disgusting how Lyft and Uber treat drivers with their A/B testing

Society as a whole needs to answer the question "is it moral to roll a dice and offer a worse service to people who get an odd number?"

In my view, it is. As far as that person is concerned, they can pretend your company doesn't exist and go to another company (and maybe roll another dice)

Some other people would say "all businesses must treat all customers equally and fairly". In many ways, I don't see how this can be universally true - there is always the superstore that has run out of a product - why should Mrs Smith who picked up apples at 9am get some, when Mr Jones who tried to buy some at 9:15am finds the shelf empty? Thats unfair.

Instead I'd like to see a list of characteristics a business is not allowed to discriminate on (religion, race, etc.), and explicitly allow discrimination based on another list (random number, position in queue, length of service as a customer, etc.). Any other factor, judges can decide which list it falls into.

I think companies run A/B tests because they don't know which option is the worse service.

This is silly.

Companies have ALWAYS had test products that they offer to a subset of customers.

There's no legal test to be applied here.

I'm curious about whether a/b testing would be considered human subjects research and therefore governed by federal regulations. [1]

I suspect that it will be in some cases. Does Uber have IRBs? What about other big tech companies?

If you work in a company and see them doing something immoral and possibly illegal, you should speak up or report the behavior.

1. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-cha...

I work at a large tech company. I have to maintain a certification for human experimentation with my IRB. Usually, A/B testing falls outside of the experimentation framework as the actual feature in question cannot cause harm, is engaged with voluntarily, and users are already aware that the software changes arbitrarily (usually through marketing material as "continuous updates"). We usually only get into the human experimentation bit when we send out a survey or the like.

Is said a/b test supported or funded by the Department of Health and Human Services? If not, that website clearly indicates that the regulations do not apply.

his comment said that drivers don't go to poor neighborhoods. you're suggesting customers to pay more for a ride if they live in a poor neighborhood.

At some point, every time I called an Uber to take me home after being out late, the driver would first call me, ask me where I was going, I'd say somewhere far away, and then they'd immediately cancel the ride. So I stopped picking up the phone when someone called right after I called an Uber, and then maybe only half would cancel if I didn't pick up.

> or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider.

That just indicates Uber is undercharging for these type of rides.

Its possible that if they charged more ridership and Uber's profits would go down.

Incentives are not aligned.

I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but here in Germany, the good old taxis have a special obligation that disallows them to decline a rider based on where he wants to go, as long as that target is within the geographic area for which a particular taxi is licensed. The idea is that taxis are part of public transport and thus should have a certain reliability for customers, regardless of how lucrative a particular ride happens to be.

I find it laughable to hear that Uber, the arch-enemy of the taxi business, attempts to (secretly, because obviously the customer isn't informed about drivers not seeing the target locations beforehand) rebuild this particular property of the system it aims to replace. And it's doubly laughable that they now stumble over that exact attempt, which they now can't actually continue, because in order to have the necessary authority over drivers they would need to make them official employees.

The law in Germany is a fantasy. Drivers still can and claim a break down, bad cell service, etc.

Having some people cheat their way around it does not invalidate the law in the first place and neither does it invalidate its intention. The equivalent in Uber's system is a driver cancelling a ride after accepting it and seeing the destination, maybe claiming his car broke down on the way to the pickup location or whatever. The fact that people can pull that off also does not invalidate Uber's original attempt to make drivers accept riders regardless of their destination.

Seems pretty simple - offer financial motive.

No one wants to go to airports anyway, they're a nightmare normally and are typically far from city centers and potentially further to a rider - so the fare goes up and you have surge pricing.

The solution would be to increase the amount you are willing to pay until someone agrees to it, not trick a person into doing work they don't want to do by hiding the details of the job until after they have begun.

Can you change the destination once you get in the car?

It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous to their health and safety. It should be anyone's right to refuse going to dangerous neighborhoods, just like forcing drivers to drive out into nowhere where they have to spend their own money/resources to get back to the network, should be compensated by Uber if they want that feature.

It's rather abusive and tyrannical to force people to do things against their will or safety. But I am guessing you live in a dangerous neighborhood because you did not "discriminate" and are paying really low rents since you don't discriminate. Right? … exactly!

You realize its OK to decline trips, and also to stop using a ridehailing service that mandates a policy like this?

>should be compensated by Uber if they want that feature. Do you really think Uber has not gone through these thoughts millions of time in the past? I can personally tell you that these are things that are constantly discussed and evluated, with the primer driver of everything being the growth of the service.

You still have free agency. As an Uber driver, you can accept a ride, pick up the rider, get the destination, decide you don't want to go there, and then kick the rider out of your car.

Then, Uber can decide that they no longer want you to be a driver on their platform.

> It does not strike me as a legitimate case to strip people of their human right to free agency and will by forcing people to do things they don't want to or may even be dangerous

But in a normal employer-employee relationship, this is totally typical. You can't sign up to be a firefighter but then refuse to go into burning buildings that you find too scary. You can't get a job as a developer and then refuse JIRA tickets you find boring, claiming that's your "human right."

In those cases, and with Uber as well, your free agency is that you can quit the job if you don't like it. But you have no fundamental right to be retained as an employee or contractor while refusing to do parts of the job you'd signed onto. The employer has their own right to terminate you if so.

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