Amazon drivers are hanging smartphones in trees to get more work
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Ultimately, Uber implemented a FIFO queue at these lots, meaning a driver was added to a waiting list as soon as they entered the lot, thus removing the need for this behavior anymore.
It is an almost foolproof FIFO pipe (literally), simplemfor everyone to understand and very cheap to run.
This way I both struggle myself (as I never want to go there that early) and harm the others' comfort and convenience by occupying the place, making the queue longer. People also tend to conflict, fighting for their place in the queue (I had to witness and to participate in too many queues in my life, people become nasty there).
If I know it's random I come whenever I'm comfortable.
Would you pay more to guarantee getting the highest rated driver near you?
I haven't had a "bad" experience, but I've had some better than others.
Part of Uber Comfort's value proposition is that only highly rated drivers are allowed to participate.
Edit: Season 3, Episode 1 "Nosedive"
Meaning you still wait the same amount of time on average, just have a bunch of "that was quick" and "wtf. I'm waiting for 4 hours" thrown in there. Not an improvement if you ask me.
:D
I firmly believe that queuing is the very basis for, and perhaps definition of, civilization itself.
(British, can't you tell?)
I did not leave a tip.
The stressful and annoying payment dance at the end of a cab ride was a not-insignificant factor in the rise of ridesharing.
Why should employers pay employees when their customers can do it for them?
Or so I was told. I saw it more when I was younger than I do today.
Generally, most tipping is at restaurants and bars/pubs. Hairdresses/barbers/salons is also very common because of the close personal interaction with the worker.
Most of the time you tip at businesses that would be expected to employ low-education, or poorer or immigrant workers (and by extension, more easily abused workers.) Restaurants, salons, car washes, etc, all tend to employ poorer, less educated people, and also tend to be highly tip-based businesses. So for the most part you're expected to tip at businesses that traditionally abuse and underpay their employees.
But in the USA, it is not uncommon to see Budlight selling for 8 dollars or more. (don't forget to tip!)
If they weren't using the same currency there would probably be difference in inflation due to very different economics between let's say New York and some tiny rural village.
Really? I never know anyone doing this
But why taxi drivers? Why delivery drivers? Are those groups also poorly paid because they rely on tips? Why other social groups haven't adopted this? Are your electricians also charging $1 an hour of work and then expect that you leave a tip that saves them from poverty?
In the US, yes.
People I regularly tip: - wait staff - barber - delivery service (for oversized packages/furniture delivered into my home, not general UPS/FedEx deliveries that are left on the doorstep) - taxi driver
It's a side effect of a low minimum wage. Most of the rest of the western world has the minimum set closer to a living wage.
Does not happen nearly as often since Uber is squeezing them though.
Though I'm already thinking about how maybe the balls need some sensors or we codes so we can have data and a dashboard.
>> That means a phone in a tree outside Whole Foods’ door would get the delivery offer even before drivers sitting in their cars just a block away.
That seems ridiculous. Plus or minus what, a minute? There has to be a better way to select drivers.
The actual phrase should be "as the crow flies." If you say "bird distance," you might get confused looks from people.
Just trying to help. :-)
That said, "bird distance" is going in my lexicon.
You may then proceed to explain this refers to the distance by camel.
You: Except on a globe, it is a great circle.
Me: 'Nobody said on the surface. I'm tunneling through.'
The simplest solution is therefore that, yes, someone 10 feet away will get it before someone 20 feet away.
The developers would have to go out of their way to add a buffer zone, e.g. find the closest person, add 1,000 feet, find everyone within that range, then select randomly. Or create a "local zone" distance range and a queue. Or other options -- once you try to figure out "what's fair" it gets really complicated.
That extra code is only going to get written if it has to.
So there's nothing ridiculous about it at all. In fact it's the simplest, most expected solution.
Now that it's news, however, Amazon might actually come up with more sophisticated requirements.
It would be nice to have perfect knowledge beforehand of how an otherwise reasonable algorithm will be gamed once it's out in the wild.
The reason you're reading this on hn today is specifically because it is novel group behavior.
By handing out jobs to the closest device and not checking the last job that device received is poor programming.
It's similar here, when an algorithm is in charge of optimisation it has its heuristics, they will be gamed as they are measures that became a target.
A company or event or technology changes something, and an evolutionary/behavioral niche newly forms to take advantage of it. People are smart and infinitely adaptable...
I'm not sure I'd call it "evolution" so much as a race to the bottom. The drivers in this article are now forced to pay an intermediary in order to secure work that was previously available for free. It's basically a form of scalping.
This is why labor laws are important and why classifying employees as contractors can be so detrimental.
But yes, I agree with your second paragraph.
Using California's onerous law that has caused so much trouble in this area, did you know that taxi services are not affected unless the city or county regulation body says so? isn't that interesting? they typically are in rental agreements with cars and medallions. However the government has a vested interest in medallions and these companies donate to local politicians all the time. Their workers are getting the shaft but it does not make news because it does not involve an internet company with billions.
The situations I do not like were stories surrounding instacart shoppers being able to cancel tips after delivery, now that is fraud and the company should be liable. I believe uber eats did something similar. T
There is something. Automation. With automation, Amazon is able to squeeze every inch of performance out of a single worker, which means less workers needed, salaries down, people more hungry for work.
It is well past time to regulate profits from automation and redistribute those profits to the population. Taxes.
This is leaving out the lack of the normal jobs which would be created if the employer couldn’t avoid it this way. People are desperate enough to take gig economy jobs because there’s been a steady erosion of other options.
It's an important distinction to make. Although Uber et co may be predatory on underutilized workers, I don't think banning them is going to bring back the better jobs that used to exist.
The best way to make Uber pay better would be to have compelling other options for these workers; easier said than done though
Also the article states that the drivers are using 3rd party specialized apps.
Case in point... I found a whole community dedicated to spoofing Pokemon Go -- https://old.reddit.com/r/PokemonGoSpoofing/
When the game was new-ish, and I was on Android, it was trivial. Just install a GPS spoofer, move the on-screen control, and you start walking. Nice when it was winter.
It was also terrible for the gameplay, and they cracked down hard. You can still spoof, but it requires a relatively high degree of technical ability. On iOS, you have to, generally, install a shady enterprise certificate and use a hacked third-party binary of Pokémon Go. On Android, you have to have root, and then jump through many other hoops that are specific to your phone and OS version.
All of that boils down to…yeah, you can always find a hack, but past some level, it becomes extremely fragile, and you would not want to rely on a hack for your livelihood. (And if you are capable of staying ahead of the app and OS developers, well, I suspect there may be a different job opportunity out there for you.)
And GPS spoofing as a debug feature is built into Android now, so there's less legitimate reason to need root to do GPS spoofing
Now the problem here is the why, that is necessity, desperation. And the who, which is that it seems some parties might be predating here, snapping up the gigs and basically scalping/arbitraging them.
The part I grapple with is that it's certainly unfair for companies to utilize gig workers and expect employees. Is it just as wrong for a company to stand by and watch their gig workers sort of organize themselves into employees?
The trick -- per a previous job -- is to figure out where the computer thinks the address is (on the street, in the middle of the parking lot, &etc...) and get your location as close as you can to that to get an edge over the competition.
The bullit room was another tricky one; entrance is on a hotel lobby off of the stockton tunnel, but google maps has you go to a sketchy alley off of bush. It's even trickier for the driver since the sketchy alley is also called "bullit".
They are trying to beat out the other drivers waiting nearby them, not sit at home and only leave the house once they get a route.
I've noticed that a lot of news articles tend to take a few examples of something outrageous, but never say anything about how widespread the practice is. I find it hard to be outraged or care unless there is some quantification of the problem. In any system, people will find a way to cheat.
Amazon is aware and maybe they are working on a way to fix this, but it's not clear Amazon has had much time to figure out what to do. Even if you think Amazon is evil and doesn't care, it takes time to figure out how to defeat this. Maybe they won't care, but at least give them some time to respond.
That's entirely on purpose. Most of such "outrageous" things, including some hot political topics, wouldn't look nearly as outrageous if it were compared against the baseline. So necessary information is not included. Actually informing people "weakens the story".
That's basically standard practice now. Find a couple outraged Tweets, present as though it represents the majority.
"Everyone" is pretty questionable here - it's quite expensive to rent rack space in an exchange, and not everyone gets to do it. That said, I think basically anyone who has any business doing latency-sensitive trading is probably capable of getting a rack.
Of course, that price isn't insignificant per se, but are minimal for anyone who actually achieves any benefit from having co-located space.
BTW, I want to give full credit to my source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs
It also does a much better job of explaining it than I have but it is a convincing argument for how Starlink can be useful and why traders would be willing to pay a lot for it.
That is nonsense, the route is longer. You are confusing stuff, light travels faster in air compared to fiberoptic cable, so the latency will be lower, but distance is actually longer.
Also they're only orbiting about 200 miles above Earth, so unless you're already relatively close to your target location, you'll need to bounce your traffic across a whole bunch of satellites, each adding a fractions of a ms just for hardware processing + light speed to the next hop. In fact over any sufficiently long distance, doing this will actually resemble a longer curved arc circumscribing the arc of the Earth.
People who really need those extra few ms have little choice but to stick to the ground, near the exchange.
(I recommend reading the whole series, it's fascinating!)
The tower location does not have much of an effect on latency because the microwave network in this case always terminates at NYSE. If you build your microwave tower a few feet closer to the transmitter (Chicago), then you have to run a few more feet of cable to the colo.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazil...
(I know you meant server colo but I wanted to point out that this is yet another case of the back and forth swing Of distributed and centralized)
And the drivers actually seem to want this, knowing full well the market is oversaturated. If Amazon were to pay drivers a fixed amount, they'd probably end up with much less drivers.
Just talk to the guy with a baseball bat hanging out in the vicinity to thwart all the "yay free phones!" folks.
That, and being in the news will probably spur companies to combat this.
I have read several stories about Amazon contract drivers being worked half to death, no breaks, long days and constant pressure to deliver more. Several of these stories have been posted in HN. (Just Google "Ycombinator Amazon drivers overworked").
It is possible that the Whole Foods delivery contracts are more lucrative but to imply that due to the recession drivers are desperate to get work doesn't jive.
By contrast, this article is talking about the just-in-time, on-the-fly gig-work market, like lyft and uber's labor markets. This is pretty clear from the fact that it's not really possible for an employer to overwork a gig worker without the gig worker's enthusiastic consent, since they explicitly choose each marginal contract they do (in fact, the theme of gig worker complaints in this area is usually against the restrictions placed on consecutive hours worked).
Well if you use this then you get, say, 2 minute waits, and since you're paid per-delivery, you make a bit more each day -- maybe you make 25% more deliveries.
On the flip side, then drivers not using this might see their average waits grow to 20 or 25 or 30 min.
For Amazon it's all the same though.
> You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.
If one looks at the whole economy, some prices might be very flexible and others rigid. This will lead to the aggregate price level (which we can think of as an average of the individual prices) becoming "sluggish" or "sticky" in the sense that it does not respond to macroeconomic shocks as much as it would if all prices were flexible. The same idea can apply to nominal wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
If Amazon were to open a subsidiary for lower priced delivery services it might be able to maintain its workforce branding and add lower rungs to the wage ladder for the purpose of labor supply development. It might be politically inconvenient for a wealthy company like Amazon to have an acknowledged wage tiering system even if it makes sense on different levels. For example, Amazon probably cannot publicly hire people without workforce documentation--an unacknowledged arms-length subsidiary would be able to provide this service.
Even Tim's own product couldn't be reduced to 4 hours. "If only I didn't sell a nutritional product, I wouldn't be getting contacted so much."
Yes, and if my job was to fill out paperwork and never Engineer, I could do my work in 4 hours a week.
Heck even if I paid some engineer in india, I'd still need to review their work, including learning the technologies and data sheets. I'm not sure how managers deal with this, just hope for the best?
Good managers do what you said earlier - learn the tech, study the sheets, talk to experts and build appropriate understanding and knowledge.
Bad managers deflect, blame, hide, etc
Edit: it's the same idea as when I boxed competitively, and watched a Manny Pacquiao documentary. I wasn't going to wake up at 3 am to drink a 1000 calorie shake or do a 1000 sit ups everyday. I wanted to get into the mindset of optimizing my training within the reasonable constraints of my student life.
For example, I've started using a fountain pen and really like it better than the pens at the office and use it for minor work tasks. Four Hour Work Week isn't different from that but presents an extreme.
The hyperbolic subcontracting seems like a pain in the neck to manage to me, but I appreciate the challenge to think of work in terms of those activities in which I can personally add value and those that I can source value. How much of the time do we miss opportunities to do things better by forgetting to take a moment and think out the build vs buy implications?
Wouldn't it be a prime target for cell phone theft?
The best laid plans of algorithms and men!
The objective is "closest driver", the metric is "closest phone that connects with Amazon's servers", and the divergence is exploited by this multi-phone syncing/dispatch setup. (In this case, the divergence is unavoidable, short of unspoofable, unremovable microchipping of anyone who wants to pick up gig work)
Though it seems like a pretty easy fix: just lower the granularity of the location query.
But why should they as long as from Amazon's perspective, the system is working?
(1) PR. Right now because of COVID-19, the public is somewhat more attentive to stories about working conditions.
(2) Morale. Happier drivers probably perform better and have less turnover.
(3) Parking. If they incentivize drivers to get as close as possible to some arbitrary point, drivers could take parking spaces that should go to customers. Imposing unnecessary constraints often causes unforeseen consequences.
(4) App/site security. The article says drivers download (third-party) apps that monitor Amazon's sites. It's better to make most users feel like they don't need bot apps. Once they go looking for them, they may find apps that have additional features which are not so neutral. Also, it creates a small industry of developers who specialize in doing hacky things with Amazon's systems.
If I were them, I'd fix this if it's possible to do it without sacrificing other important things.
If a driver has to spend 4 minutes of every hour doing stupid antics to get an order, and can earn $15/hour doing antics+delivering, then effectively $1/hour is going to pay for stupid antics, from Amazon's perspective.
Amazon would like to switch those 4 minutes from "doing stupid antics" to "doing deliveries" so that they can pay the same $15/hour but get a full hour of real work instead of only 56 minutes.
I’ve heard that if you say “bezos bezos bezos” while spinning around counter clockwise in front of an amazon locker your delivery tips will go up 5%
Doesn't seem like a cargo cult.
How many deliveries is a cell phone worth? I can't imagine a driver would leave a phone for anyone to take just to make 10 bucks or less.
> Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.
Or it uses GPS and sees they are closer rather than the impossible.
I get reporters believe this fantastical stuff because they are not in IT and are somewhat more the Arts realm.
But they need a way to fix this, like a wiki. Or not. I guess stupid people believe it and click.
The core of the story is true somewhat, you do miss out on the idea leaving phones in strange places fools the GPS and you can use this to an advantage. Or why not just GPS spoof. Or is it using the wireless, so why not use a repeater?