DoorDash will require all employees to deliver goods
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I’m a little baffled by the comments about how delivering food is somehow “beneath” an engineer. It isn’t, and sometimes seeing how the things you build are used by employees can expose unknown unknowns that need fixing for both customer and employee.
Personally I would love to embed with my customer teams for a few weeks a year to work on their integration with my product. But in my organization the incentives are not set up that way so it would not be a viable thing for me to do unilaterally.
Preface: I'm going to assume you are not just proficient at what you do, perhaps even beyond above competent, as a developer (likely calling yourself an engineer when it suits you). But it's this type of hubris that so is prevalent in the FAANG World makes me feel so... aghast at the tech bro/coder World.
I can't envision a World where someone who sought out to solve a problem would not want to directly put themselves in the position of it's intended target demographic or end user to gain better perspective about how to best optimize what it is they are developing: be it an app, product or solution.
This is why I think tech fails in the Corp World: after a while you get big enough and attract a certain type of worker and foster an environment where entitlement sets in, mission creep lingers and people feel almost ostentatiously incapable of putting themselves in First Person perspective when trying to solve a problem and would rather waste time with focus groups, endless board meetings, online polling or whatever the proper channels are that keep them locked in their ivory tower.
This is how you get mediocrity, by being so detached from the experiences and feedback from those you are trying to serve; abstracting your work away as something it's not (I also worked as a developer and consultant) is a fool's errand and I'm sad to say it's a significant part of I walked away from tech--the technology we worked on for years as an opensource project was being re-branded as something it's not, by people who never understood it as a means to stay relevant but ultimately failed to execute despite having first mover advantage, immense backing and support from the Corporate partners eager to try the technology.
The way to build a better mouse trap, is to be immersed in mouse trapping.
I'm back to tech, I never really left but I just stopped making it how I earned a living to regain sanity as well as passion, and I'm now primarily focused on ML after tracking it for a few years in a specific Industry and I'm starting to see this exact thing happen in that ecosystem now, too.
I'm going to focus on the non-sexy projects in the belief that maybe it won't be like that this time because I can't be bothered with this white glove developer syndrome.
It's the tech World's version of affluenza.
Really? How about in industries where it's straight up impossible for the developer to do so? How do people function in those industries? How does cutting edge tech get made in, say, the medical industry?
Are you suggesting that people building machines to perform brain surgery should have to go to med school and specialize as well as becoming an engineer?
Or maybe there is a different way to gain insight into what you're building, still build cutting edge solutions to real world problems, without having to actually be able to perform the job you're trying to augment?
Here's a question. What would you say to a blind programmer who is working on autonomous driving vehicles? Do you think such a person could never do a good job, because they have no experience driving a vehicle?
There are tons of extremely valid reasons why a software developer might not want to or be able to put themselves in their customer's shoes directly, without it being "white glove developer syndrome" as you put it. And they can still be excellent developers.
> Are you suggesting that people building machines to perform brain surgery should have to go to med school and specialize as well as becoming an engineer?
Consider your limitations as a developer, and having your department defer to hiring or consulting from trained and experienced medical professionals to help guide and shape what it is you are making? Along with ongoing hands on training for targeted demographic for insight and instant feedback I can't think of a way for cross-disciplinary innovation to occur.
> Here's a question. What would you say to a blind programmer who is working on autonomous driving vehicles? Do you think such a person could never do a good job, because they have no experience driving a vehicle?
This is an extreme, because while I'm sure blind developers exist, I'm also sure they are a small minority and are likely NOT working on main developer roles for AV; but if they were I bet they were doing so collaboratively amongst other able bodied developers who are relying on training deep learning model rather than making an if else command for his colleagues never seen 'what to do if a baby carriage steps out of your Tesla' situation.
You are resorting to hyperbole to try to make a weak point and it doesn't bode well for the substance of your argument, either way I think you get what I'm trying to say, albeit some what condescending manner. You can agree or disagree with it, but I think this is a major trigger point for so many here (likely the FAANG/MANGA underlings) they know it's a bone of contention.
> There are tons of extremely valid reasons why a software developer might not want to or be able to put themselves in their customer's shoes directly, without it being "white glove developer syndrome" as you put it. And they can still be excellent developers.
I disagree. You can be a developer, and as noted in my preface an above competent one, but I hardly think you'd call yourself an excellent one in the presence of an actual excellent one if you've ever met one. I'm cognizant that I am not nor do I dire to be an excellent developer and I've been humbled when I have met one and they are usually obsessed and perhaps tortured by their obsessions which they are focused on; still, despite it being somewhat socially awkward it was a worthwhile experience.
Just because it's impossible to do something in one industry, doesn't mean that it's not beneficial in another where you can.
If the programmers could perform brain surgery, using their own software to do a brain surgery would probably be beneficial. But they can't and it wouldn't be safe.
Door Dash employees can deliver a pizza to an office block for lunch, so i'm not sure how the first scenario teaches us anything about the second.
> What would you say to a blind programmer who is working on autonomous driving vehicles?
Again, we are making a comparison against someone where it isn't practically possible to experience it, but this doesn't tell us anything about the benefit if you can experience it.
It might be more sensible to provide the option to do deliveries, to the engineers who are interested. Their voluntary interest in improving the product is a positive sign that they may develop beyond their current role.
Edit: I meant to add, as others mentioned, there are other departments who would more benefit from this program. As I suggested above, the product requirements come from a long line of bureaucrats: the product designers and business analysts are primed to make the most of this program.
I started my career working in paint stores, then moved to home renovation for low income families. I feel like I have a unique perspective on qualifications and worthiness that have been hard earned. I’m an engineering manager now for a large enterprise company; I worked my way up the ladder one rung at a time.
I feel like I’ve earned my position and that I’m good at it. I also feel like basically anyone can do what I do with just a little bit of support and training.
The idea that delivery work is beneath a developer is infuriating to me. It shows a lack of respect for an essential part of your business, and a lack of empathy for people who are realistically just not quite as lucky as them. Because that’s the major difference between the classes most of the time, luck and privilege.
I don’t know why I felt the need to type this out, it just makes me so angry to see people show such contempt for each other based on trivial bullshit.
But to me, that just indicates that they do it so that I don't have to, which in turn indicates that I should value them a lot.
Imagine if they said…if I can do it, anyone can..
We can’t go about imposing our lives and our life experiences upon others. We can’t expect everyone to ‘be like us’. By that notion, everyone who has an American passport has immense luck and privilege.
You are showing a lack of respect to those who came up in life due to grit and hard work. Immigrants who have left home and often circumstances of hard grinding poverty and inequalities in their home countries..to make a prosperous life in a far away shore. It can be borderline trauma or PTSD. What is the point of leaving behind parents and friends and a social circle if it means that they can’t be feted for their hard work and sacrifice?
I will tell you what’s more infuriating ..how lazy people who do gigs for ‘the experience’ cutting into a valid income stream for Americans who are uneducated, unskilled and poor. And I am not talking about the employees in the Door Dash gulag. I am talking about the guy who is insulted and throws food at someone’s doorstep and makes a TikTok video of it because this customer didn’t tip him according to expectations. Because anyone who needs a job and has mouths to feed isn’t getting bad reviews. The whole sector is exploitative and it must be addressed at the root rot.
Classes exist. Status exist. Human psychology doesn’t change for some core attitudes. Because humans beings regardless of whether they live in Calcutta or a cave ..in Bay Area or Japan ..we are all status seeking animals. No one is going to go to the top rung and then come back to the bottom rung except to feel smug and experience gratitude for their better status.
Of course..someone who spent years and years studying and specializing and working hard is not going to want to food delivery. Their drive and competitiveness comes from the same place in their psyche as the feeling of ‘looking down on delivery jobs’. It comes from the same well of self worth. It’s all connected.
So your anger is your problem. The real problem we should all be worried about is the exploitation factor of menial jobs…and the virtue signaling companies who are pulling stunts like this for optics(which begs the question..what are they hiding?).
This sounds like it would be concerning for individuals on a work status (TN, H-1b, etc) who are explicitly not supposed to perform work outside of their job or specialization. There's some grey area here for sure, but this seems pretty clearly outside the scope of authorized work.
An engineer helping with a support ticket once in a while, sure, I think it's a reasonable expectation, but I can't see how explicitly putting this as a job responsibility isn't going to muddy the waters for some people.
Surely these visa programs account for things like health and safety training, other upskilling and so on? If DoorDash obligates its employees to do this under the claim that it helps them perform their day jobs, then I fail to see how the visa could come into question.
I think there is a stark difference between health and safety training/upskilling, and doing customer deliveries/support: the former is an "additional responsibility" to many positions, while the latter is a job function that the company explicitly pays another person to perform.
If the mere claim is enough to ensure no questions about visa status, it creates an obvious giant hole to drive immigration fraud through.
It is also the reason why this program seems to exist in the first place, so it all looks like good faith.
"Building strong relationships with the rest of your team" may be a bit of a stretch since you're not doing a delivery with the rest of your team... you do it by yourself.
I'm not accusing DoorDash of acting in bad faith here. I'm concerned that this decision could unexpectedly put a portion of their employees in murky territory
Why is it important?
It drives empathy. Testing in non-production environment can tell that the feature is working as expected but it can't tell what the delivery person goes through or what the customer experience is like.
Our policy is not one trip but one day of doing this.
Overall it drivers a deeper appreciation towards deliver agents.
That sounds much more effective. :)
Also even if its was in job description, on H1b it would be considered an additional job and might need an additional H1b filling. Any active income will need to filed by the employer
This is my understanding.
Since I was logged into the server, I could see that we were doing a LOT of database intensive processes and that the tables that we were pulling data from to generate the end-of-day reports didn't have indexes on them.
I couldn't leave until all of the associates left (policy), so, I started looking at why we were doing what we were doing, and trying to figure out how to optimize it.
Being stuck at that store helped me figure out that we were probably losing close to $(rnd(2-8)13.509400)/day -- at least 253,000 per day in labor costs just in the US by having the employees wait for this to finish up -- so, I can say that sitting there and watching them struggle to wait for it to finish up would have never alerted me to these issues, as, closing our test stores only took seconds with the few transactions that we'd do during the day for our testing.
I think that this is a good thing, but, only because I've seen the benefits of getting a second perspective on things. Eliminating pain points leads to happier employees. Happier employees means you don't see posts about your company in /r/antiwork these days.
Could always save the mental energy to program whatever I want in my free time.
Even as a young adult, the heavy labor and stress I took on from working those types of jobs would leave me so exhausted that I could barely even drive home, let alone belt out code. I'm not saying it's impossible -- throw enough money out there and you'll find the people... but that hardly makes it praise-worthy or justifiable from a compatibility perspective.
Also, who doesn’t want to make milkshakes for a day or two? That sounds way more fun that staring at a computer for hours on end. You can say that would sweeten up the contract for me.
Having to work a shitty job when you're a teenager is a right of passage, I'm not doing it in my thirties.
That's one of my main reasons for getting out of those fields, I don't like customer service. I don't have patience for you getting upset with me because your wife's not getting you enough attention or whatever's going on at home.
I'm an extremely chill person, but if anyone's confrontational or angry I'll just avoid that situation. I remember I was at a grocery store or something and an elderly man started cursing at the employees because he couldn't figure out the automated checkout. That's not for me. I don't care that the technology is confusing and hard, I'm not tolerating someone cursing at me.
Nothing wrong with solving those problems, but when your business model IS the problem, there's not much the front line can do. Actually if they want to uncover some creative solutions, they should make everybody be the CEO once a month, instead of the most powerless position in the company.
Surely they've heard of the so-called Great Resignation. I think this is just a sly way of doing a layoff.
Most people think they are too good to be doing that.
Really this is the job of the product manager, and if the product manager isn't actively using your product, or talking with your customers and end users, then they are failing at their job.
But the number of product managers that take this part of the job seriously is abysmally low. Which is why companies have to instate other patterns to try and get this work done.
Maybe, but direct feedback is incredibly insightful and worth it's weight in gold when time to market and product market fit are critical to the operation's survival: startup v Corp World.
> But the number of product managers that take this part of the job seriously is abysmally...
It really is, stepping into the Corp World starting from a bootstrapping co-founder position) was a total culture shock!
Moreover, the lack of clarity and vision is toxic to a Team's overall productivity, coupled with the fact that the they are likely the one with the most TC it's hard to rationalize the drudgery that it becomes--it's less optimization of stand out core functionality, and more adding needless features and bug testing busy work to suit a PM's 'roadmap to success' they think will lead to the next rung on the corporate ladder.
I can't think of a worst way top operate, actually.
Eh, I've been a product manager and have taken my engineers to do the job, and it really changes how you talk about issues. I used to be PO for a team which developed warehousing software (a WMS) and would take engineers from my team to go picking for the day (if they were willing).
Dev teams will push back on some tickets, and say for instance that latency is fine (and that it's not possible to fix and unavoidable!). Besides, they know it's not user-perceptible at the current rates, and they know the exact latency as we have telemetry built in. If they do try to reduce latency, it's a half-assed effort with eye-rolling.
Then when they actually go and experience the job for a day they come back and are motivated and engaged to reduce latency because they have experienced it themselves, talked to users, and have watched other people working and can see the slight pause before the next pick. Suddenly maybe we should be pre-loading information before the next pick so that we don't need to wait for a web-service response?
And as an added benefit - the engineers would come back actually understanding the job and problem fully in a non-academic and practical way (people don't really 'get' how something works in practice until they have done it themselves, regardless of how simple it sounds on paper). And my personal experience was that a team of engineers that actually understand the problem are more effective and motivated to solve it (even if they didn't enjoy doing manual labour for a day).
I don't really buy the "only the PO needs to understand what the users want" - personally I see it as the PO's role to deeply understand what the users want and translate that into features / user stories, however everyone on the team needs to understand the job.
There comes a point in an organization's life where the engineering team is no longer passionate about the product - perhaps just see it as a 9-5 - and the product inevitably stagnates until it's overcome by a group of passionate engineers. FAANG engineers are smart - but nailing the polish on a product requires passion and testing.
The things that suck about being a door dash driver probably have more to do with the business model and revenue based decisions and less to do with where the buttons on the app are placed.
Disclosure: I work for a food delivery company competing with DD
It's nice to believe that solving problems for one solves problems for everybody, but fundamentally the business model is about pushing externalities onto drivers.
What's good for Walmart might not overlap with what's good for the supply chain.
I find it insulting to even read about it because who are they fooling..?
If you want rules against adverse changes to working conditions being imposed without negotiation and appropriate compensation, you need an employment contract that provides that. Which, in practice, means you need to be an independent contractor, an executive, or have a union.
People get super comfortable working For years without knowing how their product really works.
Having people learn all aspects of the product drastically improves the focus of everyone on problems that actually matter.
Losing people that don’t want to participate is often a good thing.
- This type of work is not what I interviewed and hired for
- This type of work will aggravate my bad back/knees/rotator cuff/etc
- This type of work triggers my very strong anxiety
- This type of work requires skills I do not have
- This type of work requires equipment that the company is not providing me (doesn't matter if I own it; if the company wants it done, they damn well better provide the means)
Different people have different needs. If I were hired to be a programmer for DoorDash, and they told me one day that the next I would, instead, be driving my car in unfamiliar neighborhoods, being expected to deliver X amount of product per Y amount of time? I'd be putting in my notice.
Just like if I were someone who has no programming background working as a driver for DoorDash, and they told me one day that the next I would be starting work on a project to upgrade feature Z in the app, with an expected delivery date based on highly trained programmers and no training.
> This type of work requires skills I do not have
Great, see this as an opportunity to develop new skills! Take it or quit/be fired.
> This type of work requires equipment that the company is not providing me
OK, either do it or quit/be fired.
> This type of work is not what I interviewed and hired for
OK, either do it or quit/be fired.
Making bad (but legal) decisions and fucking up a business isn’t (usually) a crime — if it is, lock me up! You may not like what your employer is telling you to do, but for the most part either do it or don’t.
Making the programmers do the delivery driving themselves can help them to identify with those over whom they exercise power.
Not really though because the cash stakes aren't real.
I've never worked in a place where programmers decide what to build. At best they decide how to build what they are "asked" (told) to build.
If they try and dispute what to build, they are often told to hit the bricks.
Which is exactly what you seem to try to do.
The issue with workers not keeping up with the necessities of the business cannot be put on the workers themselves. If communications in a company are so lacking that people need to be shuffled around randomly, in order to understand the needs of the business, then problems run too deep already.
In the case of Doordash, making engineers shadow delivery people is overkill and counterproductive, and management obviously doesn't understand what a feedback loop should look like.
That’s intelligent logistics and last mile delivery. Door dash model is just Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
Food is expensive. Gas is expensive. Labour is expensive. Make the customer pay up.(when we had farm CSAs, even with minimums, it wasn’t worth it with Bay Area traffic and gas prices and even if I deliver, I wasn’t paying for my time) DD etc are the real villains. Door dash and ilk should stop boosting their customer numbers for increasing valuations. That’s what this is all really about ..isn’t it?
This is horrifying. The glorification of menial work and making sure ‘everyone experiences’ it is a new sort of first world hell.
We should work towards getting rid of all menial and manual jobs. Not normalize it and perpetuate.
America is laughing stock to the rest of the developing world where they work hard to escape poverty and menial jobs.
Goodbye, America. If someone had ever wanted to destroy America and a grand plan was in motion…they have succeeded.
I am truly horrified by what this country has become…companies like door dash are betting on an never ending supply of low wage menial workers instead of pivoting into automating and modernizing food delivery..and more importantly what is needed is training and educating people acc to their skills and abilities that aren’t for jobs that a mindless drone can do.
This nonsense here is some kind of sick grooming and virtue signaling horror story script for an already dying capitalist country. Why not start delivering sustainable pony carts instead of cars next?
Philanthropic? A company’s job is to make profit. An individual’s job is to create a better society.
Almost every immigrant I know who has come to this country will be laughing.
Menial jobs ARE beneath ANY human being. Educate your population instead to make sure there are no more menial jobs.
Every problem has its solution in smart infrastructure and small sustainable cities. We are trying to live in the 80s in 2022 with 21st century tech and tools.
Most of the startups are seeded with ideas that are reminiscent of the 80s when I was child in India. This country is moving backwards due to nostalgic immigrants in powerful places.
Please stop celebrating this. It’s just awful in so many ways.
It’s like everyone lets mom sleep in on mothers’ day to make breakfast in bed for ONE day and leave behind a mess and an overworked mom for the rest of the year…while feeling virtuous and glowy for one single day. Sounds familiar? I would wager..not?
I tend to agree, we have a very clear divide between Social Strata (that if left unchecked can resemble your caste system) that has only gotten deeper in the 21st Century: what once relied on cheap, migrant labor in the 20th century has now been imposed on to the domestic debt-laden labor force due to COVID travel restrictions, which leads to the grind and 'exploitation' of a once middle class society experiencing the economic fallout from COVID largess and consolidation of Marketshare. Many of who went to college with promises of being able to work in their desired Industry, carry lots of debt, and are forced to work a combination of retail and gig jobs to make ends--it's a large part of what has led to the antiwork/layng down movement in both US and China.
And to be honest, I don't blame them.
But to you point on automation.
I recently went back to school for AI and ML after leaving a career in fintech and we had a recent hackathon over Xmas that included robotics: I think automation, in logistics specifically, can currently only do so much reliably without incurring immense expenses and delays while trying to survive in an already broken model; it's the law of diminishing returns where Human capital has only recently had it's wages re-evaluated as a vital role in the equation to ease the labor shortage in certain Industries but the tech be it software/hardware/battery is simply not there yet to completely replace all of these 'menial jobs' overnight.
I also take issue with the implied notion that some of Society's most valuable workers are often deemed 'menial' by the educated intelligentsia in high ranking positions you say are ruining things. Especially with a guy with the handle that implies he farms; which is an immensely vital role (former Biodynamic farmer myself), but filled with a great deal of toil and back breaking labour only suited for 'uneducated folk' in the rural part of the World--when that is completely untrue.
I can’t support menial jobs in any form. They need to be made extinct. Not coddled and protected. If you believed what you wrote, you’d still be a biodynamic farmer and not into AI/ML.
Reasonable people should stop posturing and virtue signaling.
Edited to add:
So let’s do difficult tech things, automate menial jobs and pay more for food. Nothing..like..literally nothing is achieved with this ‘dash of shame’ disguised as ‘training’. This is some form of diluted American SV version of communist china’s Struggle Session.
We should stop humiliating and shaming successful, intelligent and productive individuals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
ETA: how you show appreciation for the most ‘valued worker’ is to pay them more. (It’s like the problem of the homeless..the only solution to eliminate homelessness is to provide homes. A home. Not homes in expensive zip code or needle exchange or blah blah blah..but provide shelter called ‘a home’.)Door dash can easily do this instead of this ridiculous song and dance. Oh wait..except if it’s a shitty business model and they can’t really milk any profits..and are just buying time and PR.
I'm saying we're creating a wealth divide that resembles an archaic developing nations assumption that title and surname matter more than capability, intellect or ambition. Things the US lauded in the 19th-20th Century that made my ancestors migrate here and help emerge to what it has become but has since degraded in the 21st century due to perpetual crony-capitalist wealth extractors who do nothing more than lobby and pay off who ever they have to ensure they can keep things 'business as usual.'
> I can’t support menial jobs in any form. They need to be made extinct. Not coddled and protected. If you believed what you wrote, you’d still be a biodynamic farmer and not into AI/ML.
To be clear, my methods are not clear to you; I believe in immersive learning to be the most effective way at solving a problem (my degrees are seldom utilized beyond just getting an interview); mine had to do with being a trained but unsatisfied cellular and molecular biologist in an Industry captured by big pharma. I excelled in microbiology and sought to play a role in the advancement of carbon sequestration and soil fertility via crop rotation of certain (then illegal prior to 2012) cash crops (hemp) and maybe alleviate the endemic opioid crisis happening in the US with more sustainable and holistic forms of pain management--introducing an Industry making products from various cannabis based products made the most sense to support small organic/biodynamic farms beyond anything that I have seen.
As of 2018 with the Farm Bill hemp is legal in all 50 US states and regulated by the US department of Ag via their local state branches licensure system we pioneered in Colorado. My goals were accomplished, there was no point in staying there any longer.
I think your viewpoint comes from an almost inescapable notion that work and identity are tied to one another, where for most people they simple see it as a means to an end: especially when family and responsibilities are included in the equation. Limited options coupled with the stress of high demands and responsibilities are probably responsible for more misery in the World than delivering doordash.
Just so it's clear, this methods is also used at the SBB in Switzerland: my friend, who let me run her farm as a manger when I was an apprentice, was a high ranking manager at her local station in the Capital. And it's typical to have to do this once a month, she often collected tickets, cleaned the trains, etc...
I'd argue Switzerland is a fr cry from your notion you are describing.
Also worth noting, and this was my experience in my time in fintech and affirmed during the COVID lockdowns, the most remarkable consistent way to reach millionaire status isn't being a a hardworking entrepreneur unshackling himself from the menial labor force: it's being a broker or money manager of a successful hedge fund that has deep ties to banks that lobby the State.
Your over romanticizing something that clearly has a more clear trajectory from outright slavery and indebted servitude than you're willing to admit, here is fun homework task if you want it: find how much prison labor is used by major corps around the World? And how many of these corps lobby the government on behalf of for profit prisons in the US for these contracts to use prison labor and help shape conviction rates to that end.
I'm going to end with this: as a person with a background in logistics and supply chain management in the auto industry (my day job when I was a bootstrapping co-founder in fintech) I decided to look at Doordash's emergence as the top delivery app and successful IPO and continued Softbank VC funidng etc... when the pandemic happened and locked downs were imposed I looked at the r/doordash for several weeks and even signed up and did a few deliveries to get under the hood,
In the end, (May 2020) what I found was the typical SV 'grow fast and break things' charade coupled with the VC inflated IPO exit strategy and left thinking that space was not worth investing my time in and went back to focusing on what I knew: International supply chain and logistics of freight. The amount of money loss due to basic things was staggering and sobering to say the least.
I wrote about this experience in my application process where I was accepted on performance based admission which opened the doors to meeting other CS students and now collaborating with graduate level data scientists in discussing and exploring how to address some fundamental needs in this space.
So you see, it's not all bad.
What you pay for an IT/AI specialist is for the years of education and experience, skill and intelligence. It’s like why a doctor gets paid more than a nurse. Or why you’d pay for an artist who has many years of education and practice honing a skill vs your scribbling with crayons.
What is rewarded with money is skill. Gigs are unskilled labour. If that is the main source of income, then there will be wealth gap. As it should be.
2. I can’t discuss caste system with you as I think it’s a distraction and entirely useless to this discussion. Ditto about your ancestors. It is irrelevant and I am not interested.
3. Thanks for making it clear that ‘your methods are not clear to me’. That is your deficit in explaining and again irrelevant to this discussion. As are your degrees or your immersive learning. I am skipping all that.
4. No. My viewpoint isn’t ‘work and identify are tied to one another’. My viewpoint is that a SWE didn’t sign up for a job to do a delivery job for performance score. Skipped the rest of the paragraph as it’s irrelevant.
5. Again…skipping the part on SBB in Switzerland. Irrelevant to discussion at hand.
6. Skipping the part about your opinion about my ‘over romaticisation’ and your incomprehensible analysis about me. Irrelevant. Again.
7. Prison Labour. Skipped. Pass.
Ok. I guess that’s that then.
Delivery is a service, but it can never cost more than the cost of food itself. It won’t make sense to most customers.
Which brings us to: why should food always be cheap and/or subsidized?
Because everyone needs to be fed. It’s the duty of any govt to keep food prices stable. There is no way cost of food will be stable or not increase when an economy is doing well.
If cost of food has to be affordable to all but labour has to be fairly compensated, this labour MUST be automated. At some point, the cost of labour will exceed the cost of automation.
This might happen when momentum /scale kicks in..but that will take time. We shouldn’t stop working towards automating entire sectors. We are already a decade or two late. By 2050, population will peak at 10-11 billion and then it will start declining. There won’t be enough people to do these kinds of jobs. So we can’t develop systems and structures and processes that doesn’t take into account the eventual generational population decline. We must redesign legacy infrastructure processes and systems. Like ..the paradigm shift..we should have started yesterday or a decade ago.
Some jobs simply have to disappear. What happened to horse carriage drivers and stable boys and farriers when automobiles replaced horse drawn transport?
We can’t claim any advancement unless we aim to get rid of all menial jobs. This has to be a stated goal. So much human talent is wasted and especially horrible because to keep food costs low, an entire demographic is being paid barely liveable minimum wages, exploited and work under hazardous conditions.
Agtech will not bring down real cost of food but it will make food accessible and affordable to all as wages/income go up as menial job workers move up to higher wage paying jobs.
This is how society should make leaps and bounds. If one wants human beings to do menial job, it means one is ok with inequalities. One can’t engage in virtue signaling and harping against inequalities while still encouraging exploitative sectors to thrive and creating startups that rely on said low wage menial jobs. Door dash and it’s ilk..fooling no one. Not me anyways. I am just sick and tired of the startup community’s virtuous song and dance. The truth is that Door Dash can never..I want to repeat: never…justify its valuation. And hence all this pipsqueak drama of Shakespearean proportions.
A lot of undocumented immigrants when they get their legal status or their next generation do not come back to farming. They go into construction jobs or landscaping. They have tools and machinery and higher wages and medical etc.
One might want to consider why people even work in such awful conditions when literally even being household help or a blow/mow gardener will be able to make more $$. Most farm workers are out in the fields through labour contractors. Not hired by the corporate farm themselves.
It is an exploited sector. It is a shadow labour market. They won’t toss lettuce on the road because they didn’t get a tip like the dashers or come late for work or skip work(they live 4-6 to a room and still rely on coyotes to cross the border. They start work before daylight and are transported by the labour contractor in vans to the fields. Many work here for 9 months, send home money and go back during off season or simply live here illegally to avoid risking border crossings.)
That’s one kind of menial job. They’d gladly deliver food without ‘food wastage’(door dash euphemism for undelivered orders), but if they can do it, they fall in the same trap of living in a first world country with third world wages.
Startups like door dash have brought third world jobs at third world wages(because food delivery can’t be outsourced like coding jobs) to a first world country. This business model will never take…whatever we are reading in the article is just temporary optics.
To sum up: 1. Jobs will disappear. 2. We don’t have to work 40h/week. 3. We don’t need human beings to do menial jobs. There are ways to automate jobs and work flows to eliminate human input. 4. You don’t have to be an engineer to be an artist or a farmer or a teacher or a musician.
In America, we are losing basic survival skills and arts. We are lagging behind in education, healthcare and manufacturing. There are other jobs. We should be upskilling and reskilling our population in America.
Another worrisome trend is that America is the third largest populated country in the world and we are arrogant that we can absorb more. But India and China don’t have first world living conditions and Americans are number one in consumption. Everything we import is coming from a place and with labour Americans won’t do…if we don’t have the tech or talent(math is racist in America and so they are trying to cancel calculus in schools), let’s import or outsource the tech with our dollars. Just like Saudi Arabia is doing. They are investing in future tech.
Our attitude is to implement what works for the workforce in India and China. I am sorry to say this but a lot of startups are mimicking what’s working for countries with 1.3+ billion people and hence has a lot of economic inequalities. It simply won’t translate in America. They have ended up importing the inequalities and housing unaffordability m, crowded cities, bad infrastructure and debt traps while giving up what those countries want to emulate about us. Leisure..high paying jobs and cutting edge tech.
Young immigrant entrepreneurs should realize this and they are rightfully lauded (by VCs/investors because they see the numbers and nothing else) because everything that works in China and India is a brilliant hack but honed over hundreds of years and only matches their eco systems. Menial jobs in india and Xmas tree sprayers in China would love to be dashers as it’s a step up in a poor country with not enough jobs for their billion plus population. It will be a thorn…a poisonous thorn..on America’s side. It’s not a good fit…this gig economy. It’s like purposely buying a shoe many sizes small just to experience discomfort. When there is no need to..
Young entrepreneurs should ask themselves..what kind of world are you helping to create? It’s YOUR children who will inherit this world. Look how we live in the Bay Area…350k/annum is breaking even. There was even a discussion about it on HN. It’s like we are trying hard to import income inequalities with some misplaced nostalgia Or romanticization to be a developing economy rather than be comfortable with our developed rich nation status.
It’s is the self flagellating attitude that seems to have pervaded this country since 911. We have to snap out of this trauma or drama or whatever the fuck is happening to our country. Maybe someone can psychoanalyse our nation and explain that in a separate thread. But this HAS to stop. It’s like someone pretending to be sick so they can hang with other sick people who are the majority. Healthy people can guide others to become well. They shouldn’t forget their blessing and join the sick ward party because the flowers and get well cards and balloons looks like fun.
True Abundance is not the ability to support 100 billion world population. Real abundance is when resources needed to survive as a species is available to all without scarcity.
In America, we can afford to not work 40 hour work weeks and Crete cutting edge tech. Why are we not doing it? Why are we making first world population do menial jobs that the poorest of third world population does to escape poverty? And why are we surprised that it’s not working here?
Suggested solution: be shitty to a delivery worker
Seems like some solid reasoning and empathy.
You're not wrong on point a), but I don't think we'd see a "significant" difference though - but you're incorrect on point b) because I've had (and have) very, very flexible working conditions with the same full benefits as everybody else. Benefits don't necessarily have to be fractional nor tied to any kind of fixed rate. If a company wants to extend its health-plan to its part-time workers there's certainly no US tax-code or insurance reg stopping them - nothing other than the generosity (or lack-of) on the part of company leadership.
DoorDash isn't avoiding anything by not paying benefits -- they are paying cash instead of benefits. Maybe it's the case that the employees should net out more than they do; but that's quite separate from whether they get benefits or not, because it's all cash out the door at the end of the day.
I agree: if people want to work in the gig-economy on a part-time or "side-hustle"-basis, then of course they should.
But I also think that if people would prefer to work in gig-economy as their full-time job then they shouldn't be screwed-over either.
I do recognize that being a "full-time gig-economy worker" working 12+ hours a day can, in-practice, mean working 3-4 hours/day for each of 3-4 completely separate companies, and on that basis I don't believe there's currently a workable way (in the US, at least) to require any single gig-company (like Uber or DoorDash, etc) to extend FTE benefits like that, but this a new paradigm (is it really that new though?) that needs to be written into employment law with a solution that works well for everybody: it's demonstrable that the greater-society loses when more people don't have decent health-insurance coverage or childcare or even good ol' fashioned time-off.
I recently ordered a small appliance from Walmart and chose the option for next-day delivery, which turns out to mean delivered from a local Walmart store, and Walmart subcontracts that from-store delivery to DoorDash and other companies.
Later the same day (not next day), I got a notification that the package had been delivered, left on the porch. That seemed strange, since I was at home sitting on that porch when they said the delivery was made. They provided a photo "showing where the package was left" -- but it was in fact no such thing, it was just a stock photo of the item from the Walmart website. I walked around the neighborhood, thinking maybe they left it at the wrong address, but no luck.
Finally, I called Walmart and a CSR looked it up and said, "Oh, that's being delivered by DoorDash. They sometimes just say they delivered things even though they haven't. You'll probably get your package tomorrow."
I asked him if Walmart was okay with their delivery service lying to customers, and he said, yes, Walmart is totally fine with it.
I did not get my package the next day. Or ever. After three days, Walmart refunded the order.
The moral of this story is that DoorDash is a company of liars. Don't trust them. I hope the company dies.
Semi-related, I recently learned that if you create a Walmart account online and you later decide you want to delete, you actually have to call into Walmart's customer support and speak to a representative in order to do that.
I've worked retail and food services and delivery jobs. I got into software to never ever have to do that again.
The job sucks, and for most of the people working it, the pay sucks too. To that end, I think a major part of why the job sucks is that the pay sucks - so much hard work for so little reward adds up mentally, and makes every interaction and delivery worse - so they're kinda missing the point with the "build empathy" part if they aren't making only delivery pay while they do this.
And yes, fellow employees are your customer.
I can go get my SWE comp elsewhere and not have to do bullshit like that.
I have worked places where myself and fellow office workers have regularly pitched in for things like inventory in the warehouse, but then again the companies I have worked at have not been notoriously abusive with regards to labor and compensation. Coming from a blue collar family and having worked crap jobs prior to college, I never look down on any labor, rather the companies who take advantage. I do look at exploitative companies implementing suspect policies with a cynical perspective. If you don't believe that the gig economy is a shift towards destroying worker's rights and solidarity (how many tech workers are really pro labor? Vs how many anti-union rugged individualists), I'm sorry.
> If you don't believe that the gig economy is a shift towards destroying worker's rights and solidarity (how many tech workers are really pro labor? Vs how many anti-union rugged individualists), I'm sorry.
I absolutely do believe that and I outright refuse to participate in the gig economy. I never use Uber, I never have food delivered, I do not like this. But we're talking about salaried employees being asked to put themselves in the shoes of their users once a month. Let's keep some perspective.
I think the most likely explanation is some executive who himself lacks sympathy with the vast majority of the classes of people working underneath him read something or had some isolated experience, or both, relating to the utility of the technique, overgeneralized it, and the instituted an overgeneralized, poorly considered, mandate around a broadly-useful concept, rather than initiating an effort to find a way to incorporate it as and where appropriate.
My perspective is "I did that job in college and I remember well how shit it is, I don't need to be told by my boss to go experience it again"
I think they're trying to create a corporate cult where everyone believes in the mission and that the delivery workers are happy and being given great gifts of opportunity by the corporate giver rather than being exploited.
They don't want empathy for the actual situation of the (delivery) workers -- which would require empathizing with the precarity of their whole existence. They want a ritualized simulacrum of empathy. They want to pretend that they have empathy, exactly to negate the possibility actual empathy, and to negate actual worker revolt.
It's the exact opposite of what it presents itself as.