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Comment by aphexddb | Hacker News Reader

Context: I was a UPS drivers helper during college during the holiday seasons. This job entailed running large amounts of holiday volume packages to houses from the truck.

I speculate that this is because the role of driver is a high-trust and critical operations role. This person has to reliably execute package delivery every single day regardless of the highly variable problem spaces that emerge. Without the last X mile capacity that a driver brings, all of the infra at UPS doesn’t provide value. For example a driver wakes up early every day, rain or shine (or sleet), and is accountable for making sure a truck is loaded correctly at the dock, and every package on the route is delivered. This can include packages of diamonds insured for 10’s of thousands, to hundred plus pound boxes.

I only rode shotgun for a few weeks a year and it was hard work. From that POV it a seems like a fair wage for the role.

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Drivers with consistent routes doing pickups for businesses end up being the most important customer facing people for the delivery company.

You can call your UPS rep and get results in a month (or your FedEx rep and get results in a year IME lol) but your daily driver can make an extra pickup or make a timeframe adjustment same-day if you ask and it’s doable.

Regarding the "high trust" part, they are tracked in real-time with GPS including when they scan deliveries.

The tracking part is more telemetry for their delivery optimization algorithm. (Think the classic traveling salesman problem.) For example, UPS drivers are generally prohibited from making left turns because it's considered less efficient to do so.

UPS drivers are personally held responsible for packages placed in their custody.

> For example, UPS drivers are generally prohibited from making left turns because it's considered less efficient to do so.

No, they aren’t “generally prohibited from making left turns” - that’s a misrepresentation. The truth is that their routing-engine is optimised for reducing idle time waiting at lights which meant that _consequently_ their navigation+routing instructions given to the driver will avoid left-turns. That’s all it is.

(When the media references this they make it sound like eliminating left-turns is the objective, rather than the end-result)

It's definitely used for checking and evidence of delivery. For instance, GPS coordinates are logged when parcels is marked as delivered so that know exactly where this happened, not only when.

How much does this differ from the responsibilities of armored car drivers, who make $17/hour?

They should make more too.

Same reason pizza delivery (a fairly dangerous job, more likely to die on the job than a cop) makes less - It’s not as hard to train and retain armored car drivers. Armored cars make routine deliveries of exactly one product to a fixed number of regular commercial clients. General package delivery is pretty much the opposite of all of that.

It’s a hard work, yes. And people should get paid for hard work.

But you’re a delivery man, that’s it. In each job you need to wake up in the morning and have responsibility to do your work well. And very often you’re handling equipment/goods that exceed not only your monthly salary but your lifetime income.

That's exactly why they should be are so highly paid. You don't want your delivery man to be texting their friends that they just dropped off a high value package somewhere.

They should be highly paid, or they'll conspire to commit felonies?

That's not a reason to be highly paid (and note - nowhere I argue how much they should be paid).

What is "that's it" supposed to mean here?

Delivery, aka logistics, is one of the most important jobs in our economy.

Twitter demonstrates that companies and systems could survive for months without programmers. As the early days of the COVID lockdowns demonstrated, society would collapse within days or weeks without deliverymen.

> What is "that's it" supposed to mean here?

It means he thinks people should be paid more than UPS drivers to sit in a fabric box all day developing fart apps for iPhone.

Or WFH whilst waiting for said delivery man to show up with the box from Amazon with more unnecessary Chinese garbage he didn't need.

All kidding aside, I've experienced just about every delivery company and UPS is the only one where the drivers take their jobs seriously. In comparison, I once caught FedEx performing an Ace Ventura-style penalty kick of my package onto the porch.

> It means he thinks people should be paid more than UPS drivers to sit in a fabric box all day developing fart apps for iPhone.

Yes, there're only 2 types of jobs in the world - app developer and UPS driver.

Your comment is border-line insulting to people doing other jobs, that are often much harder and dangerous, but pay much less.

It was an exaggeration, but he described the poster’s sentiment perfectly.

I think the theory is that “importance” shouldn’t really drive salary. The ability to find someone to do the same job for less money should.

If the industry cannot reliably deliver packages with proper security, safety, reliability, humanity, etc. without this level of compensation, then it’s the right number.

The interesting thing about this salary is that if you can actually earn that much without an expensive education or hard-to-attain skills, then there would likely be a lot of people saying, “heck I’ll do that for less! It sure beats massive debt and this shitty job I have.” And salaries would correct… unless there’s more to this story, or a union stops the system from correcting.

>a union stops the system from correcting.

Ah yes, because the market is perfect but for those pesky unions and government interventions. The economy totally prices things efficiently on its own— managers and executives would never abuse their power to extract more than their fair share. Must be nice to live in that simplistic Econ 101 fantasy camp.

"That's it" it suppose to mean, that it's a hard work, but there's tons of hard jobs around, that are essential. And the requirements that op presented of having to wake up in the morning, check that your work place is ready to work and then do your work - if someone is impressed by that, I'd say, they it's first time they face an "honest" day of work.

Coal mine? Farmer? Factory worker? Construction worker? Oil rig workers?

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