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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what do the devs who coded these "features" think about themselves and/or what other people think about them.

Yes I know they are literally paid to not have these questions. But deep down, is there any remorse or guilt at all or is it just "not my problem" attitude all the way to the bank?

On a tangent, this is why I think there need to be more regulations with software development. Any real engineering discipline has tons of oversight and government agencies breathing down their neck to ensure compliance. Software came out when all these pushes for safety has been gutted and as a result we have a free for all race to the bottom.

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There are many people who believe vigorously in dynamic pricing and it providing the "best service", and don't need to be paid to believe so.

The difficulty arises because the counter-argument of "surge pricing can kick in way faster than new cars show up on the road" is, in its details, subtle. And "this is just grabbing money for no increased service" goes against many people's idea that people should be able to charge arbitrary amounts for services if they feel like it. "People shouldn't be bidding against each other like this for transportation" is yet another can of worms.

This is a space where there are so many sticking points that many people will disagree with. A place where you can really understand gaps between people's axioms, depending on what part you focus on. And it's a place where Uber sits comfortably in the conclusion of the simple arguments, and the opposition to its tactics lies in the conclusion of very long, nuanced, contextful arguments (that still, at one point, require acknowledging that it's not good for society as a whole for a service provider to have unlimited pricing power, which is a big ask!).

Surge pricing is literally just supply and demand. It tries to ensure the number of people who need a taxi is the same as the number of people who drive. A glut in drivers decreases driver earnings while a glut in riders will cause long wait times.

> It tries to ensure the number of people who need a taxi is the same as the number of people who drive

This is almost certainly not what it does. What it (almost certainly) does is maximize Uber’s profits. Meaning if they can make a few extra bucks by raising prices and leaving someone out in the cold and a driver without a job they will.

This is not to say that Uber has any obligation to do anything different, just a reminder that profit maximization is not the same as welfare maximization.

How would you word a regulation against this sort of thing to apply against the low man on the totem pole, the lowly SWE? Might it be better if it was regulated as unfair and deceptive by a strong FTC with a nice bounty for SWEs?

One of the main avantage of regulating a professional board (eg. Engineers, doctors, etc) is to make an individual fully responsible. What if that "lowly swe" wasn't so lowly anymore and the company executives could go to jail if they pushed code without his stamp on it? In civil engineering, if your boss asks you to stamp something illegal and you do it, you can lose your title.

It garantees that there is always one person in charge who will take personal responsibility for the act and will fight for thing to be done properly and no one can bypass him.

We have fully licensed computer and software engineers in Canada. There isn't much demand for the professional designation outside of safety critical fields; many people graduate from accredited programs and never get the physical stamp.

You'd have to massively expand the bounds of what constitutes "engineering" when programming software.

This would immediately kill open source. Anyone who isn't an engineer couldn't write code unsupervised. Anyone who is, would refuse to release code publicly licence because you'd have professional liability for anyone that uses your code in perpetuity forever.

I like the idea because licensure helps deal with the power differential that some professionals have over the average person. But the lines would have to be drawn very carefully to avoid killing open source.

You're making the SWE responsible for compliance with consumer protection laws. That's not going to work.

It is a failure of capitalism that we need to force certain people to behave ethically, taking the role as umpire for a broken system.

Instead of something merely sketchy and probably not real, what about something clearly illegal and proven real like for example the VW emissions thing?

Or does being sketchy / probably immoral vs being actually illegal make a difference? Maybe something around twisting yourself in knots to justify something being corrosive in ways that knowingly doing wrong isn't?

I suspect it's less apathetic than that; more "sweet, this'll get me a bonus!"

No one even had to code them necessarily. Imagine building a purchase prediction engine. You could easily accidentally slide credits in as a feature. In the same way that you have to be very careful in ML to not accidentally include either the answer or a close proxy for the answer in your training data and have the model learn that it should just pick the proxy for the answer.

Regardless, I'm also not clear what I think about government regulating the price of a service like Uber. My first thought is probably more harm than good. We mostly don't regulate the price of airline tickets. I don't see how Uber is any different.

Might come down to two variables:

- do they believe they're doing a job that is otherwise net positive to society or their users ?

- how hard would it be to successfully argue against this feature getting implemented ?

For instance I'd they think Uber is saving humanity but this feature would cost their whole career if they went hard against it, the remorse would be negligible.

For others it could be the last straw breaking the camel's back.

In general I think we're turning the blind eye to many shitty practices if we assume it's a small issue in the grand scheme of things. I mean, we wouldn't have so many dark patterns and spam emails from almost every companies we interact with if it wasn't the case.

When was the last time you went to tell your marketing department to dial it down ?

The devs might just adapt to the users who take an Uber to the next union meeting. People know about the consequences of this kind of "freelancing" but still don't care enough to adapt their consumption.

It is not a single dollar worth it to them and people don't seem to see the connection between their own working conditions and their demands for consumption.

Sure, Uber also destroyed or at least challenged a lot of taxi monopolies. For that alone it was surely worth it. But I think "abusing" the price flexibility of customers is anything nefarious as they certainly do the same.

I think all the people that have moral qualms have already refused to build such things. It doesn’t matter, because there’s a whole line of people in it only for the money that can take their place.

I don’t think it’s fair to be so black and white. Morals are a luxury item. The rest of us need to work somewhere.

There is one Uber, there are untold numbers of other companies/businesses operating more reputably.

They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: health insurance.

Instead of regulations, I think this is the kind thing that should be driving a push to unionize tech. For the most part we don’t need to worry about dangerous job sites or low pay, but we do have to worry about unethical business practices.

Specifically, if we had widespread “codetermination”, which gives board seats to union members, the people that build things would have a say in what they’re being asked to build.

> Specifically, if we had widespread “codetermination”, which gives board seats to union members, the people that build things would have a say in what they’re being asked to build.

We don't have legal or cultural barriers to leaving to work somewhere else if you don't like what your current employer chooses to spend their money on (and modern telecommuting counters issues from living in a one-employer town). Without those barriers needing to be compensated for, this sounds like just trying to seize control of other people's stuff.

How is giving an elected union official a seat in the board room seizing other people's stuff?

You need share holders' approval to join the board. Today's markets immediately punish a company which supports union. So forcing your way is the only practical way to get a union board seat

Not a dev, but someone who went through a relatively shitty process implemented by a SaaS company at my first job.

The general idea was enshitification once new subscribers dried up. We auto renewed everyone that we could into a drastically different, and more expensive, pay structure then forced them to call if they wanted cancel.

I knew it was scummy at the time (circa 2012), and now wish I had at least SAID something. As a fresh college grad still, I needed the job and stability.

In an ideal world, we would empower workers to stand up for what is right, but every step of the system is designed to take that away from us. Having a moral choice is a luxury in today's workforce.

> As a fresh college grad still, I needed the job and stability.

This is why we have student debt. It keeps employees compliant and subservient.

No I don't think there is a cabal of industry conspiring to achieve this. But, with thousands of little nudges from business this is where we ended up.

I know sales leaders who intentionally encourage their sales people to get into financial commitments (e.g. buy that bigger house, a new sports car). This is all so that the seller is desperate and will work crazy hours to ensure they get their commissions and can pay these financial burdens.

I could also imagine that there is lot of gaslighting involved to feel good about themselves when making these features. For example, they will talk about in terms of prioritizing Ubers for customers because they need it more urgently hence the the premium. So, (1) you can comfortably talk about developing these features with each other (2) even though you know its BS you don't care because you know its gonna lead to good perf review (increased revenue by X%) => bonus.

Kind of how Apple justifies crazy App Store policies/pricing for keeping "customers safe".

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