A confession from a mainstream food delivery app engineer
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The tip stealing thing felt very similar to one thing I noticed last night during NYE was certain friends who used uber more had to pay higher for the same rides as me who never uses the app. There’s so much data singling both drivers and consumers out to maximize returns, it’s crazy
That's why you always pit the techbros against each other and have at least 2 competing apps that you distribute your rides across.
It was removed from all but one, so no mods of any community were able to verify identity (stuck in automod queue for some).
This is what made it feel fake to me. Even the most naive startups don't discuss these kinds of details with the dev team (or sometimes even the senior management) because it's not relevant to getting the work done. This alleged business is likely much larger and naturally siloed. Intent is not a success criteria, and things are always subject to change so why bake it into the code? Sounds like a terrible idea.
What would make way more sense is asking the dev team to expose configuration and stats. Dashboards are not suspicious because they are genuinely useful to the entire business, not just some evil inner group trying to squeeze a few percent.
It necessarily has to be need-to-know and decisions have to be based on dry explanations where the intent isn't clear at all unless you're sitting in on many meetings across many teams. This is just how things scale. I question where some people have worked that are commenting.
In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
If you're the builder working on an evil mastermind's evil lair, you may not be told, specifically, that you're building a piranha pit. But they will have to disclose that it they need a pit, which is also a freshwater aquarium with a means of keeping large carnivorous fish alive. Also that there has to be a hidden trap door big enough for a human to fall through when a button is pushed.
And even if it is given a codename like "the justice room" or something, during the months of design and building no doubt some people will slip up and call it "the piranha pit" in your presence.
I don't think we're talking about the same topic at all. It sounds like OP is so curious that they made the whole thing up, and I think you might be out of touch with businesses that have plenty of tech workers, but aren't a tech company (most businesses around the world).
Nothing in that article reads implausible to me, both that they were building things like "desperation score" (probably not called that, probably called something like "commitment" or something) and that any reasonably intelligent and curious engineer would have understood what he was building.
I do congratulate this author, though. If posted it to a different site, I would believe it.
The first paragraph already triggers all the red flags that the story is made up.
"Burner laptop", really? Then "I put in my two weeks yesterday". Why put in the effort for a burner laptop and then dox yourself in the next sentence?
Nah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies pocket the tips, but this story smells.
If I was going to do some kind of exposé of my employers I'd at least include some semi-obfuscated screenshots to add some credibility to any claims I might make. Sure, things like that can be faked but it at least would require more effort to do all that (and make them appear credible) vs just a bunch of raw claims.
(I also don't think it's a great idea to judge claims based on how believable you personally find them. That often just leads to confirmation bias as you're just reinforcing your own biases).
If you didn't care, you'd post the names
It isn't at least for Wolt, which sells it as "delivery direct to you from the restaurant", rather than the delivery driver also doing other deliveries in parallel. This is quite easy to confirm given the realtime tracking of driver (and your food not being cold because they stopped at another restaurant on the way and had to wait 20 minutes).
I live in an urbanish area, and if i don't set Priority Delivery then there's probably a 2 in 3 chance I'm stuck in a queue with "waiting on other delivery to complete".
About the only way to get my food while it's still warm enough to eat (because few of these drivers use heat bags) is to set priority delivery. And when I do, I can track it straight from store to my place. No 'waiting on other delivery' messages, not even blips of disconnectedness while the driver fulfills orders from other apps. Just straight to me.
This fee, I find, works better than tipping. Which is sad because in my imagination, I suspect the platform is keeping the fee rather than the driver. Incentives are completely messed up for gig deliveries.
I got a glimpse of this "delivery economy" myself last week, so
Self pick-up was:
>2x faster (20min vs ~40min estimate, probably more in the end), could be better if I actually knew the area and picked a better parking spot
>1/3 cheaper (total dropped from 30$ to 20$. I'm not from the US, and make roughly 6$/hr, so the sum is more significant than it seems)
>food was probably generally more fresh, but I don't eat sushi much, so can't tell the difference
>also, food was probably less banged up, because I'm not on the clock and don't drive like a madman
some counterpoints:
> we were already driving home from somewhere, the place was the opposite way though
> we live in a dense city, but not too dense, so owning a car and driving it around is possible even on a not so large income, but everything is pretty close
Generally, my family never stopped doing things "the old way", we barely use any delivery services, taxi, and everything the gig economy is involved in. Likely saves us good amount of money in subtle ways. Also, specifically not giving money to those platfoms is a minor benifit in my book.
I get there are people who are disabled, busy (parents with small children, ...), and so on, but it seems to me that for most people the barrier is psychological, and is about task/mode switching more than actual time and effort.
The only one I disagree with is the "2x faster". Yes, the time from when you start thinking about food to eating food might be halved, but food delivery is basically zero time. I dont need to do the getting the food portion. So, 0 minutes vs 20 minutes.
(And I appreciate that it's worth paying for prompt delivery. I am baffled that enough people are happy with cold food that it's not the standard.)
Also, why did the URL not change to old.reddit?
Always tip in cash and never through the app
Don’t use priority delivery
They do offer more utility and convenience than the previous generation of services, which is why they’ve gained market share. Increasing accountability on the current big players is better
No I will not tip in app, that is obviously a scam.
No sensible food delivery company would do such a thing - it’s a scandal waiting to happen - so the maximum number of companies that would ever do such a thing is either zero or one. Therefore claiming they’re called “human assets” in the database would instantly uniquely identify the company and the company could then correlate with recent resignations and sue the crap out of this individual for violation of the NDA that they are making very clear they’re aware of and are knowingly violating.
Any sensible engineer would know all of this and would not divulge such a conspicuously specific tidbit. No matter how drunk they are.
Therefore, nothing else this person says is credible. Therefore I call bullshit on the whole thing.
Consider the nomenclature. Even during the Kalanick era, when “move fast and break things” was operational doctrine, you would not have seen internal naming this careless. I was there. We called drivers “supply” and riders “demand.” Clinical, yes, but accurate and apolitical. The language reflected the business model without editorializing about the humans within it.
What’s worth examining is not whether Uber engaged in questionable practices. Of course they did, and of course they still do. The real question is why the practices look different now.
Growth stage vs. profitability stage.
Uber in 2013-2016 was optimizing for growth. Uber in 2025 is optimizing for profitability. These are fundamentally different objective functions, and they produce fundamentally different behaviors. The perverse incentives remain constant; the tactics they generate do not.
Here’s the key distinction: growth-stage illegality and profitability-stage illegality carry asymmetric risk profiles. When Uber was in growth mode, the company had optionality. Infinite capital and public goodwill meant the growth team could deploy aggressive guerrilla tactics to enter new markets, absorb the legal consequences, and move on. The expected value calculation favored action.
Profitability-stage Uber has no such luxury. The levers available to a mature company fighting for margin are few, and they all point in the same direction: the humans. Drivers. The “assets.” When you squeeze there, you’re not circumventing a government. You’re directly degrading the livelihoods of your own platform participants. The reputational and regulatory exposure is immediate and personal.
This brings me to Spain.
When Spain blocked Uber from operating, we did not wait for lawyers to navigate the legal system. We shipped a technical solution. I watched this happen in real time.
Here’s what we actually built:
The goal was simple: keep the Uber app functional for Spanish drivers and riders despite the government blocking our server IPs at the network level. We needed a system that could rapidly distribute new, unblocked IP addresses to every app in the country without requiring an app store update.
The solution was a Lua interpreter embedded in the Uber app paired with a gossip protocol for peer-to-peer distribution. The Lua compiler allowed us to push executable code to the app dynamically. No app store approval needed. It was essentially a remote code execution backdoor into our own app, which was both brilliant and terrifying in hindsight. When a user opened the app, it would fetch and execute Lua scripts that contained the latest routing logic and server whitelist.
The workflow once it was live: when Spain blocked a batch of our IPs, our infrastructure team would publish a new IP whitelist. That list would seed into the gossip network, where each active Uber app became a node, sharing the updated configuration with other nearby apps. The propagation was exponential. Within hours, millions of devices had the new routing information. The Lua script would compile the updated whitelist and redirect all trip service requests to the unblocked servers.
The tech stack was essentially a censorship-circumvention system: Lua for remote code execution, gossip protocol for decentralized distribution, and a dynamically compiled IP whitelist that the app used to route around the blockade. Same playbook Tor uses for bridge distribution or how Telegram distributes proxy servers to users in Iran and Russia.
The Spanish government quickly realized they had exhausted their options. We forced the outcome, Uber was unbanned, and operations resumed legally.
Here’s the part that matters: it was illegal, but the illegality accrued to Uber’s benefit without harming users. Drivers kept driving. Riders kept riding. The Spanish government got cast as the obstruction, and Uber was welcomed back as the protagonist.
That’s the difference between growth-stage rule-breaking and profitability-stage rule-breaking. One makes you the hero. The other makes you a landlord squeezing tenants.