I used to work at Uber and we would see similar behavior from drivers at airports. There would be a geofence around the parking lots where drivers had to wait before they could be sent a ride. However, the app would still send a ride to the closest available driver, so they would all lean their phones against the gate to get as close to the edge of the geofence as possible.
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.
Most every taxi firm in the uk has a piece of plastic water pipe and a bunch of ping-pong balls. As each driver comes back they take their number from the basket and drop it into the far end of the tube. The next call that comes in, and the despatcher takes the ball out the "near" end.
It is an almost foolproof FIFO pipe (literally), simplemfor everyone to understand and very cheap to run.
I had a driver tell me he’d get his friends to call in fake rides if things were slow, which meant that he got to the front faster. He was convinced everyone else was doing it too.
It must be completely dependent on where you're from. Over here you tip neither waiters or cabbies. I have no idea why you'd tip the taxi driver at all. I'm glad that with Uber you can just pay through the app and that removes the stupid "just keep the change" attitude. Most other taxi companies are implementing their own apps with online payment nowadays so fortunately this habit is dying out(one can hope).
Wait... car mechanics too? If you’re already billed for human labor cost on your invoice, what percentage do you tip on top of that? How is it shared between employees of the shop?
Assuming you go to the same garage, and that the mechs are not the owners... Your car is one of many at the garage. You may have particular expectations on time or how you like your settings (specific wheel alignment, etc) A bit of extra "appreciation" means your car may get fixed earlier, and come back with a few extra things adjusted without being on the bill, along with extra care to meet your specific asks.
Or so I was told. I saw it more when I was younger than I do today.
I've never tipped a car mechanic. They bill their labor rates anyways, tipping in such circumstance should never be expected.
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.
Yeah. Like why can I get a draft beer anywhere in Amsterdam for 3 euros MAX 4. At the top of the 5 star Okura hotel, beers are 4/5 euro. Of course, fancy beers can be 6 euros.
But in the USA, it is not uncommon to see Budlight selling for 8 dollars or more. (don't forget to tip!)
Yes I noticed the same thing, but only in the cities. Cost of living there is generally higher and income is as well. If you go to a small town in the US a beer can be 3 dollars and a coffee 1.50 or so.
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.
Wait, deliverymen? I don't tip the UPS, FedEx, or USPS guys. The only type of person that comes to my house that I tip is the garbage guy, and only when I have a particularly large garbage pile to take out. They send out cards around Xmas with the official tipping procedure, but I do it whenever I have an onerous load, not at a certain time of year.
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.
But why? I somewhat get the argument with waiters - they are paid shit wages, so somehow it became a cultural norm that customers have to subsidise waiters since their employers are too cheap to pay properly. Like, ok, I don't agree with it, but that's the system you build for yourself so that's the one you have to deal with.
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?
At German train station the taxis form a line. You are expected to take the first car in the line. If you try to take another one most drivers will tell you to go to the first car.
And it is how taxi lines work or worked in the US. App-based hailing changed this, since there is no longer a designated physical place where the line would exist. Building a virtual-line, makes plenty of sense, and in hind-sight was something overlooked.
This happens in Norway as well. Unfortunately different companies charge different rates, so I refuse if the first in line is one that charges more than others.
I love solutions like this. Had I been called on to solve their problems, I probably would have built a "simple" app. I try to remember solutions like this when I am tempted to over complicate a problem.
Though I'm already thinking about how maybe the balls need some sensors or we codes so we can have data and a dashboard.
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.
If you think people fight in a FILO queue you wait till you see what happens when the one guy who’s been randomly waiting all day sees you randomly get randomly served first 5 times in a row.
you do understand that the only difference is a fixed waiting time vs. a randomized one.
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.
It worked for marketing yellow "champagne" diamonds. I joke that the next trend is "chocolate" and "dark chocolate" for selling brown and black-ish industrial diamonds on the retail market.
LOL here in Manchester they had ways to spoof their location/cheese the system for ages, it's one of the first things I've learned after moving here last year (had to use Uber a lot).
Does the amazon brain actually think that the person standing 10/20/50 feet closer is the better person for the job? My first impression was that these phones were being run by people blocks/miles away, but they are actually only a few feet closer.
>> 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 requirements were surely to give preference to closer delivery people, and the easiest code to write will simply order delivery people by distance.
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.
This sort of "unintended consequence of over precision" has happened a few times... I remember a while back a dating app (I think?) was returning the distance between the two people with a ridiculous amount of precision, which allowed people to triangulate where someone was with three phones
Is "cutting the queue" (what this is) an unintended consequence of having a queue? It's perfectly normal behavior. Maybe it gets resolved socially, or the solution could involve tracking whether the follow-up movement happened as assumed (the real hidden assumption). Making a buffer and reducing precision doesn't solve anything actually, it makes it socially more difficult, but it's really a hack, as was choosing the closest physical phone whether a warm body was attached or not.
I think if they randomly select someone with a range, it would make it not as important to try to be physically closer. It wouldn't stop all gaming of the system, but it would be a start.
You'd want to tweak it so you were picking the person in range who went the longest without a gig rather than a naive random pick. Lot more encouraging for the workers vs watching the guy who just got a gig receive yet another before them.
Why would you ever choose to penalize the actual closest driver (gamed algorithm aside)? It seems like a completely reasonable algorithm. In theory, the algorithm sends the closest driver away on a delivery, moving the next closest to the front of an implicit queue.
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.
If there's an algorithm in charge of optimizing, it will be gamed. If there's a single algorithm controlling a large population, it'll be catastrophically gamed.
This is such an obvious way to game the system though, if they had put literally any effort into trying to make a system that can't be abused, they would have caught it. Either the system wasn't thought through, or it was thought through by someone with no understanding of how groups of people behave.
In Croatian we use "air distance"... I'm going to be smug about it's more understandable than both (even though I like the Game Of Thrones association when ever I hear "as the crow flies")
The correct term for this measure of the geodesic is orthodromic distance and is guaranteed to get confused looks from people, which is often my intention.
You may then proceed to explain this refers to the distance by camel.
... and probably only from a specific point. You might be inside the place right at the kitchen's door and be further away in their system than if you stood outside somewhere close to the coordinates of the point.
It's just amazingly interesting to see our own societal evolution in action, rapidly spurred on by technology.
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.
However these are the essence of contacted work. A job is put up and you choose to take it. There is nothing being forced upon anyone. I know people who drive for Uber, no one is forcing them too. They have their stories of taxi drivers who tripled or quadrupled their income by switching.
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
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.
I don't think those jobs losses were caused by the gig economy, though. Rather the gig economy arose out of the glut of labor available.
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
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.
It isn't technology so much as policy essentially. We see parents holding their kids back so they perform better in sports. Humans /will/ game any system in potentially horrifying ways to gain an edge.
This particular case is a textbook example of market failure - we've added actors to the market who do nothing productive, game the system and scalp profits.
It is pretty easy to spoof GPS locations, at least in Android, in a way that is undectable to apps using location services. Might be a better option for these drivers?
Eh, it's less easy than it used to be if the application developer really doesn't want you to use a spoofed location. Pokemon GO and SafetyNet have been doing next-level in their ability to detect root.
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
from being a player (who doesn't do this), it tends to be a short temporary ban, and an arms race between Niantic and the people doing it (aka spoofers), with Niantic losing it most of the time.
Not as easy as you might think. Not sure about amazon but some apps have anti-spoofing detection. Not sure what they look for, probably precision and correlated data
Yes, there are methods that apps can implement to detect anti-spoofing but as long as you have physical control of the computer/smartphone then it is just a matter of time before the anti-features are defeated if there are incentives to do so -- especially a monetary incentive.
As a former (very casual) spoofer…it’s far, far harder than it used to be.
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.)
I agree, it seems they saw a bunch of phones hanging in a tree, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt it is an existent phenomenon, but would also question the extent. It's interesting because the case here is that the gig worker wants to behave like an employee, basically polling the system and taking a job without evaluating it is akin to getting assigned it. It feels like the flip side of what you normally see.
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?
Wouldn't Amazon just adjust its algorithm to punish delays in delivery? Penalize drivers who take longer to get there than they should if they were truly nearby?
Apparently they are putting the phones in a location that is impossible to be physically closer to in order to get the job first -- park car, walk over to the tree to sync your phone then wait in your car for the next job offer.
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.
This reminds me of when I was a Lyft driver and in SF there is a dance studio under the central freeway; sometimes dropoffs would tell you to drop the person off on central freeway and jump down to the building.
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".
Why are drivers willing to allow this and not just walking over and destroying these phones? I don't understand the benefit of getting more deliveries but at the cost of a significant percentage of the payment.
But the drivers using this technique are truly nearby, they are getting the route on the phone in the tree and then forwarding the route information to their own phone in their car, and they are presumably in the area.
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.
The Amazon drivers seem to be far less careful in their deliveries as well. In the past, deliveries were delivered to my porch. Then the started showing up on my drive. Yesterday my wife found a book delivery under a shrub next to the curb.
Simple Solution: Treat all phones within X distance of the store as being the same distance away. If the typical parking lot is 1/4 mile away, that's the minimum distance to use.
It is no different from traders laying down their own cables and private communications infrastructure to get a millisecond advantage on trades on the DOW.
I always wonder in these kinds of articles how many people are doing this. The problem is that it is so sensationalized, that it could be that there are 10 people doing this, and it's not really a big deal. Or it could be that 50% of the people doing this work, do this. For example, the article says that it reviewed photos and videos of phones near Whole Foods and Amazon delivery stations. Okay, so how many phones did they find? How many people do they have personal knowledge doing this?
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.
> 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.
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".
Don't underestimate the role of laziness. It's much less work to just find a localized instance of something, and then report it as a phenomenon vs. doing the actual in-the-weeds journalism in order to get a widespread view of the topic.
I can't help but think of the stories from before stock market colocation was a thing. Nowadays the stock exchanges have a fair setup where people can put their machines in the same data center as stock exchange. And everyone gets to connect with an equal length wire. But before this modern solution, it was a free for all with companies trying various tricks to rent space as close as possible.
Isn't this sort of still the case in HFT, where some firms try building e.g. their own microwave radio tower networks to beat others by a few milliseconds?
Nit: the microwave networks themselves are a standard feature of a lot of exchanges, such as SIX and CME. There is some posturing between companies building receivers that you may have heard about[1], but that is largely because companies are building towers so close they are causing interference.
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.
That's only if you're arbitraging between multiple exchanges at physically different locations. If you're just interested in having low latency to one market, you just pay the colo fee.
A possible use for SpaceX's Starlink as well. Starlink doesn't have to follow the curvature of the earth so over long enough of a distance it is actually shorter and quicker to use Starlink.
Under ideal circumstances Starlink is claiming a 15-20ms ping. That's already too high for HFT.
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.
Don't you actually want to be as close to curvature of earth as you can? Or actually even under it. Straight line through the planet or crust would be the optimal route. Any distance you go up is making it longer than curvature.
I think GP is confusing things a bit. Starlink can actually be faster, but it's because laser links in a vacuum are on the order of 1/3 faster than terrestrial fiber optics. The distance is longer, but the information travels faster by a large enough margin to overcome the distance and result in overall lower latency.
Right, so if you can't go through the crust then going up would be another option. Over long enough of a distance, say NYC to London (or even farther), the overhead of going up first and then a "straight" line horizontally (it's not completely straight because it has relay between the satellites via LOS laser but each arc would be fairly long) and back down would be shorter than a line following the curvature. (Edited: This is wrong. I had conflated the lower latency with shorter distance as others have pointed out.)
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.
> Over long enough of a distance, say NYC to London (or even farther), the overhead of going up first and then a "straight" line horizontally (it's not completely straight because it has relay between the satellites via LOS laser but each arc would be fairly long) and back down would be shorter than a line following the curvature.
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.
> Nowadays the stock exchanges have a fair setup where ... everyone gets to connect with an equal length wire
"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.
The prices are minimal -- at CME I believe it's ~15k/month for a 52U cabinet. You can rent these even as a private individual (several friends have rented individual racks as part of a syndicate group renting the whole cab).
Of course, that price isn't insignificant per se, but are minimal for anyone who actually achieves any benefit from having co-located space.
Hmm, my former firm’s colo expenses were quite a bit higher than that would suggest, but I don’t know the breakdown across all the different datacenters.
Yeah; the logical conclusion of free market doctrine is that everything will become a spot-traded market, traded at the highest frequency possible. Complete with all sorts of dodgy payyment for order flow, arguments over best execution, pseudo-indexes like LIBOR, and overt front-running of clients.
Instead of paying their drivers a fair wage regardless of how much they deliver, they're letting them fight amongst themselves while they laugh all the way to the bank.
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.
I have a hard time believing this story, not because the technological explination doesn't make sense but because it is my understanding that there is no shortage of work for Amazon delivery drivers.
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.
The articles I'm reading from that Google search refer to drivers who are FTEs or have set contracts (eg 10-hour shifts with quotas).
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).
There's always slack in the system though. E.g. because of the randomness of when orders are ready let's say there's an average 15 minute wait for all the drivers, when things are running at full capacity.
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.
> 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.
One reason Flex contractors do this is to get around the requirements for being a driver, such as having a valid license or being authorized to work in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter. In such cases, someone who meets the requirements downloads the Flex app and is offered a route earning $18 an hour. He or she accepts the route and then pays someone else $10 an hour to do it, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.
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.
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.
Because the point of reading the book is not to exactly replicate his life. Only to be aware of ways of reducing the amount of work in your own life.
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.
Have you ever bought something, say software, to make some work task easier or better fit how you work?
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?
I think most people reading it don't realize this. I thought it was pretty obvious when I first read it that the odds of replicating what Tim did was very low. It's about as likely as those people who lucked out on some affiliate keyword and now making $500k+ a year with a static html page with affiliate links and consistently places in first place on google. Plenty of stories of this happening, even on HN
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?
True, if a bit oversimplified. But cynically, as a manager (one of the former type, I like to think), if you're able to outsource your work, while maintaining the expected quality of work product, without breaking any security/compliance/governance rules...I'm not really sure I'd have a ton of heartburn.
It would be self-optimizing if they were just waiting in Whole Foods parking lots, not hanging phones in trees. It's a case of optimizing for the metric, not the objective, by exploiting the divergence between the two. This is generally pretty distinct from a market self-optimizing.
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.
(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.
More concretely: Amazon's drivers (arguendo) don't care what they're getting paid $15/hour to do. If Amazon removes the incentive for antics, then it can pay 14/15 the per-delivery fee, and each driver can do 15/14 the deliveries and still make $15/hour.
Because those are regularly-enforced laws with significant penalties. You can bet that Amazon is going to operate within all regularly enforced laws that meaningfully impact their business.
> (In fact, the UK only finished paying reparations to slave-owners five years ago, 183 years after it was made illegal.)
That is actually slightly incorrect. The UK borrowed money to pay the reparations to the slave-owners at the time of the abolition. They just finished paying off the loan a few years ago. So the people they were paying all this time was not necessarily the slave owners, but the descendants of the creditors who had loaned the money.
The article suggests one person runs the set of phones, and sells their service to drivers. So I'd imagine that person has tuned the number of phones to be profitable. You can get older used cell phones for dirt cheap.
They may be wrong but that doesn't make it superstition or cargo cult (although it may seem satisfying to say it is). They have a decent hypothesis of how Amazon prioritizes and they are trying it out. Sounds creative and smart to me.
If your employment was entirely piece-work driven by "the algorithm", which is completely opaque and subject to change at any time, what other recourse do you have? They're basically trying to reverse engineer the weights of various inputs in Amazon's scheduling algorithm to try and have some control over their lives.
It is not superstition if you have a valid theory of why it might be. I mean they don't claim the phones in the tree are charms that give good luck as a token sacrifice to Mammon.
> 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.
Seems like a trivial extension to the story that one person is sitting nearby keeping an eye on the phone. The advantage still holds, since all the other drivers in the group can spread out.
> to get a split-second jump on competing drivers.
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?
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.