“Desperation score,” bogus “priority fees” revealed

Developer for food delivery app spills the beans

In a drunken New Year’s rant, an application developer for a grocerty delivery firm appears to have confirmed every delivery driver’s worst nightmare. Corporations labelling some drivers as “High Desperation” send these workers the worst jobs, at the lowest rates, and then also skim “Benefit fees” to pay their own legal teams.

“You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories,” the developer writes. “I am a back-end engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings, where product managers discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of human assets (that’s literally what they call the drivers in the database schemes.

“They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the priority delivery is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a psychological value add. Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a Boolean flag in the order JSON but the dispatch literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

“We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn’t speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the priority ones feel faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better,” the engineer notes in disgust.

Even worse that the scams perpetrated on the firm’s grocery clients, though, are the ones foisted on drivers:

“But the thing that actually makes me sick and the main reason I’m quitting is the ‘desperation score.’ We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10pm and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high desperation. Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high paying orders.

“The logic is why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6. We save the good tips for the casual drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience while the full timers get ground into dust.”