The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors.
Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.
Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)
In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.
Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)
FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.
On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.
Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.
I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.
EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.
Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).
Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.
I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.
Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?
The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.
For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)
And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.
I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.
Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.
Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.
I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.
Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.
First off, your opinions are completely meaningless to me.
> you helped destroy an established industry
LOL my other comment rings so true about how HN loves to bend over backwards to defend the taxi monopoly.
1) Taxi drivers were not employees they were independent contractors. 2) Taxi drivers had to pay for gas, rent the taxi, and clean the taxi at the end of their shift 3) Every shift they had to pay for the use of the car/medallion and they started the shift OWNING money. Once they earned enough to pay for the fees, they earned everything after that. If they had to end their shift early due to illness or family emergency, they LOST money for the day.
This is the "established industry" that you are protecting? I'm happy to be a part of dismantling this immoral monopoly that abused their workers. Uber drivers can turn on and off their apps whenever they want, they can work at Uber and Lyft at the same time, they can withdraw their earnings at the end of the shift, etc. They can stop working whenever they want and they can start working whenever they want. My time at Uber something I'm deeply proud of.
I would ask you to point out in my response where I am protecting anything. I am decrying the destruction of things by underhanded means (subsidizing to make costs artificially low and payments to workers high) which is irresponsible and completely indicative of a business model that has no concern for externalities or contingencies for failure. 'Oh the business didn't work' is a terrible line when in the process of failing you destroyed an entire working system, even if that system did suck in a lot of ways.
It is great that you are proud of your work, but I hope that in your current and future endeavors you may be able to use your talents for something a bit better.
Nah, I really don't. I enjoy having discussions where I educate people.
It wasn't underhanded, not in the least bit. Defending the status quo monopoly that exploits its workers is really strange. Destroying entrenched rent-seeking monopolies is doing the world a great service. Uber has been a public company since 2019. The fact that it's a viable business is beyond question at this point.
Have you given any thought as to whether you might take the time and reevaluate your basic assumptions about this? Being a person who is always perceived as smarter than most everyone else can lead to some ways of viewing oneself and the world in a very skewed fashion. I personally found doing psilocybin to be helpful in breaking down the ego enough to gain some good perspective on myself.
In that case, it sounds like you were a bunch of naive idealistic tech kids that bought the lie.
SV is very justifiably seen as a group of naive overconfident kids taking on the world and making a mess of it all, just as much as it is very justifiably seen as a group of ancap money men using computers to concentrate wealth and power.
If you want to “believe in a mission”, there are plenty of ethical jobs out there. It’s just a shame that so many smart people on this website are hooked on the high-TC go-go startup lifestyle.
Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.