Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver III: How do I rate?
278 Responses
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BenWilson, in reply to
Surely that information must raise alarm bells with the thousands of other illegal Uber drivers operating in NZ?
It very much depends on whether Uber simply picks up the tab. One this is pretty clear though - left to their own devices, it's pretty much at their pleasure if they do. I expect they probably would want to do so quickly to minimize the damage created by it getting out that this guy is pretty much left to fend for himself.
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BenWilson, in reply to
It’s a well known problem. I’ve written algorithms that attempt to solve it without doing a full Dijkstra walk through the road network for each location pair.
Me too, and that was in the 1990s. Now they can do it with a thousand times more computing power than I had. Which begs the question of why they haven't. I suggest it's because they're actually not as competent at this stuff than their public image would suggest. Their genius is not in app development, certainly not in algorithm design, and absolutely not in robotics. It's in marketing and worker exploitation. I don't see that translating into self-driving cars. It translates into bilking investors until they realize that they're subsidizing vaporware.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I am of the opinion once one has accepted a job that person has made a contract with the hirer, the only reason for cancellation is a break down and then the hirer should be contacted to be informed why they have been cancelled.
There's far too many issues built in here to unpack easily. Firstly, Uber would maintain that there is no contract with them whatsoever. In fact, Uber NZ claims that there is no contract between them and drivers at any time, that the contractors in NZ have no contract with an NZ based agent of any kind. The contract, if it is a contract at all, is with Uber BV, based in the Netherlands.
Secondly, they (Uber BV, via their proxy in NZ that claims not to represent them) claim that the nature of their business is not to sell rides to customers at all, but to sell "Leads" to drivers, at which point the driver meets the passenger and a contract is formed between those parties to which Uber BV (and certainly Uber NZ) is a stranger. Uber provides only the the lead and the service of processing the payment, they claim in the preamble to their contract.
So if this is to be taken at face value, no contract is formed with the passenger until they get into the car. Since the driver is only responding to "leads" there is no reason for them not to choose the more promising of 2 "leads", if they come at the same time.
However, because this is at total and utter variance with all common sense and everyone's practical experience of riding in an Uber, and how Uber market and sell themselves, they also write into the driver's contract with Uber BV many pages dictating exactly how the driver must respond to and conduct themselves during these contracts that Uber is supposedly a stranger to. Most of the contract reads like an employment contract, except for the start of it, which specifically excludes Uber from:
1. Operating a transport business
2. Hiring any drivers
3. Having any contract with passengers
4. Having any liability whatsoever for anything that happens to anyone anywhere anytime
5. The jurisdiction in which the actual business is conducted applying to them.In some ways, the way they conduct business could also be seen to be making good on that distancing:
1. There is no phone number or email address for anyone to ever call in NZ, ever advertised on their website or anything in print.
2. They do not keep any regular office hours. Their office seems to exist only for signing drivers up, and they only very, very grudgingly will deal with operational matters
3. You can never, expect to speak to their management. It's not clear if there even is any management in the country. There are only spokespeople and marketing types, if you believe their claims in court, rather than their public announcements.
4. Who the hell else would suggest to people that they break the law for a living except for people completely distanced from any responsibility for their actions?So yes, in the presence of these factors, it's hardly surprising that Uber drivers do not feel that they owe Uber, or Uber customers anything, except when they actually get into the car. Anyone who has dealt with them in any way that has ever gone outside of the plain vanilla ride quickly comes to realize that they are not dealing with a properly constituted organization at all. It is a law unto itself, and the longer term drivers begin to act more and more like that the longer they keep doing it, as contact with Uber is something self respecting people would want to keep to a minimum - if only to avoid the anger and frustration that comes with all official dealings with them, and to avoid smacking one of the staff over one day, something that becomes more and more tempting every time they are dealt with. There is a reason that one of the 4 employees that Uber has in its front office is a security guard, and that all the other employees (if there even are any employees at all) are hidden behind big locked doors.
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BenWilson, in reply to
In the taxi industry we have rules around this issue, the rules apply to contractors, employed drivers and shareholders etc. Failure to carry out an accepted order unless there is a justified reason fines apply. The fine is usually in excess of the fare value.
Uber do it simply as a numbers game. Cancel too many and you might be timed out or lose your right to drive for them. There’s not some dispatcher out there making sure orders are met, it’s all algorithms, and the decisions are all made by algorithms. We don’t know what these algorithms are, nor do any staff. When they decide something, it can’t be appealed (according to them). If you attempt to, it’s got to be done as a support call, as if the software or process broke down, rather than as a person speaking to another competent person organizing a business. It’s just not that sort of relationship. Your support message will be answered by a “robomuppet” (as we call them), someone overseas who will not really read it properly and will answer it entirely using a boilerplate response, at least the first time. You’ll have to respond with follow ups pointing out the missing overlap several times until eventually, if you’re persistent enough, it will go a locally based person. Usually their modus operandi is to appease both parties, regardless of the facts of the dispute, unless it’s something highly noteworthy, in which case they will act arbitrarily and with as much prejudice as they can muster.
I don’t think many drivers ride around with both apps on all the time, though. It’s more likely that they put themselves offline on A when a call comes in on B, and vice versa. But they have to do that by hand, every time, and it might get missed. Then you find yourself driving to an Uber and getting a Zoomy request coming in. Do you really owe the Uber passenger their average $7 ride when the Zoomy has a minimum $10 fare, and you’re not an employee of either shop, but instead “responding to a lead”? I can see why people jump between. If the ONLY right you actually have is to choose when to work and which organization to work for, why should you not choose the better lead?
Yes, it’s not the way taxis work. They’re designed around a much more traditional boss/worker relationship. As in, you have one, and are the other. With the gig economy, it’s cutthroat by it’s own design.
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Not that I probably need to tell goforit this, but for the benefit of everyone else it needs to be known that no driver is ever actually presented this contract by Uber NZ people. Nor are they ever made aware that they will be contracting to a third party. As far as anyone knows from the presentations made, they work for Uber.
The contract is first presented when you have purchased your car, got your licenses and insurance in order, been induced and trained, and are ready to go. You attempt to go online with the app (that you’ve already installed), and find that it demands you click accept on the terms and conditions.
Yes, you read right. This business contract hides behind the terms and conditions acceptance for using the app, and the first day any legal driver would have been made aware of it is many months after they were induced to drive for Uber and had spent a significant amount of money getting ready to do so.
The drivers with no compliance whatsoever find out quite a lot quicker, of course. If they read it, they will also find that their contract is automatically voided by the fact that it says in it that the drivers must comply with the laws of their jurisdiction or the contract is voided.
Hence my quip above about whether the drivers are contractors at all. Are you a contractor if your contract is actually voided simply by you doing what you were advised by the staff was your job, having followed their advice about what is legal in NZ?
ETA: Also, are you a contractor if the other party actually does not exist? The laws of Amsterdam don't apply in NZ nor vice versa. So if Uber BV has no agency in NZ, is a contract to do business with them in NZ really a contract at all?
IANAL! I don't know the answer to this. It's possible that no drivers here really have any contracts at all. But even if they do, the Uber BV contract is so completely one-sided in stripping all rights from drivers and laying all responsibilities on them, that it barely matters. Except in so far as courts are concerned, of course. They're not going to even look at a contract until the parties in the contract are present. So far Uber has never presented any party that claims to be the party to which the drivers are contracted.
I don't know how much longer they can get away with this. My bet is "not much longer".
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stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz, in reply to
Maybe their software sophistication is changing, though.
I say this only because one of the speakers we invited to APSEC 2016 at Waikato last year had been working for Samsung...and he's just been snapped up by Uber.
He's a very smart person who deals with designing very sophisticated methods for finding errors in things like non-deterministic programs (very hard!).
Not sure what he'll be doing for Uber, but their days of not-very-smart programming might be ending.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Not sure what he’ll be doing for Uber, but their days of not-very-smart programming might be ending.
I can't speak for how it operates everywhere, either. Proper road network databases may be much more developed for them elsewhere. I'm surprised they don't just buy one from Google or one of the other vendors here, though.
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Hi Ben, the world of Uber appears to have gone very quiet, I get the feeling that there forward movement (puff) around the world has slow down. Self driving cars and trucks have taken a beating and the new diversion appears to be flying taxis LOL.
Any news on your court procedings. -
BenWilson, in reply to
Has parody turned to farce? We were joking about flying cars and Ubers last year as like the next level of ridiculous. Nek minnit, it's what they're claiming. Should we start a pool on the next technology? Add to this list:
-Uber Hover cars for competing with ferries
-Uber plus Rocket Labs = taking the international flight industry by storm delivering passengers via suborbital hops
-Uber Cryo - take a one way trip to the future by putting your body on ice
-Uber Tardis - why stop at only going forward in time?
-Uber Teleport - Transmit your body to your destination without even needing to pull out your credit car -
I think over this coming year Uber is going have to work very hard at convicing the money people to part with more giveaway money to throw down the drain now they appearto be coming psychotic in there ideas. LOL
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BenWilson, in reply to
They are getting pushed out of many countries, and in some cases the management are being arrested. I think it's end of days for them. Which is usually the time an Empire looks strongest and most unassailable - right before it falls.
Yes it's quiet here. I've got another job and it's keeping me busy. Since the Uber advocacy is unpaid, it fits in where it can and recently that's not been very often. Considering that mostly what we're doing is waiting for the impartial majesty of the justice system to come to a conclusion about who exactly should be turning up, I'm not in that much of a hurry. At some point we'll be in an actual court hearing, and this house of cards is going to come crashing down because at the end of the day it's still a country of laws, no matter how many lawyers you send to try to mess with that.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Has parody turned to farce? We were joking about flying cars and Ubers last year as like the next level of ridiculous. Nek minnit, it’s what they’re claiming. Should we start a pool on the next technology? Add to this list:
-Uber Hover cars for competing with ferries
-Uber plus Rocket Labs = taking the international flight industry by storm delivering passengers via suborbital hops
-Uber Cryo – take a one way trip to the future by putting your body on ice
-Uber Tardis – why stop at only going forward in time?
-Uber Teleport – Transmit your body to your destination without even needing to pull out your credit carUber Hitman – if anyone's giving you trouble, dirty deeds really are done dirt cheap.
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Driver-focused business model powers Uber competitor in US.
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Sacha, in reply to
snap. That's a great post about how bad the head organisation is on the inside.
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Yeah I just came across it too, and everything it says resonates with their behaviour in every way to every complaint ever made to them. It's a Trumpesque, however frantically they are trying to disassociate from The Orange Vortex.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Yeah I just came across it too, and everything it says resonates with their behaviour in every way to every complaint ever made to them. It's a Trumpesque, however frantically they are trying to disassociate from The Orange Vortex.
In other words, they're only sorry that they got caught in the act.
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Looks like the great Uber idea is showing signs of self destruction. Most regulating authories around the world appear to have woken up to what Uber and other outfits whom think they have invented the wheel for the first time that all these outfits are doing are giving the regulators the fingers.
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this sums things up nicely http://jalopnik.com/uber-is-doomed-1792634203
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BenWilson, in reply to
Yes, it seems to be unraveling. I don't think that app based ride booking is going away, since it is actually a good idea. But Uber seems to be blowing their chances of a future, banking everything on technology that has not been invented yet. They had a perfectly good idea in their app if the fares hadn't been pitched to beggar the drivers. But this idea of buying market share with endless huge losses whilst still pitching your prices below fair remuneration to the workforce is bound to fail in the end.
Their point that the business doesn't have economies of scale is a good way of summarizing why it must eventually break. They didn't actually make driving a taxi magically cheaper. They just worked out how to squeeze worker balls in a way that's taking a few years to unpack.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Their point that the business doesn't have economies of scale is a good way of summarizing why it must eventually break. They didn't actually make driving a taxi magically cheaper. They just worked out how to squeeze worker balls in a way that's taking a few years to unpack.
If it hasn't already been mentioned, Uber's business model has been likened to a Ponzi scheme.
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/07/excellent-deep-series-on-uber.html
https://uberpeople.net/threads/hidden-uber-pyramid-scheme-hmmm.9124/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/12/the-latest-get-rich-scheme/
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According to the NYT, where Uber said their self-driving car was under control of a human when it ran a red light in San Fransisco, it was actually self-driving at the time.
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The thing I cannot understand is the so called value of Uber, I run a business and if I was to value it, my value would be what someone else would be prepared to pay for it not the value of the money I had put into it. Investors may have put billions into Uber but what would be realised if the company was sold and I bet it would be stuff all.
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The FT ran a story today based around an apparent increase in Uber executives seeking new employment.
_ "For employees at Uber, quitting the company often means walking away from restricted stock units or stock options worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in Silicon Valley’s most highly valued private company. With Uber currently worth about $70bn, a typical middle manager position comes with RSUs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that vest over a four-year period.“Historically, it has been incredibly difficult to recruit from Uber, which partly has to do with people being unwilling to leave their stock options on the table,” says Guillaume Champagne, president at SCGC Executive Search. “From a purely financial perspective, Uber would need to become an awful place for them to leave.”
Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, Mr Champagne has seen an increase of about 5-10 per cent in the number of people interested in leaving, particularly those who are “a bit less of a culture fit”, he says. “To be fair, people typically know what they are getting into when they join Uber. They know it is a very male-dominated, high-octane, investment banking type of culture,” he adds." _
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