Uber Has Lost

[vetran]

Perhaps coders could be paid by the line of code?

Oh deity no!

a well written 3 lines can do the work of 800 but if you paid me by lines of code you would get 3000!

[Whorty]

I really don't get why people don't go direct.

I hate the phone but it's not difficult to look at the deliveroo menu then find the number and call them directly.

+1

[d000hg]

Perhaps coders could be paid by the line of code?

This has definitely been done.

Joel Spolsky wrote about how any metric you bring in to measure coding performance, coders just game the system. Lines of code, number of commits, even number of bugs found/fixed.

[mattster]

We wouldn't pay significantly more the competition would take care of that, when a supermarket charges the same as an owner operated corner shop supermarkets would drop prices or small business would expand.


ALDi & Lidl pay their staff more than any other supermarket but one of their main selling points is cost.

Aldi to become UK's 'best-paying supermarket' with wage rise | Aldi | The Guardian

The great thing about paying staff more is that they will actually pay tax in the UK. If you give multinationals more they will pay tax where they can avoid paying any.

You can live well on less than £12k if you take the big housing costs away. Build more homes (we need millions) and housing costs will fall. My daughter pays less than £100 rent including bills in a University town up north because there is plenty of property up there. In London a similar rent would be £800 plus bills. You can buy a reasonable 2 bed property up there for £50-80,000, London its at least ten times that.


Don't up welfare, up housing stock.

Agreed. Paying e.g. supermarket staff more (even much more), probably wouldn't have a huge impact on the bottom line, or food prices. The simple truth is that labour is like any other commodity, and companies will pay as little for it as they can.

You are right, of course. Housing is the the biggest issue everywhere, and without a major price correction - which seems unlikely, given that governments of all stripes see maintaining high house prices as their sacred duty - then low paid workers are always going to struggle.

[BrilloPad]

You can live well on less than £12k if you take the big housing costs away. Build more homes (we need millions) and housing costs will fall. My daughter pays less than £100 rent including bills in a University town up north because there is plenty of property up there. In London a similar rent would be £800 plus bills. You can buy a reasonable 2 bed property up there for £50-80,000, London its at least ten times that.


Don't up welfare, up housing stock.

Great idea. Lets build over the whole of the UK(including flood plains) so foreigners can buy UK property and leave it empty. Or more older people can buy them and let them out. Thus enslaving more young people like your daughter.

Old people are such morons. Pushing up property prices. Expecting young people to stay inside and do nothing lest they should kill some selfish old, fat git. Who does not work, only income is rental income. And bangs on about the war and how tough things were. And how they deserve that - without any thought to what young people deserve.

No wonder the UK is f**ked. I have told my children to move to Asia when they can.

[d000hg]

I really don't get why people don't go direct.

I hate the phone but it's not difficult to look at the deliveroo menu then find the number and call them directly.

Or I can click a button, and the order goes right through without having a conversation with someone in a loud kitchen with bad English, and little idea if they heard my order properly

[mattster]

This has definitely been done.

Joel Spolsky wrote about how any metric you bring in to measure coding performance, coders just game the system. Lines of code, number of commits, even number of bugs found/fixed.

Spolsky's articles are almost always excellent.
I actually worked somewhere (many years ago) where they brought in a "bug bounty" system as we approached delivery once. Stay after work, get a few free beers, and a few extra quid per bug. You can imagine how that worked out.

[BrilloPad]

This has definitely been done.

Joel Spolsky wrote about how any metric you bring in to measure coding performance, coders just game the system. Lines of code, number of commits, even number of bugs found/fixed.

My 3rd ironing episode of the day.

It was big in Japan.

Someone I worked with fixed 1 bug. And introduced 4 other bugs. Then congratulated by boss for fixing 5 bugs in one day.

It its commits its the last time I "squash & merge" instead of "merge"....

[FIERCE TANK BATTLE]

Takeaways aren't a problem if you live in a city as you can go and get them yourself. I do as my local Indian takeaway owner explained to me in detail a few years back how the likes of Deliveroo, etc eat into his profits and he was one of the richer takeaway owners as he has multiple outlets.

The thing is a lot of places don't offer any better alternatives. Like, my favourite Chinese is the same price if I use their website or if I use just eat or whatever. And their website is atrocious whereas just-eat's website is slick and easy to use.

He could pay someone to set up his own website if he wanted and put a bit of effort in and make it cheaper.

There's a fish and chip shop down the road that charges a 50p online fee (!) to order online. I closed the browser and went elsewhere when I found that.

Ordering food over the phone is generally terrible. Many of these places put the phone in the noisy kitchen so you can barely hear what's going on, with someone foreign that has a strong accent and less than perfect understanding of English... it all adds up to just thinking f this I dread spending 10 minutes trying to explain what I want to order down the phone and hoping they got it right.

It's a bit like companies that are too lazy to vet a few CVs instead using an agency that takes a big chunk for basically doing a bit of unskilled admin work.

---

Anyway Uber will probably just adapt, just like now to avoid IR35 I have to jump through some ridiculous hoops filling in SoWs and having them married up against project objectives and it's a giant pointless paperwork exercise to try and make it even clearer I am outside IR35 to protect the consultancy. Even though I work my own hours, have my own objectives, don't have any supervision or management etc etc

Uber will probably just switch to texting rides or something that don't require the app to be open, with a link to open the app in the text.

[vetran]

Amazon probably can. For your local Chinese takeaway, it's far more onerous.

The vast majority of people do a pretty crap job. Especially when there is no reward for doing a better job. There's not much of a career path as a delivery driver. When everyone is simply paid NMW why bother doing more than you need?

Not my experience as you may know I have some professional driver friends.

My mate was a bus driver was well regarded at the depot but when the hourly rate fell to £12 an hour for a PSV licence holder he moved to work for a supermarket for more money, he is one of the longest serving agency drivers there because they like him.

Plenty of our front of house staff are not paid massively well but frequently get compliments from customers.

Well treated staff mainly like doing a good job.