[locallost]

Chilling ending to the article:

> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.

Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.

[happytiger]

This is just a social credit system designed to control behavior, but attached to your workplace instead of your person.

The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.

This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.

[Aurornis]

> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet

Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.

The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation.

Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating.

Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time.

Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership.

Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.

[LocalH]

My SO is a restaurant manager, and she has told me that the only reviews/ratings that have any positive effects are 5s out of 5. 4 out of 5? You might as well have put 0 or 1.

It's extremely toxic.

[pc86]

I remember once I bought a car and the salesman said if I had any reservations about giving him a 10/10 on every question in the survey no matter what it was that I should text or call his personal phone and he'd do whatever he could to fix it, also directly saying that it's better for them to have 95% of people not fill it out at all and get 10/10 from everyone else than to have 100% completion with a single 9/10.

I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for God."

I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from, everyone I know who has ever been involved with that industry, etc.

Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?

[AlexandrB]

This is classic Goodhart's Law stuff[1]. The key takeaway is that any company that implement these kinds of incentives doesn't actually give a shit about customer experience, they just like to play pretend.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[cgriswald]

From the story it seems like they just like to deny bonuses on flimsy pretexts.

[thfuran]

No, the key takeaway is that they probably shouldn't be relying on ratings to the extent that they are.

[20after4]

When I'm buying a product on a site like amazon with 5 start rating scale, I find that all of the useful information is found in the 2, 3 and 4 star reviews.

1 star reviews are mostly people pissed off for some reason, people with unreasonable expectations, or competitors trying to hurt their competition. 5 stars reviews are either zero effort reviews from people with low expectations or they are outright fake reviews from people incentivized to inflate the rating.

The 3 star reviews identify key and serious problems with the product that the customer otherwise would have liked. Usually the most information is found here. 4 star reviews identify weaknesses in the product that the customer still liked despite the drawbacks. 2 stars often are the same as 1 star but from less critical people.

The only signal I pay attention to from 1 star and 5 star reviews is if there are too many of them it's a red flag. More than 10% 1 star usually indicates a serious problem with product defects. More than 80% 5 star indicates a product that's buying fake reviews.

[ipaddr]

Or that is just a simple theory that is easy for you to understand. 80% 5 stars might mean something else and 1 stars might mean as much as 2/5.

[20after4]

Of course it's a simple theory that's exactly the point. It has explaining power though and I find it useful YMMV. What I was trying to get across is that you learn more from the text of the reviewers who voted somewhere in the middle. The 5 star reviews rarely bother to say more than a sentence and they rarely include any useful criticism. The people giving 1 stars are often just pissed off for some reason that will not affect me. Stuff like "It wasn't what I ordered" or "they sent me a used product" - The signal is in the remaining reviews if you take the time to read them.

[jjk166]

> Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?

"So if I implement this system then either I get confirmation that everything I'm responsible for is perfect or I get an excuse to save money on labor?" - management approximately 8 seconds before implementing the surveys.

[ImAnAmateur]

This mirrors my experience in retail. Anything less than the top score is counted as a negative, often counting the 1-9 score as a 0 with the 10 as a 1. The heat lands on a local manager when corporate comes to town. What ends up happening is that the customer-facing employees train the customers to put down 10s.

It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it gives customers a voice.

[LocalH]

Which is ironic, given that it modifies the customer's actual voice when interpreting the numbers in such a toxic way. I point to the cousin comment where a salesman lost a $10k bonus because a customer didn't give them a 10, despite the customer's comment being very explicit that they were extremely happy with the experience, but that they refused to rate anything perfectly, as they reserved that for God. Despite that comment, the 9 was used as justification to deny the bonus, effectively also denying the customer's voice.

[salad-tycoon]

Or pull a YouTube/google and just eventually totally remove the option to down vote at all. “ Yeah… we’ve heard the vox populi and ehhh, gonna have to pass on that one.”

[ghaff]

And Ebay, so 20+ years. It was either positive and A+++++ or it's effectively negative.

[wodenokoto]

To me that’s the crazy thing. You give a 4/5 and immediately you’re asked what was wrong.

It’s also why Netflix moved tot the thumbs up/down system. When they moved into new territories their recommendations system had troubles since some territories would rate everything as “bad”, because in that territory 3/5 meant it was fine and they enjoyed the show.

[JohnFen]

Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them.

The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.

[AlexandrB]

Agreed. And because ratings are so broken, there are multiple ways to game them. In addition to rarely leaving ratings, I rarely trust the damn things either.

In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail like Amazon, maybe 2 years but not much longer than that. This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of a one-time investment.

[20after4]

Notably steam ratings on games are divided into "all time" and "recent" categories.

[supertrope]

App store ratings are gamed through bugging users to rate the app, cozying up to the app store maintainer who can delete reviews, or even Sybil attacks on competing apps.

[tyingq]

> Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.

Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.

[pc86]

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Do we want to make it easy for someone to "start over" when that means instead of driving bags of food around they're now driving around people?

[tyingq]

The scoring system doesn't necessarily reflect reality.

Separately, there is a drive towards a sort of "social credit rating" that I do think is a bad thing.

In the narrower space of having a criminal history, the US is very different in how that affects people that have done their time. Any company can do a dirt-cheap background check, this makes people close to unemployable. In other countries, like Australia, employers can request a "yes/no" answer to "is this person's history suitable for this specific job" from a government agency...but they can't just get history themselves.

The combination of consolidation in the space into a few giants, and dirt cheap sharing of data across employers is, over time, applying the same sort of permanent mark problem to everyone else. I think it's a bad thing.

[nradov]

Some US states have now adopted "ban the box" legislation which prohibits asking job candidates about criminal history (at least for certain jobs). Of course, it's still tough to explain a 10-year employment gap on a CV.

https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hir...

[BobaFloutist]

It's also toothless when the employer's insurance company can require a (post-hire) background check to cover the employee and failing it is grounds for canceling the hire.

I don't see an obvious solution, because compelling commercial insurance to cover someone with repeat duis/reckless driving/addiction issues in a work truck doesn't feel quite fair, but there needs to be a path to gainful employment for ex-cons if we want our supposedly rehabilitative justice system to have even a chance of working, and there's not a lot of options that aren't customer facing, don't involve driving, and don't put you in some sort of security context or in charge of accounts or money.

Basically, any job that pays worth a damn requires a bit of trust, and we simply don't trust ex cons. And they're probably statistically somewhat less trustworthy, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a path out. For our sake as much as theirs.

[nox101]

I had I think, a related issue. I moved, need a new dentist, called one, told them I wanted to take a sleeping pill because it helps me with my anxiety from previous painful dentist visits. They said they'd have their office manager call me back. He vehemently steered me to another dentist. It was ridiculous how much corp-speak he used to try to convince me it was in my best interest. They had a 5/5 rating. I assume it's because they reject anyone the think might lower it.

[nradov]

You're probably reading too much into that interaction. Look for a local sedation dentistry practice. They specialize in managing patients with anxiety. Regular dentists may not be set up to handle patients with major anxiety.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22275-sedat...

[nox101]

my last dentist did it and was not a "sedation Dentistry" practice. She was head of the California Dental Association tho

[tengbretson]

Asking someone to temporarily take on the responsibility of your medical wellbeing while admittedly being on psychotropics is a bit of an ask, isn't it?

[nox101]

Is it? My last dentist did it

[cm2012]

Doctors telling patients they're fat doesn't help them get skinnier. The literature is pretty clear that in every double blind study, the category of medical advice or helping make nutrition and exercise plans leads to 0lbs average weight loss over 5 years.

[everforward]

No, but some people do need to be informed of how dangerous it is, and doctors can either prescribe weight loss medications or give a referral to a doctor specializing in medical and surgical weight loss.

Regardless, it’s something I would expect doctors to nag patients about, the same way my dentist nags me to floss.

[FeepingCreature]

Why, if there's proven to be no benefit?

[everforward]

The person I responded to said that there's no benefit to advice to diet and exercise. Presuming that's true (I doubt that there's 0 effect, and e.g. [1] would disagree), there are still benefits. As I mentioned, advice on dieting and exercising is far from the only tool doctors can reach for here.

There are medical options that doctors can prescribe (or refer to another doctor for a prescription). WeGovy/semaglutide, Adipex, HCG, good old adderall, etc. I haven't followed the space in about a decade so I don't know what's in and what's banned, but I'm aware there are a range of options there. I believe there are some outpatient programs as well, semantically similar to outpatient rehabs.

There are also surgical options that doctors can refer patients to a surgeon for. Laparoscopic bands, gastric bypasses, I think there's a third that I can't recall.

The incredibly sad issue is that doctors are sometimes forced to fall back on advice to diet and exercise because many of these treatments are contra-indicated with common comorbidities of obesity. Anesthesia can be very risky for patients with a BMI of 45 or 50, so they may need to lose weight the old fashioned way until they're at a weight where they can be safely anesthetized. Stimulants (adipex and adderall) are very effective at curbing hunger, but are contra-indicated by high blood pressure which is incredibly common.

I also believe there's a large segment of primary care physicians who aren't up to date on weight loss procedures, because they change fairly frequently relative to something like treating strep throat.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6169796/#:~:tex... (

[kyleee]

It’s the right thing to do at the individual level. The doctor should be honest with each patient and every individual should be given the chance to act on that honest information, even if studies show that many people have difficulty overcoming weight issues on their own.

[lupusreal]

"Proven to have no benefit" in this case only means that most people won't lose weight after being told to. A minority will though, so doctors refusing to tell fat people to lose weight is a disservice to the few who stand a chance of making it. The rest should either be signed up for surgery, drugs, or written off as lost causes.

[cess11]

It's much broader than that.

Having people with little to no understanding of work evaluate and exercise power over it has been foundational for capitalism since its beginning.

[Nasrudith]

What hasn't that been foundational towards? I think that goes back all the way to god-emperors of the first cities.

[cess11]

Could you give some examples?

[qeternity]

I don’t really understand why you think having financial incentives to avoid bad ratings and deliver food warm is bad?

[lll-o-lll]

Because, delivery drivers, unlike uber or whatever, are frequently screwed by things outside their control. No parks near the restaurant, so delay in the pickup? Bad driver! Restaurant behind on orders? Bad driver! Something missing from order? Bad driver!

Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.

[EasyMark]

Having worked as a server in college, servers get blamed for everything, and it definitely made me avoid and lose most of my confidence in humans other than close friends and family. People can be just mean and horrible for no real reason. Most are nice and patient, however a significant minority are just awful and must lead miserable, empty lives.

[d1sxeyes]

In a vacuum, there’s no problem.

Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise risk taking and dangerous driving.

[input_sh]

May I suggest reading the article you're commenting on?

[qeternity]

I did read the article. Hence my confusion.

What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?

[bigstrat2003]

I read the article. I don't think the article made a persuasive case that this policy was bad.

[bagels]

They aren't bad in themselves, but the consequences of reckless driving are.

[JohnFen]

Because it can encourage dangerous behavior.