DoorDash is requiring engineers to deliver food (opens in new tab)

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716186

Requiring the engineer to actually use the product they are working on in real life is good. Maybe it can help make the experience better for the dashers, the restaurants, and the company.

That $400,000/yr engineer makes more money in a day than a DoorDash worker makes in 2 weeks working full time. I do not feel any sympathy for the 1 dash they will have to make a month.

Seems like a great way for employees to become more intimate with the product they’re developing. This, I would expect, would lead to developing a better product and user experience.

Has anyone considered that this is simply a viral stunt created by the gossip website (which I'd rather not name) in order to promote itself?

Even if the commentary isn't fake, it's just one engineer within a huge organization. For those upvoting this story, shouldn't our outrage/attention be directed elsewhere?

They did this at chick-fil-a corporate as well. An extremely competent product manager described the yearly experience as “standing around not knowing what I should do and trying not to get in the way.” Those kitchens get hectic, super different than being in the office.

When designing a dogfooding process try not to have 50 engineers do the same thing 12 or 120 times a year. For example, having engineers in kitchens fulfilling orders, having engineers perform store management tasks, and having engineers run a full day of deliveries will probably provide more insights even if done less frequently. I’m pro dogfooding, but put some thought into making sure the entire app is being dogfooded. Finally, when running a dogfooding program in your company be sure to communicate the importance of focusing on your customers and and cultivating customer empathy.

This is all-around a good idea. As a worker I would be happy for a paid opportunity to get away from my desk and dash across the city once a month.

The protesting engineer cited sounds like a bad team player who needs opportunities like this to develop character.

I remember one comment here in HN that mentioned how in the future society will be divided in those above and bellow the API. About the difference in quality of life of those that make the platform, and those that work for it, like the gig workers. It made me angry because was too cold, but in line with reality.

I really hope this type of strategies help in this regard. For the people developing those platforms, to remember that in the end those who work for those Apps are humans too, and not only a number in an A/B test or KPI spreadsheet.

I once worked at a company that mandated everybody do help desk one day a month for a similar reason. Everybody thought it was a good idea including me. There was a 5 month span when I was working 10-12h days (yes it was a startup and I was young and dumb) to get something shipped. By the 3rd time of having to take a day to work help desk I was furious that on the one hand I was expected to work myself bald to ship a product but on the other they felt it was a good use of my time to take a whole day off the project every month. After this and a couple other incidences we stopped requiring it. This is to say there are certainly some upsides but there are also morale downsides.

Let's do some math.

So, say you're paying me $15 an hour. Really, if you own a business by the time you pay for taxes, infrastructure, capital outlay and insurance you are really paying about $45 an hour for me to hang out and do what you tell me to do at varying levels of competency. You need to make that much more value from my labor per-hour or you are going to go out of business.

Say I have a piece of software that, because of a miscommunication between the developers who wrote it and the people who have to use the software (ideally this is what management is for but, lolz) has added 30 seconds to a transaction I do 20 times an hour. This means that, suddenly, there are 10 minutes of labor added to this task on aggregate an hour.

If you have a piece of software that wastes 10 minutes of my time, you just wasted $7.50 worth of my labor. But, of course, I'm using this software for 8 hours a day. So that is $60 of money wasted a day.

So, really, you thought you needed to make $45 an hour from my labor, but you just added $7.50 to the total. So, $52.50, and now you have a morale problem to boot: because the folks who are using the software are now accomplishing less than they used to for the same amount of work.

Without experience, an engineers understanding of a problem space is suspect.

In other words, the difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer often comes down to experience and understanding.

My guess is the company is also taking note of the engineer's attitude and reaction to this experience requirement as well.

Ah, I remember reading about this idea in "The Phoenix Project" (or "The unicorn project") book, where all employees work in the shops for a week servicing customers, to get an idea of how the people work, who they are building the software for.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone ill suited to food delivery gets injured, robbed, assaulted, or worse.

I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it during normal times never mind during a pandemic. Seems like a bold strategy during the most job seeker friendly market I have seen in 20 years.

I made life choices so I wouldn't ever have to go door to door for anything. No offense to hard working delivery people but when I did that sort of work I chose to mop floors and clean toilets over anything food service.

DoorDash is a good idea in principle, but it's poorly executed. Among their competitors, Grubhub is superior in every way.

The reasons I dislike DoorDash and stopped using it:

- It has frequent outages.

- Has been the subject of controversies regarding tips.

- Does not have live customer support. They get back to you in 3 days.

Grubhub has none of the issues above, and they are always on top of orders.

Amazon Restaurants was another yet superior competitor to DoorDash but was discontinued as a service.

I have no affiliation to any of these companies, just talking from the perspective of a user.

I notice that none of the comment think about scenario where the engineer doesn't know how to drive or doesn't own a car

The amount of people both here and at DD who think that the task is "beneath them" is appallingly large.

"Today you, tomorrow me" should be what everyone says to themselves when confronted with this sort of thing.

Yet another manifestation of the callousness of SF tech workers

One engineer who is getting nearly $0.5m total compensation and when asked to do one delivery a month, they are now throwing a tantrum over that.

But you know what? Good.

Maybe that is what they need since the drivers and riders get 0.01% of what these engineers earn and I'm sure that there were complaints about that. So when one is getting nearly $0.5m for the engineering work and told to do just ONE delivery a month, they are STILL complaining.

Just deliver a pizza to your friends house once a month and eat it and that would count.

Job done.

I'm pretty sure some engineers had ideas previously about how to improve the product, they just have no power to do so. It would be weird if it wasn't like that. I wonder if all this is just a way to create a massive quit

The crybaby rationalizations are not only not a suprise, they aren't even clever.

The very people trying to invoke the value of their time, are in that very process exposing how valuable it actually isn't.

> But a 1,500-comment thread on Blind

Nothing good ever starts off that way. Astonishingly sociopathic website.

That said, I do think that the media are deliberately seeking out the weirdest and most unpleasant employee opinions; I can’t imagine most employees of the company have an issue with this. And it does seem to be something they did before; they just suspended it for a bit.

Curious if you're allowed to leave early or come in late for this, or if they are asking employees to do it outside of their regular working hours.

I have seen a dozen adds from Doordash promoting becoming a “Dasher” in the last several days; perhaps they are just having issues with staffing?

Provided there's also a way to surface ideas that come from this experience, this sounds like a great move.

I have a hard time feeling sympathy for these engineers.