I would believe that someone did/has. If you look at things like Project Maven at Google people did speak out, or the Chinese search engine. Speaking out doesn't help if you're not in a position to modify the plan though. I've been in both places, both where I could keep a bad idea from going through and times when I could only share my concerns.
For me, it was situations like this that gave me the motivation to get better at pitching (and shooting down) ideas. Using the tip fiasco as an example, you can argue it at the social justice level which will be ignored by the Chief Product Officer because they don't care about social justice, so for them you argue it at the product angle,
"This policy/product is going to stain our product and make us look like greedy chumps, look at how our competitors product idea to do <x> resulted in so much bad publicity they had to pay <y>, which totally negated any value to the company. Do you want to be the guy that costs this company that money? Are you ready to be out on the street looking for a job where your last idea turned out to be reviled by press? It will be you because the CEO certainly isn't going to take the blame for it, they are going to fire you and say 'See? We thought it was horrible too and we fired the person responsible.', and that is going to be you. Think about that before you move forward on this product idea, kthx bye."
That makes is personal to someone in a position to actually stop it from going out the door. If you can show them the risk in a way they will understand, then, and only then, do you get any traction in stopping it.
I totally agree with this, and I think this makes the point that social outrage can sometimes play a positive role.
In an ideal world, we could get people to act ethically because it's the right thing to do: if we can't do that, at least we can appeal to their self interest and point out how horribly this could backfire if people found out.
This is also literally the claim that libertarians use to justify deregulation. "We don't need laws, if a company does bad things consumer would just naturally avoid them!"
One would hope laissez-faire proponents are siding with the angry workers and disgusted customers in this case.
Consumers don't generally have sufficient information to avoid bad actors. Classic market theory, especially in its pop culture form, seems to largely ignore information imbalance -- market efficiency presumes buyers can make informed decisions, but sellers have no incentive to provide buyers with honest and complete information unless they believe doing so will result in a sale. Regulations that address this information imbalance arguably make markets more efficient, and I tend to be suspicious of any anti-regulation argument which takes the form of "compelling sellers to disclose information to consumers will raise prices and is therefore anti-consumer."
I mean ultimately it's the executives that call the shots. I've seen people stand up to executives over things like this and then they get fired and it's business as usual.
Most people aren't willing to risk their jobs over screwing over gig workers, especially when you feel powerless to actually stop it from happening. I mean it's so socially acceptable we've even coined the term "gig economy"
Chances are the people that really feel strongly about these things just refuse to work for those companies in the first place.
Did they? Can you name the people to blame? If someone shows up with Instacart on their resume, is it hard for them to act like they were either ignorant or against the decision?
Hard to say exactly without being privy to their conversations, but the aggressive growth pressure that young companies with VC funding face almost always factors in somehow.
It's hard to truly expect companies to make the correct ethical decision in this scenario when the survival of founders is dependent on raising more and more money. The "grow now, profit later" model truly puts pressure on execs to take whatever they can. And in this case, they clearly thought either nobody would notice or care.
Who polices the VCs? It seems like they have no accountability, even financially speaking. If one investment fails they have nine more to reallocate towards, so to speak.
The market, obviously. If they invest in shit startups, then eventually they will lose all of their money.
Now the problem is, what if people still use something and give their money to even if that service/company is unethical?
Is it unethical to make very bad employment deals with people who have no better opportunities on the job market?
Well, now that's where again people come in. Some people say, no, because if they don't like the job, they can start their own company (ehm, ehm, maybe that's why we are here, too many people trying to start stupid companies built on almost stealing from each other). Some people say, fuck no, that's just a race to the bottom Somalia.
Some people pitch NIT (negative income tax, a form of universal basic income). Some full blown direct action style socialism/anarchism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Technically LPs, but they're more-often-than-not large, faceless funds only interested in returns and mostly insulated from any blowback so moral considerations don't always concern them.
Its a function of money. The people who make the decisions (CEO, board) are judged on how much money the company makes. They are paid based on it. They keep their job only if they make more money.
Basically imagine you are an investor who spent $70 million on this company. That money could represent anything. Money can be used for anything so people can imagine it will all be used for altruistic purposes if they want. Sometimes a portion of it is. It can represent 50 or 500 or 5000 people who are counting on that money to grow.
The point being, it is very easy for a person in charge of a large sum of money to come up with a moral justification for maintaining or increasing that sum of money. The least of which is keeping their job or social standing -- but that one alone is usually enough for people to justify many things.
In this case, they will probably just say something like "well, its not our responsibility to make sure that people earn a good wage". In the end, the only thing they are really being held accountable for is how much money they make.
It is the ancient philosophy of nickel-and-diming employees in low-margin hospitality sector businesses.
I don't have access to the financials, but at no point has 'on demand food delivery' seemed to be anything other than a highly risky business servicing an extremely price-sensitive market.
As an MBA, I really take issue with this cynicism of MBA programs. It's not like we're cold greedy bastards. Stop generalizing. People can make great and terrible decisions, regardless of grad school degree choice.
Hah. Well it's obviously a case where the consumer habit of tipping for delivery means that on a $100 order there may be $105 that the customer is willing to (or used to having to) pay. Thus leaving that $5 on the table is perhaps a stupid business decision. I should hope an MBA would point that out, so long as another MBA pointed out that the user experience may be more important than the few extra dollars.
Pardon my interruption, but I think a perfectly adequate response would be to counter by asking if ethics are taught in CS/CE programs (or what curricula have ethics prereqs)
That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment. I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites. Plenty of engineering schools offer compute ethics courses as electives, but then again, plenty of business schools offer business ethics electives in MBA programs.
> That's a model curriculum and has no mechanism for enforcment.
The mechanism for enforcement is ABET accreditation. When I was at Cal Poly SLO, our CS program was up for re-accreditation, and yes, we were required to take an ethics course, mostly due to remarks from prior accreditation reviews.
Edit:
> I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites
ABET accreditation allows for ethics to be covered as part of other courses in the curriculum. IIRC, it requires at least 4 units worth coursework to focus on ethics. Schools are allowed to cover this as part of a software engineering capstone series, for example.
This has digressed a bit. Let's recap: someone asked if ethics were an MBA requirement. I responded by asking if it was CS/CE requirement. Then someone brought up the ABET model curriculum, and now here we are.
The general point is that it started with a altogether too common dig at MBAs. I think those are usually unwarranted without any further examination. But I also found some studies that indicate leadership in a corporation is neutral to positive on corporate social responsibility (didn't share it earlier, but here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25782028).
The ABET model curricula is admirable, but the ethics requirement is not overly stringent. And there are very prominent CS/CE programs that are not accredited (http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx, I won't name names, but they are top 10 schools, easily).
It would be great if every damn high school student had to take semester of secular ethics, let alone MBAs or Engineers. I could easily see any degree having a 1 or 2 credit hour course in profession specific ethics.
But to the original point, I just don't like people getting high and mighty over people with MBA degrees for no good reason (I don't have an MBA).
ps - and to bring it all the way back around, there were many, many people involved in this. UX design, backend development, PM, project management, testing... it's just lazy scapegoating to pin this on a hypothetical MBA pulling all the strings.
I agree that ethics should be taught in school, it's pretty universally applicable in the workforce.
However, I do disagree slightly with your point regarding the many people involved in this. While it's true that it takes several types of skills to build a product like Instacart, most companies don't give their engineers/designers the ability to push back against features that they're not comfortable building. You're paid to execute on a vision that's dictated higher up the food chain. That doesn't mean it's coming from an MBA per se, but just because an engineer wrote the code doesn't mean that they're culpable here, especially given our aversion to pushing back and whistle-blowing in corporate culture.
Speaking out against corrupt/unethical leadership can very easily cost you not just your job, but your career as well. This is one area I would love to see improvement in.
Speaking for myself, though, that wasn't a course I felt I needed to take. But every professor certainly expects you to approach problems from an ethical perspective, just like in any other degree...
I think in this case the ethical issue is not disclosing the policy more directly. I suppose why would anyone tip $5 if the driver would only get $1.
My guess is that this isn't really an ethical issue with Instacart, which I view as a very well run company.
More likely, the model is a fairly cleverly designed tip jar that accepts tips and then brings up the average wage so that workers have a higher guaranteed minimum, in exchange for some tips not going directly toward their own pay.
This is a clever system, which likely derived from the optional "service fee" which Instacart used to incorporate, which was used to fund additional employee benefits.
The problem is that when you call it a "tip" then people expect it to work a specific way and so the underlying clever idea is lost and the company appears to have done something shady.
Look at the history of Instacart's explorations of a service fee and you'll see that what's going on. I think Instacart deserves credit for trying to find a better solution to this problem than what had existed before, though I think a smarter way to do it would be to let customers optionally contribute to the "bonus till" that is paid out companywide to customer-facing staff who have the best star ratings.
So you're suggesting that this is a dark pattern to direct users into thinking that they're leaving a tip when they're not?
If Instacart chooses to adopt a system that isn't universally understood and transparent to both shoppers and customers, the onus is on them to make sure that users of the app understand what's going on. If they fail to do so, they should be held responsible for it.
Seeing as how thousands of shoppers have organized and signed petitions about this "feature", a clear misunderstanding on the part of shoppers and customers exists here, which demands an explanation as to why Instacart would implement such a confusing, opaque tipping system in the first place.
How does that sound like a well-run company to you?
>More likely, the model is a fairly cleverly designed tip jar that accepts tips and then brings up the average wage so that workers have a higher guaranteed minimum, in exchange for some tips not going directly toward their own pay.
That doesn't make any sense. If the minimum wage is $1000. There are 10 workers and this month there is $1000 in the tip pool. Then the company won't pay out $1100. The company still takes the $1000.
If what you said was true then they wouldn't deduct from the wage. They would deduct from the tip and say that it's added to a tip pool.
Not sure if it's a required curriculum unit, but I audited some MBA courses and Leadership & Ethics was one of the available courses. It consisted largely of reviewing and discussions based on case studies and ethically complex scenarios.
We don't have corporatism (corporate crony capitalism, which is a bit redundant, but not corporatism which is a completely different thing; the corpora referred to in corporatism is the body formed by the whole of society, not each individual firm as a corporation.)
The argument, especially for low-margin businesses like these delivery startups, is that the company might go under if financial tricks aren't in place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well take the path of least embarrassment and hope no one calls out the tricks.
So maybe your business model is flawed? If you can't survive without robbing your employees then you shouldn't survive at all. This would easily be solvable by building growth organically, or having companies that hook into your service willingly to offer delivery at lower cost to them than hiring a full time employee. This would necessarily limit usefulness to larger population centers, but would make it more viable long term.
True, but once someone knows something illegal or deeply unethical is going down and sticks around, they can't complain about getting part of the blame for it.
Who's to say someone didn't? All we know is they decided to steal tips, not that everyone thought it was a great idea.