DoorDash’s CEO has slammed social media claims that a food delivery service is rating its drivers based on their “desperation” for work, saying he would fire any individual who thought that was acceptable.
The co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based DoorDash shared a screenshot of an unverified Reddit post made four days ago, in which an anonymous user claiming to be a developer for a food delivery company makes allegations about internal practices.
The legitimacy of the post is up for debate: Having gone somewhat viral on the social media platform, it was then declared a hoax by tech and democracy site Platformer. But by then, it had already garnered the attention and denunciation of one of the CEOs leading the pack in the food delivery space.
The Reddit user claimed an unnamed delivery service holds weekly meetings in which product managers discuss how to squeeze more out of “human assets”—their delivery drivers. “They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent,” the post claims.
The user, who said they had recently quit their role and made the post on a burner laptop from a public library, alleges drivers are given a “desperation score” depending on their behavior at work. The hidden metric supposedly flags drivers who accept low-value “garbage” orders without hesitation, and then prevents them from viewing higher-paying orders.
