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Comment by flootch | Hacker News Reader

How many laws does Uber have to break, how many drivers does Uber have to cheat, how many assaults on riders and drivers have to be committed, how much predatory pricing does Uber have to commit, how many labor laws does Uber have to flout, how much full time jobs does Uber have to undermine, how many people, riders, pedestrians and drivers does Uber have to kill

before this generation of engineers looks beyond the high tech goodness and high salaries they personally achieve to see the poison you enable by staying on with Uber?

ethics/shmethics it's a great job at an important company!

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Maybe half of these things apply to Lyft too, which really weakens your argument.

Also to the taxi companies Uber and Lyft are replacing.

I drove Yellow Cab in Houston for a few tough months in Houston while I was in school and the taxi business is far worse than anything I've heard at Uber -- especially for those doing day-leases. The taxi business is more blue collar by comparison with Uber. I am definitely not defending Uber -- I am saying that Uber is getting this press because the situation affects educated (mostly white) liberal engineering type while taxi business practices often go unnoticed because taxi employees aren't typically the demographic that starts blogs or talks to The NY Times -- nor do they raise VC money thus entangling them in SV politics and media.

I never once saw a female taxi mechanic -- the only female employees I ever saw were grizzled old dispatchers too tough to take any crap or the occasional girl out of college working as a marketing assistant. Operations was almost exclusively men -- the mechanics in the yard were all men.

Pay attention to how taxi companies try to 'sell' cars to drivers at insane terms to were drivers would have to work 5 days out of a week just to pay the note. Try scratching a day lease car and watch how the repair costs get taken out of your money (despite also paying for "insurance" to cover such things.) Yoy get robbed when picking up a dispatch passenger and lose all your money -- too bad, you still have to pay the day lease. I get it -- drivers are independent contractors -- however any criticism of Uber ought to be tempered by a fair assessment of the industry they are ostensibly replacing.

I didn't say Lyft was better (though it seems clear from settled lawsuits and FTC fines and police reports that Uber is much worse) the takeaway is that engineers are responsible for the output of their employers.

Engineers used to understand that and would debate taking positions in the military industrial complex, and would discuss the ethics of whistleblowing.

Go through my comments the past few days and witness today's engineers basically saying "Uber has been good to me, I am not responsible for the other parts"

Why do you talk about 'engineers' as if they were a single mind? They've also been working on nuclear weapons for generations.

You're exaggerating.

> how many people, riders, pedestrians and drivers does Uber have to kill

I don't think you can really pin accidents on Uber.

Then again their drivers are constantly fucking up traffic, so maybe.

I agree with you though. But people worship the founder, the guy who built the company. They just see him as a maverick, a guy standing up for corruption and breaking taxi monopolies.

Sure they actively flout regulations put in place for good reasons and seem like a pretty scummy company, but that valuation!

> they actively flout regulations put in place for good reasons

I suspect the downvotes are coming from people like me who don't think that taxi regulations were ever put in for a good reason. Taxi medallions and city restrictions on taxis have always been pure rent-seeking behavior.

I phrased it poorly then. They seem to do what they want, flouting both outdated taxi medallion regulations and others which were put in place for reasonable reasons.

Taxi medallion regulations and others were not put in place for reasonable reasons. They were put in for crony "government-granted-monopoly" reasons.

They maybe "flouting" laws, but they still follow taxi laws, in that they can't be hailed by hand. They are electronically ordered, which the law categorizes as something different. They're lawful, they just made the taxis look really stupid. :)

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