New Doordash policy for employees
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DoorDash will require all employees to deliver goods or perform other gigs
All DoorDash Inc. employees, from software engineers up to the chief executive, will have to perform deliveries or maybe shadow a customer-service agent once a month starting next year — and some of them aren’t happy about it.
DoorDash DASH, +2.98% confirmed Thursday that it told employees this week it is reinstating the program, called WeDash, in January. The company said it has had the program since its inception and in 2018 tied it to a philanthropic effort to address hunger and food waste, but put it on hold because of the pandemic.
The renewed push adds choices for employees who may not be able to do deliveries, a spokeswoman said. Besides WeSupport, which will allow employees to shadow customer-service workers, the company will also eventually offer WeMerchant, a way for employees to take a closer look at the merchant-support side of DoorDash’s business.
On Blind, an app that lets employees post anonymously, a thread about the delivery requirement has about 1,500 comments. The post, which is titled “DoorDash making engineers deliver food,” includes profanity and statements such as “I didn’t sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this.”
Others responding to the post said it was a good way for engineers to see how their work affects customers and merchants, and possibly to “empathize” with lower-paid delivery workers. Other commenters said their companies have also required white-collar employees to step into the shoes of their companies’ hourly workers once in a while.
A Blind spokesman said Thursday the company can confirm the post was written by a DoorDash employee, because Blind requires users to sign up using their work email addresses. The DoorDash spokeswoman said the complaints on Blind don’t reflect the sentiment of the company’s employees at large.
DoorDash said it was reinstating the program because it wants employees to understand the challenges and problems in its business and help solve them.
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I think there is merit in IT staff really understanding what the front line folks do. But I don't think once a month is a good policy.
When I was coding systems from the ground up I always went out and spent time with whoever the end users would be so that I wrote software that conformed to or improved their workflow. I see so much stuff these days that is written to the database design rather than the business case.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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Spending time with a low-wage high school dropout, yuck, forget it.
And how about making the drivers spend time with the CEO or at least some other executive level type? You want the drivers to understand that the privilege of unlimited cash is not all it is cranked up to be.
