There's the old quip that if your discipline has "science" in the name, it probably isn't really a science. More seriously, scientists follow the scientific method, formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. And that's a broad enough definition that it includes A/B testing, so it must apply to some of what they do. But science typically goes another step, generalizing observations and hypotheses into theories; I would be surprised if there was a lot of that going on at Instacart.
Which isn't a slight against them or the field in the least, it's just a debate about definitions.
Because science is an academic pursuit designed to create and test generalizable hypotheses and add to our collective knowledge, while the people in the article are trying to figure out how to optimize the act of underpaying someone to go grab some cans off a supermarket shelf and bring them to me.
They're not scientists, they're engineers perhaps, or business analysts.
So a person doing basic biology research for Monsanto isn't a scientist? And whether or not Kantorovich qualifies as a scientist depends on whether he was working for the military or a university at the time he came up with linear programming?
It doesn't depend on where the person works (though sure that's a relevant sign) it matters what they're doing.
Analyzing business related data and optimizing KPI's isn't science. At best it's applied science, which we have names for, such as engineering or statistics or financial analysis.
