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Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

>The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks.

Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust, not just skill.

When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your employees, coupled with other coercive practices, you drastically increase the chances they will steal.

There's a reason casino cage cashiers don't make minimum wage despite it being a low skill job, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.

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> There's a reason casino cage cashiers don't make minimum wage despite it being a low skill job, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.

Not sure that is even the primary reason.

Could also be:

- Paying more attracts a higher level of employee with a more professional image (which yes matters even if someone is cashing in chips). In other words you are assuming they also don't pay the proverbial janitor a higher salary than they could get away with. After all, all else equal, if you were doing that job wouldn't you rather work in a nice building cleaning up rather than a older building or situation? Even for the same or close to low pay you were able to get elsewhere? And if this is the case why wouldn't employees still be stealing left and right. They aren't.

- Require a higher intelligence level that is more likely in a higher paid worker. That way less likely to be able to con the cashier or take advantage of them.

Also no surprise that people steal at all levels of income and in all situations. It's like when people wonder why some famous and successful person (with money) takes their own life. They say 'wow they have everything'. If that were true and a reason not to kill yourself then you'd expect people with no money to be taking their own lives left and right. And obviously that is not happening.

Noted, FWIW, by Adam Smith:

The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...

We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies. The value and ROI from paying people more is not well promoted enough. Decades of globalism, private equity acquisitions, and corporate competition obsessed business literature where lower prices is always revered.

But in knowledge/service based industries it's not always about shaving pennies to make businesses better and there are many chances for better returns for small salary investments.

Smith speaks to this as well, as I'd recently posted.

And to clarify, because the point is often missed: I'm not mentioning Smith because I agree with all he's written, and certainly not for what he's claimed to have said, or to suggest that Jacob Viners very tortured re-assembling of various snippets across three separate books of the work is the book's central message. Smith is verbose as hell, but can, and does, get to the point when he really wants to:

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." "A man must live by his work." "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." "[Political economy proposes] first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people...; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services."

Smith isn't the last word on economics. And he's not the first. His views, even when wrong, are almost always well-considered, and it's usually possible to learn from his mistakes. And he anticipates a verry surprisingly large number of present concerns (with a few gaping holes: mechanisation and automation are almost wholly ignored, even though Smith personally arranged for a position for James Watt at Edinborough).

He is simultaneously highly influential, greatly ignored, and tremendously misrepresented. Reading him is extremely revealing, though I'd suggest he not be thee sum total of your economic education.

But what he absolutely is not is the laissez-faire advocate of harsh market therapy for all things, and corporate apologist, he's often represented to be, by both critics and so-called advocates. Which even brief passages can make clear. His two chapters on wages particularly.

> We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies.

This is more of a political issue than a cultural one. Companies always pay what they have to pay to get workers they need. The problem is we have policies that depress wages.

For example, the H1B program nominally isn't supposed to have foreign workers competing with domestic ones, but the rules are easy to game, so it does. The easy fix is to get rid of most of the other rules and just require employers to pay the government $75,000/year for each foreign worker they hire. Now it's impractical for someone under H1B to replace a US worker who makes less than six figures, but companies who legitimately can't find what they're looking for in the US workforce have the ability hire outside it -- for an extra $75,000/year on top of whatever salary they pay.

Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that. So they stay home and play video games, there is $4/hour less disposable income in the economy (the profit from which could have allowed someone else to get a raise), and the person who couldn't take the job/internship now has no experience to leverage into a higher paying job. Even if you want a minimum wage for career fast food workers, imposing one on college students and other people just starting out is likely harmful to wages on net.

There are many other examples of things like this. Companies or misguided people lobby for bad policies that depress wages and the people whose wages are being depressed aren't organized enough to stop it or even recognize the mechanisms by which it happens. Then people are more desperate for work and companies don't have to pay them as much.

It's also culture.

https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...

> In early 2005 ... Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.

> ...an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen...

That's still a policy failure -- poor enforcement/deterrence in that case rather than poor legislation, but still. And even to the extent that it is cultural, the policy informs the culture. If Eric Schmidt went to jail over that, would it happen again?

Apple at least sits on a huge pile of cash, yet Jobs colluded to steal billions from his own employees, the very folks who made the whole thing possible. You can't police that sort of sickness, it won't be healed by passing the right laws.

Laws won't work but asking nicely will?

They can't steal from you if they're in prison.

Your original statement was, "This is more of a political issue than a cultural one." I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

> I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Whether we put them in prison is the policy decision. Culture influences policy in the same way that policy influences culture, but they're not the same thing -- and there are two different cultures here. One is that of the executives making the corporate decisions, the other is that of the voters/representatives making the political decisions. They could be wicked and we could still put them in jail.

> If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

If people weren't as wicked we wouldn't need laws. If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The undesired results are created by the existence of bad laws as well as the absence of good ones.

And more to the point, it's easier to change laws than culture. What would you suggest is the best way to affect the culture of corporate executives? Not even they can easily change it without a policy change, because the culture is derived from the existing policies and the corresponding consequences. The executives who cheat and steal and don't get caught are the ones who get bonuses and promotions and end up running the largest corporations.

Culture isn't static, it evolves based on the environment -- and the biggest part of the environment we have any control over is the laws. Bad laws suppress wages and cause economic inefficiency and wealth inequality, so here we are. Half the regulations on the books were passed under the guise of taking from the top, but the people actually at the top have the resources to avoid them so what they really do in general is take from the middle. But the middle is the place we wanted the people at the bottom to get to -- so all we're doing is making it harder for them to do that while pushing the people who are already there further down.

If you want to improve the culture, get rid of the bad laws and actually enforce the good ones.

If life on Earth were simple enough that "good enough" laws were even possible (not difficult, not tricky, but possible to formulate at all even by a legislature populated by very stable geniuses), then we would not have evolved such large brains.

After all, Gödel showed that any powerful system of rules will contain inconsistencies. Even closed tautological systems like the Catholic religion contain flaws (that was the premise of the movie "Dogma": two banished angels find a loophole in God's Law and attempt to destroy the Universe) and theologians literally get to define God.

Any system of human law must be inconsistent, so we perforce rely on human judges, which means we rely on their [lack of] wickedness, i.e. their culture, and we are back where we started.

> If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked.

Meaning no disrespect, that is a proposition to which I assign a low truth value.

I read "Walden II"[1] at an impressionable age, and I thought for a long time that if we could just make the "right" laws, construct the right system, then we could easily achieve Utopia. I was too young to realize that the novel is actually "behaviorist" propaganda.[2]

My own experience of humans, and something Gandhi said, later convinced me that law, no matter how good or wise, cannot of itself make for good people. I've never been able to find the actual quote, but it was something like, "No system [of government] relieves the people under it from the burden [or obligation] of trying to be better human beings."

If prison worked to convince people to take up that burden I don't think recidivism rates would be as high as they are, eh?

So, again, I don't reject that good and just laws are a vital part of a good and just society, but I see them as a result, not a cause.

In any event, well met.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism

> Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that

I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship. The rest need enough wages to live off of.

> I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship.

Except that there are now a bunch of restrictions on unpaid internships that have caused companies to increasingly stop having them.

And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.

> The rest need enough wages to live off of.

In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more? Unless there isn't one, but in that case their alternative is having no employment, which pays even worse than $4/hour.

> And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.

Let me put it more bluntly - rich kids are the ones taking the unpaid internships. Nobody can survive off of a $4/hr internship. The $4/hr might as well be $.50 an hour.

> In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more?

They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases. Unpaid internships tend to give much better career progression - you just need to have the money to be able to survive it. Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.

> Let me put it more bluntly - rich kids are the ones taking the unpaid internships. Nobody can survive off of a $4/hr internship. The $4/hr might as well be $.50 an hour.

What you're really saying is that $4/hr might as well be zero. But it's different -- by $4/hr. There is not a brick wall separating rich kids from poor kids, it's a wide spectrum. There are lots of in between kids who could swing $4/hr but can't get away with working for free.

> They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases.

Then why are you advocating forcing them into that? If the choice was $4/hr now for $50/hr later vs. $10/hr now for $10/hr forever, how is taking away the first option supposed to help them?

> Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.

Except that the wealthy people's kids are the ones whose parents have the influence to get them a paid internship, or at least one of the few remaining unpaid ones after the others are destroyed, so all you're really doing is screwing over the people in the middle.

This is counterintelligence 101. There are four traditional motivations of insider threats (MICE):

M: Money

I: Ideology

C: Coercion

E: Ego

The thinking around that is changing, but the financial motivation is still at the top of the list.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

I think M,I,and E (hopefully not C) could also be considered motivations for convincing someone to change jobs?

(In my experience, recruiters from a well known FAANG company like to lean HEAVILY on E. Jokes on them, because the right answer is M!)

Coercion and Ego are almost never used because they aren't reliable and are fear based.

Money and Ideology are positive incentives, Coercion and Ego are generally painful incentives.

Coercion it used all the time. Castro would send his doctors abroad, getting them paid handsomely by aid agencies and he'd take the lion's share of their income, and he'd get away with it by holding the doctor's family de-facto ransom. The Chinese government is known to do this.

There's a missing item: 'Duty + Guilt'. Governments will use a softer form of this coercion whilst trying to imbue a sense of national duty (I guess a kind of 'ideology') upon individuals, guilting them into 'doing the right thing for their people'.

The Chinese government plays at least a small role on many Western campuses helping organize their expats, promoting their agenda etc.

That's not Coercion in this context, it's Money.

Think more along the lines of Honeypot and blackmail when you think Coercion in this sense.

It may be money for Castro, but we're talking about identifying an actor using MICE. The original poster was correct, the actor was being coerced. Don't over think it.

What I had in mind by Ego was "flattery", so in a positive sense. In retrospect, ego without M is an empty, impotent argument.

Please don't make a trollish username on HN. It's distracting, since the account basically trolls every thread it posts to.

We can rename the account for you if you email a better username to hn@ycombinator.com, but I've banned this account in the meantime.

Or ego in the form of bait and switch offers of getting to have leadership responsibility or opportunity to heavily influence decision making about technical choices.

Hype a position up like someone has creative autonomy to lead, because it strokes their ego, then later just shrug.

You could argue that the US military uses ego very successfully. The money isn't good all things considered but it is reliable/stable. So, I think it is a mix of M and E.

Now imagine if we make universal health care and universal college education free of cost and available everywhere to everyone regardless of income. I bet military recruiters' job will become a lot harder.

This makes me wonder: why can't we use ego in civil service? I'm thinking police, firefighters, and transit workers (from the bottom all the way to top management). Because after all, if we want to reduce cost (and I hope we all do) then what's better than to reduce pay?

Ego without additional money could be a valid argument. A lot of engineers would leave a job where nothing gets done for an equal-paying job with a lot of impact.

Heaven forbid any country vote for an elected official who this could apply to.

Or not let low-level Chinese employees have access to secrets. Apple is known for being very punitive against leakers and is very secretive. It seems to work for then.

Similar stuff happens to Apple. 20 Apple employees or contractors were arrested for running a business selling Apple users' data.[1] There was a different incident of an Apple employee threatening to leak a user's data.[2] There's also leaked Apple product info, such as specs, datasheets, and parts.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/china-apple-pers...

[2] http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001890/apple-employee-threate...

Is this sarcasm?

Why would it be? Seems reasonable to not let low-level chinese employees access to company secrets given their track record.

Compartmentalization of data, monitoring, vetting of employees, better communication policies (particularly around the risks and monitoring), better management, keeping employees happy who have access to valuable data (financially or otherwise), etc are all things that could be done to address this.

There are plenty of jobs where people get access to high value assets without being high-wage though. It's too simple to reduce it to mere wages.

The part about "it seems to work for them" sounds sarcastic because Apple's problems with leakers have been well publicized.

This seems incredibly racist. There could be low level employees of other ethnicities or countries of origin leaking information. That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

How many Chinese companies are giving Americans access to high level permissions in their computing infrastructure?

If every country has this then China’s is the Lebron James of them.

Remember that 95% of the stuff on Amazon is manufactured in China. There’s a demand in China for sensitive information that is beneficial to the folks running the factories. Sometimes for commodity products are priced pennies apart —losing a contract can put the factory out of business.

That doesn’t mean that Chinese are inherently more risky. It’s just far more likely than an employee in China is a risk for certain types of corruption than an employee in Munich or Brazil. A warehouse manager in New Jersey might be accepting bribes, but for a different reason and different impact.

> That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

No, it absolutely is not. That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government. Companies can, and do, decide not to give certain privileges to remote offices. It is not comparable to businesses refusing to staff certain positions or give certain responsibilities to remote offices. Furthermore, companies can require certain positions to be filled by US citizens (common practice in defense and aerospace companies).

That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government

It is also racist to assert that Muslims are all of a single race. Like most religions there are followers of all ethnicities in all countries.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US citizens is not comparable to the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

Which government did that then?

Apparently it was an actual policy that the current United States administration wanted to implement, but I think it got shot down by the Supreme Court or Congress for being unconstitutional. So I guess the point is that it is a genuine example of a thing that governments might want to do...

It must be given https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/11/ex-apple-employee-self-d...

Yeah, it’s been weeks since the last design leaked before the great reveal!

Amazon can’t eliminate bribery with certainty only by paying more. The principle of bribery is someone exploiting greed in the weakest link to get something they want.

The Chinese sellers/brokers are also successfully bribing employees because they want the information more.

They have the manufacturing to produce the things to sell on Amazon, the cheap labor to write fake reviews, and the cheap distribution/shipping to make the sale economically viable while also low-price for buyers. This is a great scenario for Chinese sellers, and a huge advantage over many US sellers that don’t have those abilities (or have to go through a middle-man to work with Chinese production anyways). The stakes are much higher with the potential to have Amazon be Alibaba 2.0.

Increasing wages does, however, increase the consequences of getting caught. If someone stands to lose their $12,000 annual salary if they get caught, then selling user info for a couple thousand is tempting - it increases their annual income by double digits. By comparison, I think considerably fewer people would accept such a bribe if they stood to lose a $120,000 salary. This is Singapore's logic: their government officials are some of the highest paid in the world.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but I can only speak my own opinion on this matter.)

A couple factual problems with this: first, the employees that have access to this sort of data are in white collar roles, and are hardly being paid "absolute bare minimum." Second, when Amazon interviews employees, we ask about our Leadership Principles (https://www.amazon.jobs/principles), one of which actually is that leaders "Earn Trust." Trust is absolutely something we look for in employees.

Does it really matter what a company talks about when they interview employees? Prevailing culture that is shaped by what the organization rewards seems way more important.

Sure, let me be a little more specific:

- We ask candidates about times that they earned trust, behaved in a trust-worthy manner in the past. - Employees in their reviews are judged in part based on how well they earn the trust of their peers, managers, etc. - Promotions happen based on demonstrating the Leadership Principles, including earning trust.

I can't speak to whether every pocket at Amazon has implemented it the way it's supposed to, nor can I say that every employee at Amazon excels at this. I would hope though that someone who reads a statement like "Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust, not just skill" understands that this is something that has been explicitly understood within Amazon for years.

Yeah, every company in the world wants employees that they can trust, are team players, and so on. At least, I've never seen a job spec for 'Untrustworthy, slightly shifty, loner required. Must be antisocial and lazy. Must have a University degree in science or mathematics and a current drivers license.'

If it's a prerequisite then does it really matter if it's said.

Then why China, and not India or other low COL areas? I don't believe it's as simple as purely salary.

Speaking as Russian, I'd speculate that China is the subject to the same effect when having collective memory of socialism when property belonged to nobody makes for a society where cheating the System (big foreign company would seem close to it) isn't that big of a vice, if any, and may be even a sign of being smart/entrepreneural.

Agreed. Amazon has a large operation in India. And FANG has had development centers there forever. Espionage is unheard of.

cos Indian suppliers aren't as big players yet. I think the Chinese suppliers care about US buyer data which is supplied from Chinese factories.

And casinos have a large security staff and I suspect do better background checks than FANG companies do.

Its the same at a large uk telco I worked at only a limited amount of people had widespread access to data and where positively vetted as well.

I know one team leader who was going to have to pass DV (TS in US terms) clearance.

I do not think this is due to low wages. Quality of ones morality is not necessarily measured by ones wage. If one is corruptible/corrupt there’s always a price point (or some other excuse) one falls for it.

Do a minimum wage job for a few months and you'll be surprised how quickly this changes.

If everyone treats you like shit and you get a shitty wage as well... Well, a lot happens to your mind

I agree somewhat but feel it better to say I dont think wage (assuming it is a living wage) is the biggest variable in moral behaviour.

Wage likely has some weighting (especially under a living standard), but I cant see how people disagree it is a big factor. If the counter point was true we would see reducing corruption as people go up the wealth scale. Whereas I feel there is a reasonable portion of lax morals at every level of wealth, and there is higher proportion of corruption the higher the level. My logic to this and why;

1) Firstly I am aware corruption and 'wealth have a negative correlation in terms of GDP per capita but would position this as, countries with less corruption get wealthier, and culture plays a huge part in corruption so to understand this you have to look within cultures and country to country comparison is not accurate in understanding wealth/corruption relationship.

2) There is always someone wealthier and if 'getting to the top' is a huge personal driver it doesn't matter whether you are in the bottom middle class or the top 5%. There is always more to go up.

3) Corruption scales, so at the lower level someone might be taking a $1k bribe, the wealthy are taking $million bribes so the desire for immoral money scales in value to the risk/reward so people dont become dissuaded as they get wealthier and it is more to do with personal morals.

4) Wealthy have more opportunity for corruption. E.g. as you go up corporate ranks you get bigger budgets/access and more autonomy in signing things off. And there is more grey in decisions for contracts awarded etc. Its a heap easier for a senior person to be corrupt than it is for a minimum wage employee.

Side point: I dont think its fair people downvoted the original comment. HN is better than voting on I disagree with you. It is a fair comment and while maybe could have been expressed more please lets not become the community of hivemind and agenda pushing. Lets have interesting conversation regardless of if it aligns with your opinion.

Thanks for a detailed reply and analysis. There’s nothing I can disagree in these since it is an attempt to explain further why we do what we do. Also replying to other comments as well, life might leave one without much choice when especially living under deprived conditions and having family. But again it’s all about choices. I think downvotes are to the tone of the comment rather than the statement itself. Fair enough.

>If one is corruptible/corrupt...

Which is pretty much everyone.

Don't forget that China is ultimately a far more collectivist society, and stuff like this happens all the time. The money just provides additional motivation; people's natural tendency is to share things.

Where possible Bezos has Western employees pissing in bottles and penalized for taking sick days, working without vacations, retirement savings and health care supplemented with food stamps and tent-camps so it's pretty generous to blame Chinese culture for toxicity from the top.

Indeed, the "data leaks" that Amazon experiences in the US are people taking pictures of their working conditions and sharing them with the public.

Eh, how do you define collectivist? Ever tried to get on a Chinese subway or stand in a Chinese queue? I'm not sure you can compare e g. US and Chinese collectivism unidimensionally.

I'm not a sociologist but this is a fairly common distinction in sociology. Countries like Russia or China are considered to be more collectivist. For example in China they are very OK with using eminent domain to seize individual property to build rail roads. America is considered to be more individualist. We also have eminent domain here, but it's much less common to use it, (eg. see California high speed rail).

That's not true. Selling data for their own profit is completely individualist.

So-called collectivist is just another way to say government could seize anyone's personal property without permission and compensation for 'greater good', which translates to government officials's pocket.

Collectivism can manifest itself behavior like this. I can't speak to China, but I have a lot of family that migrated away from Cuba, am a descendant of Cuban immigrants myself, and met many Cubans during my time in Florida. Those that grew up in the socialist system often have a sense that cheating is okay as long as you're cheating "The Man". Maybe these days we call it cheating "the system". Basically, stealing and fraud is more tolerated if it's stealing from some faceless group or organization, like governments or companies.

I think the distinction is shame vs guilt society if anything. Guilt is more intrinsic while shame is more external socially. China is more shame with their concept of face. Telling the customers their meal might be a bit late is loss of face even if it arrives on time. Insisting everything is fine and stalling up until it may or may not arrive is the "proper" thing to do.

Essentially that seems promotes both "do what it takes" and "do what you can get away with".

i think it's more likely that people generally (anywhere) would feel little natural allegiance or loyalty to a foreign multinational corporation

Doing whatever it takes to get personal benefit even though it screws over others is the opposite of collectivism. As somedy who lived in China, Europe, and the US the notion of people in China being less selfish and less likely to cheat the system is just absurd.

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