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Comment by throwaway_aws | Hacker News Reader

I joined after the team had gotten traction already. Both the GM and senior most product person on the team told me about their tactics independently.

To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new things. On a day to day basis the only pressure was to build... I don't remember instances where ethical guidelines were brought up. So, in a way, the outcomes were a result of what people were rewarded on.

Only after I left AWS I started thinking it was ethically iffy. I still believe Amazon is an amazing company and my time at AWS was one of the best learning experiences.

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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.

I wish we went into this in much more detail in high school when covering economics and ethics (if the school even bothers to teach ethics). It should be a prerequisite in any capitalistic economy (but not only those, it can easily be extended to other things).

I've also worked in industries that I think don't operate very ethically. It's amazing what you can ignore as an outlier because the alternative is uncomfortable or means you have to make a large personal change.

A large personal change like going hungry? Not feeding your family?

Well, yeah. Or just having to look for a new job that may or may not pay as much. But I wasn't really going that far as saying people (myself, at one point, if you notice what I wrote) staying at a company they feel is acting unethically, but actually just noticing and accepting the company as doing unethical things instead of attributing it to an outlying situation that isn't indicative of how things are normally done.

Companies and people sometimes do shitty things. It isn't always on purpose (misunderstandings, one bad person, etc), and there isn't always a good way to fix it afterwards. I don't condemn people and companies because of this, and there's a tendency to assume this when you see something and work at the company. It can take a while before you start seeing a pattern and accept that it might just be how things are done sometimes and the management is fine with it. If you don't have a lot of options, I think there's a tendency for people to not look closer either on purpose or subconsciously because they might not like what they find, and then they've put themselves in a harder situation, where they must choose between what they believe is right and a hardship.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and the human mind is very complex. That's all I'm saying.

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