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Comment by Xeronate | Hacker News Reader

If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions aren’t part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been around since the beginning and has the same core values as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn’t how the company works.

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I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough horrible things from people that used to work there that make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In fact, those other people went out of their way to convince me not to take a job there.

I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture.

All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.

I don't speak for my employer, which is Amazon.

FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive of the customer like you're talking about to be encouraged or allowed.

Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and earning the customer's trust have taken deep root everywhere I've been able to see.

Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are difficult, compromises have to be made, there are outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I really like that aspect of working where I do.

If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.

> If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.

And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the most talented senior employees are already starting to leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things on Amazon because the experience has become significantly worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.

You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no longer about value creation but value extraction. And quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.

It's funny, you and I arrive at the same conclusion from different paths.

You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's beyond their capabilities, and that nobody knows how to ensure trustworthy information on the internet.

But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.

In a way, I'm more pessimistic than you: I think good intentions wouldn't even help.

You’re saying the company that’s revolutionized the supply chain and brought us AWS can’t mitigate at least mass, organized fraud if it was a priority?!

Bull shit.

There will be Amazon rockets and maybe one day a Mars landing but stopping mass fraud is too big a problem?

If Amazon wanted to solve this problem, they'd get rid of comingling and allow customer to flag bad returns as "fraudulent products." It would be trivial to train an ML model to catch fraud this way, all you have to do is allow it to have meaningful inputs. Of course once you get rid of comingling you don't even need to bother with that, as you've solved the problem the same way the rest of the industry has already solved it.

This isn't hard. Seriously, you have lost all goodwill from me - anyone that isn't a fucking idiot could immediately solve this problem. But Amazon doesn't want to lose money, is what you really mean.

Fuck Amazon and fuck you. I have more respect for Facebook at this point.

I always wonder how much you can truly unlink from Amazon for retail purchases. Even where a store runs on Shopify there is a good chance they are using FBA for fulfilment

I've also completely stopped buying from Amazon. I will go so far as to exclude amazon.* from my search results when I'm searching online for an item.

Reasons:

- Receiving broken, clearly used/returned, or counterfeit items.

- Product reviews obviously gamed and useless.

- Sticking their nose into political issues. Just run your services please and don't try to tell me what to read or think.

Then please prove that commitment to the customer and to long term credibility by making it a high priority to mitigate this problem.

A lot of people love Amazon now but this kind of shit screws customers and that’s unacceptable.

What about the short term solution of PIP culture?

Sure you get short term results because colleagues are competing against one another to not get into the PIP meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and people leaving.

Not to mention Amazon’s reputation in tech is pretty low b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture

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