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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice. While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.

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Agreed, feels like directed incompetence. If the errors were in the other direction, I wonder how quickly Amazon would direct focus to it.

Without data, my default assumption is that there are lots of cases where things are being done wrong that are not in Amazon’s favour. The “directed incompetence” theory assumes that clueless people are being intentionally allowed to be clueless with the full knowledge of somebody less clueless. I find it easier to believe, without evidence, that the cluelessness exists at all levels.

I don't totally disagree, but people respond to incentives, and are thus going to be that much more motivated, at all levels, to notice, escalate, and solve a big that impacts the bottom line. It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it, as they say.

Anecdotally, I've heard lots of negative things about working at Amazon, no positive. In contrast I've known many people who work at Google and they seem generally happy with their jobs, have been there for years. The people I know who work in tech and are more desirable candidates would never choose Amazon as their first pick. I'm surprised that Amazon works as well as it does, as a company. There's a real cost to high turnover.

I guess on the flip side, I was receiving 100$ per month in AWS credits for about 2 years for an Alexa skill I had disabled. This was also incompetence in this case.

still receiving them lol. its actually a really nice gesture bc the credits expire and the money more than covers the cost but i feel more inclined to use AWS for the next thing i build because of credits

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