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Comment by cjaybo | Hacker News Reader

You posted the same theory above, except there you included the important disclaimer that you have no inside information — is this just a hunch that you have? Because it seems like a Hanlon’s razor type of situation to me. Without some sort of evidence of the fraud you speak of, it seems far more likely to be them simply struggling with challenges of scale. Every business deals with bad employees but the majority of people with jobs tend to want to keep their job. It’s hard for me to imagine that fraud is the dominating cause here.

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Amazon systematically underpays all their employees. They do this by encouraging employee churn, like to the point where warehouses occasionally realize "shit, we're running out of new people to hire in the entire metro area". This means they have a high tolerance for a lot of things that would be considered disqualifying. For example, in a lot of workplaces, random drug testing is mandated by insurance, which means people who smoke weed are unemployable. Amazon will hire them anyway[0].

That's not to say Amazon has no limits - they do background-check for felony convictions, and having one would make it harder to get hired by an Amazon warehouse. However, they've still built a hiring system that optimizes for hiring the precariat[1] and underpaying them so they stay precarious. They've built all the economic incentives for them to be stolen from. We don't necessarily need to prove specific allegations of theft in the same way we don't need to prove that specific cracks in the road are caused by water getting in and freezing.

[0] For the record, this is a good thing, but Amazon is doing it for incredibly terrible reasons.

[1] The class of people in permanent precarity - i.e. people who you can get to do anything, including run a marathon across a poorly-organized warehouse filling boxes for eight hours for little pay.

No, I posted a much more specific theory above with a disclaimer.

Here, none was necessary, since I wasn't going out on a limb. I also do know enough people who work at Amazon to know that many of their SWEs despise their employer. Reporting (in newspapers) about warehouses is horrific. That strongly supports that Amazon is not tending towards the happy end of the "employees acting in employer best interest" curve. My own experience, my friends, and anecdotally on posts like this, has been very negative about the honesty and customer service from Amazon starting around 2020.

Now:

Corporate corruption is complex.

To give an extreme example, if one is at an Enron, one keeps their job by keeping their mouths shut and participating in the fraud. It's the likely whistleblowers who get fired.

This is not at all uncommon in organizations. It's a stereotype that working too hard at some union shops is not good for one's long-term job prospects.

One step down from that is employees who don't care about their employer. They want to keep their job, have decent salary, future options, work-life balance, and enjoy work as much as possible. If an employer doesn't fire people who don't work, no one works. If an employer has no means to check if items are correctly packed, very quickly no items are correctly packed. This is not uncommon at the CEO level either (at least for external CEOs), who mostly want to pump up short-term profits to get bonuses and prepare for their next gig.

Acting in corporate interest is only occasionally correlated with keeping ones job. In general, you need to keep your stakeholders happy (probably your boss), and the extent to which that correlates with business success is... mixed.

This impacts a majority of large businesses.

At scale of over ≈20-1000 people, organizations are dominated by incentive structures and dynamics you can model with game theory (ref: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). The hypothetical business where everyone is aligned is, well, almost hypothetical beyond some scale.

It's not uncommon that in a large organization, zero people care about that organization. If there's a problem, no one fixes it. It survives in the free market simply because their competitors are no better (and how well large businesses manage this largely determines their success).

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