[rtx]

>They are expected to bring inside knowledge and contacts to the table.

This is not always unethical, we exclusively hire former AdWords account mangers for our sem team. This primarily done for branding and reducing the recruitment cost.

[sidlls]

If the market is unhealthy (e.g. a monopoly exists in some cases) then it is very much as unethical or illegal as their (former) employers’ market position is: they’re literally leveraging the same conditions to extract value.

[dalbasal]

Ethical is a broad term. It's not illegal, or in violation of any industry ethics standards that I know of.

That said, it's not illegal (in the US) for politicians to receive payments from companies for consulting, giving lectures or such. It's not illegal (in most countries) to hire former staffers for a politician you wish to lobby as lobbyists, compliance officers or such. I would say that most people do consider some of these ethically questionable.

IMO, the issue is one of nuance and scale. The more subjective, arbitrary or ilegible decisions these employees can make, the larger the risk of corruption. The more employees can make these decisions, the larger the risk. The larger the economic impact of these decisions, the larger the risk.

This case, demonstrates a dangerous nexus. The marketplace has a lot of moderation (or whatever amzn call it). Subjective decision making. Culprits removed suspensions on sellers and products in exchange for naked bribes. For adwords, that might be ad copy approval, adsense categorization. IDK if an adwords account managers can affect quality score, but that would be a big one. I suspect they can. A lot of amazon and google employees make these decisions, another scale for the nexus. These decisions are worth a fortune. In this case, $100m in sales.

Subjective decisions made by many people affecting very large sums.

Once you are at Google or amazon scale, this is big money corruption. $100m in sales. There are whole industries where whoever wins at amazon marketplace, facebook ad market or adwords wins a major market.

In terms of ethics... Ethics either works against some sort of professional or societal standard (eg legal or medical ethics) or you have to examine it from a "who is harmed and is that fair" perspective. Here amazon itself was harmed, so it's straight crime. In other cases, it might be unfair to competitors or consumers. If you are outperforming your competitors on adwords because you hired the most well connected former account manager... I can see where competitors would consider this unfair.