[wegs]

I think one of the problems Amazon suffers -- and this is not a condemnation of the company as a whole -- is that it treats employees like garbage and runs a sweatshop. There is zero loyalty among Amazon employees I know. Some are very highly-compensated sweatshop workers, but sweatshop workers nonetheless (a lot of fintech and quant work the same way, and even more extreme -- you get a lot of money, but you have no work/life balance, are on call 24/7, and if your performance slips for a moment, even due to a family emergency, and you get the pink slip).

That sets a strong environment for corruption.

Why is this not a condemnation of Amazon? Turns out each corporate structure has problems. You pull on one lever, and you get a dozen unwanted consequences. But it's important to recognize the faults of such structures.

[stingraycharles]

To turn this in a more broad discussion, are there any examples of “great” corporate structures for tech firms that scale well? Google has its problems (unwanted side effect being abandoned projects because of how they promote internally), I’ve heard quite a few bad things about Netflix as well. Apple and Microsoft seem to be faring quite well in this regard?

[wegs]

Last I looked, Microsoft's culture was toxic -- much more so than Amazon, Google, or most any other major tech organization. A ton of in-fighting, and decisions made for political reasons. They were working hard to clean it up, but I'm not sure how far they got.

Organizational design is a complex problem. It's like finding a great employee or a great spouse. They don't exist; it's a question of fit-to-function. Linus Torvalds would be a lousy doctor, and my doctor would be a lousy programmer. You really can't get everything. If you try, you fail. It's a question of aligning organizational structures to what you're trying to do. If you're running a sweatshop in India like a corporate R&D lab, or vice-versa, you're gonna fail.

I would argue Amazon has a great corporate structure which scales well for the purpose it's designed for. Amazon has been winning for alignment to profit/growth, for innovation, for customer-focus, and loses on the employee sweatshop front. That ain't bad. I think it's cracking a bit under COVID19, but at least for two decades, it's done really well for both customers and growth.

Google was a great org structure for its first decade, and then grew complacent in hiring, and when bad employees came in, it started failing in virtually everything else; I'm not sure it's coming back, but I hope it does. For now, it's been sailing on its (very significant) momentum, but that eventually wears off. It doesn't seem to have the right executive team in place anymore, though, so I'm not sure how it might come back.

[Pfhreak]

Not only do they work their employees hard and offer limited benefits, they tightly constrict what they can say and what they can do outside of work.

For instance, want to grab a couple buddies and do a game jam? That's against the rules and could result in you being disciplined.

[wegs]

And after you leave. They have nasty non-competes, and they do sue employees on the way out the door. Even when they're wrong, they're right; threat of cost of lawsuit is enough to deter 95% of their employees.

I didn't want to work for Amazon in part for that reason.

[DyslexicAtheist]

> Why is this not a condemnation of Amazon?

this is a feature unique to capitalism not just Amazon.

[lucaspm98]

Capitalists can value the long term advantages of having a fairly compensated and happy workforce. A company might be able to gain a short term benefit by mistreating or underpaying workers, but in a properly regulated capitalist system this will lead to public backlash, regulatory attention, corruption, and ultimately employees leaving for competitors.

[wegs]

Capitalist markets, even when thinking through the long term, don't work like that. A lot of costs of messing with employees are externalized. If I lay off my workforce after a product ships, issue stock options worth 10 cents, or otherwise, the result is a lack of trust in tech management as a whole.

The direct blowback on the individual company is pretty small. Would you ever find out if a manager you were interviewing with had done that? Or a startup?

The US was more efficient when companies treated employees better, and when companies were like a community who took care of each other. But, as an individual manager, and even more so as a company, I come out ahead if I treat employees more aggressively.

Better transparency would help. If employees could see company financials, it would solve a world of hurts. The information asymmetry is a lot of what leads to inefficient markets here.

[shakezula]

They could, but they don’t because the short term usually works out just fine for them.

[_qwfv]

I agree with you, but even among capitalists Amazon is uniquely brutal to work for.