| 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). |