The MBA thinks "cheap as possible" - so two devs and a dog sounds like a reasonable budget, even if it means stuff doesn't quite work and employees get broken.

The real poison is MBA culture. It's literally insane in most normal human senses.

This. It's easy to shift the blame to faceless Amazon and pretend "the company" is at fault.

It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees.

This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearing suits have talked about this and agreed it's okay.

Tell me, if it was your money being invested, would you act differently?

I like to think that I would. Primarily because I tend to seek to spend and invest money in a way that does not require me to make compromises in terms of humanity.

Granted, I've never invested money in anything of Amazon's level, so I cannot know -- all I know is what I hope I'd do.

Yes, this is a classic example of a skew risk. Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff.

And of course this will never, ever come up in your case studies as a recurring risk, because you're encouraged to read everything as a nice little story in business school. The one or two cases where it does happen will just be chalked up to some admonition about hiring better staff or some other BS.

"Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff."

Are you implying that Bezos and Amazon's investors are just dumb and don't think about the long term implications of their hiring practices?

You can always short Amazon's stock if you're that confident.

Maybe they did think about it all, and reached the conclusion that this culture and hiring practices will have a better return on the long term.

It is far too easy to say what other people should do with their money...

Yeah, it seems like it's the natural dynamic. The government could probably do something about it, I guess.

Yep, and that should be minimum wage, not "good working conditions for highly-paid white collar workers". [Edit: sorry if the tone sounds bad, no intend to offend]

Disclaimer: I'm a highly-paid white collar worker.

There's enough competition in the tech industry that this isn't a problem, let the market regulate itself in this case, it's working. I wouldn't work at Amazon under those conditions, but if some people would, let them.

Yes, because I think about profit more than one or two quarters down the road.

Are you saying that Bezos doesn't?

And if your management strategy is better than just hiring cheap, open a company and you'll win on the long term.

That's a bit glib considering you also need to deal with funding, investor relations, market fit, and all kinds of other issues that have a lot more impact on longevity than developer salary.

It also ignores the fact that markets are structured to reward cheap and greedy behaviour and C-suite narcissism, and to punish - or at least get in the way of - bottom-up worker democracy and other more fluid and less myth-of-the-holy-CEO management structures.

As for Amazon - the company can clearly afford to treat its workers better. The actual effect on profitability is likely to be positive, not negative, because better people will stay for longer, less churn means more stability and less random technical debt for new hires, and better publicity makes it easier to keep customers than lose them.

Bezos seems to think the tradeoffs are fine as they are. I think he's wrong about that. Amazon's model is quite brittle, and it's open to any number of competitive attacks. And Bezos has made some very poor decisions (phone, etc.)

Amazon will be fine in the short to medium term, but I'll be surprised if its business model isn't seriously disrupted by competition within less than a decade.

IMO treating workers better would make the company more creative and resilient, not less - and probably more profitable too.

They did have more people. The problem is not everyone in the group knows the code to the same degree. Even when you have someone on station who's supposed to take care of problems, if it takes him more than about twenty minutes to find the problem they're going to start calling the rest of the team.

If you're good and you have a reputation for being good they're going to call you. I got 3:00 AM calls because I'd written a particular piece of code even though a half dozen of my colleagues were already on site and awake.

Put yourself in the manager's shoes. You can not tell the customer he's needs to wait two hours for the people on site to come up to speed on the shipping module (or whatever) because the guy who wrote it needs his beauty sleep. There's too much money involved.

This situation is very common in low margin businesses.

Source: I spent 15 years managing IT (devs, DBAs, ops) in a multinational manufacturing company. Even though I had a team of 100+, for each discrete app or system, it was normal to have just one or two experts due to lack of adequate staffing. My CIO took pride in restricting IT spend to <1% of revenue. :-/