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1. Amazon is revenue focused 2. 3% shrink is accepted in retail, that is 6+ billion dollars they are ok with losing. 3. Data is large and hard to get at Amazo

1. Amazon is revenue focused 2. 3% shrink is accepted in retail, that is 6+ billion dollars they are ok with losing. 3. Data is large and hard to get at Amazon. Just getting access to a database without direct VP help is sometimes impossible 4. Compute resources to 'run a report' on terabytes of data are even harder to get. 5. Manager changes every six months 6. Devs last ~18 months so no one is there long enough to care about solving a cost issue. 7. There is NO REVENUE in catching thieves, so there is little to no exec sponsorship 8. Often management is involved in fraud or theft rings.

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
Can you explain the last 8th point further?
- one2know 7y ago
  Thousands of managers. Not all are honest. As an example, I toured an FC once and there was a still boxed perfect $9000 TV sitting in the damaged area. Most retail has a policy that damaged has to be destroyed. In reality places I have worked, managers came through and picked through it. This is nothing new for retail or warehouses. If a manager is suspected of helping thieves, they might be moved around instead of fired due to politics.
  - learc83 7y ago
    When I worked at Best Buy years ago our Inventory/LP manager was fired (and later arrested from what I heard) because he was involved in a theft ring with other Inventory/LP managers/supervisors across the district. If I remember correctly, they were transferring items between stores and then saying they never arrived.
  - steve19 7y ago
    I have worked in the shipping industry (shipping as in ocean transportation). We had a very high rate of damage to pallets containing beer. A forklift clips a 6 pack on the corner breaking one or two bottles. Insurance pays out for entire pallet, stevedores go home with a lot of beer. Theft was considered a insurable cost of business. I am sure insurance rates were priced accordingly. I am also sure our rate of theft was no different to any other port in the country.
mlevental 7y ago
you know what I think is funny? if 3% loss is acceptable than why do these people even get prosecuted? deterrent so that it's not 4%? sure but there's something unsatisfying about that as justification for imprisoning someone. before someone accuses me of being a communist hippie I have a thought experiment for you: every 5 years I do spring cleaning by taking all of the boxes drawers etc of accumulated consumer goods junk I haven't looked inside of in the past 5 year and just take them to good will. I reason that if it hasn't been important in the last 5 years it never will be and that I would waste more time (money) looking closely. now the thought experiment: suppose someone had broken into my house over the last 5 years and stolen something from one of those receptacles that was eventually thrown out. should I be upset? now note that I'm not asking if I'm legally entitled to being upset but whether it would be rational to be upset. but let me actually put on my hippie commie beatnik hat: there is so much money sloshing around in the economy and inefficiencies that entrepreneurs exploit to become wealthy. most of it is above board but some of it isn't and whether those people get punished or not is largely a function of whether they're caught before they're super successful or not. what is the difference here? these people saw an inefficiency and took advantage of it. to put a sort of hyberbolic point on it: why is this theft but selling toxic cdos not? in both "transactions" ultimately one party profited at the expense of the counterparty. Edit: I love the downvotes. What exactly about my comment isn't "curious" as dang loves to exhort. God forbid someone questions the most totalitarian institution the human mind has ever conceived of: the law. HN is no different from every other pointless echo chamber that double speaks about freedom but suppresses dissenting opinions.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  I, for one, would prefer my unused stuff went to a charity of my choosing than a thief.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  > suppose someone had broken into my house over the last 5 years and stolen something from one of those receptacles that was eventually thrown out. should I be upset? now note that I'm not asking if I'm legally entitled to being upset but whether it would be rational to be upset. A person's response to being burglarized is never purely rational. You've got the distress of the initial discovery, followed by the subsequent process of figuring out what (if anything) they stole, modified, or left behind, and the process of reporting the crime to authorities. Then you'll deal with self-blame about not investing more in home security and uncertainty about whether these thieves will come back for what they left behind (did they break in knowing you were gone, or did they mistakenly think you were home...?). Even if you had excellent video surveillance coverage that proved that they only took stuff you'd forgotten about, the burglar(s) violated your personal space, which obviously feels pretty awful, and may have broken something on their way in. The negativity of getting burglarized is irrational in nature and difficult to quantify in economic terms, but is nevertheless real. In conclusion, I'd say every victim of B&E has great reasons to be upset, regardless of what (if anything) was stolen.
soulofmischief 7y ago
Could you explain point 6 a bit more?
- cloakandswagger 7y ago
  What's there to say? Amazon is a revolving door of developers, most of which don't make it to 2 years. It would take a year or more for a dev to become familiar enough with their domain and its systems to even know to suggest a report that would sniff out this fraud, and even more time for them to have the political capital to get support for the project.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    That's what confuses me. I don't understand how anything gets done. It takes a year just to get settled in at a place like that.
    - one2know 7y ago
      There are PE's and people that have been there for years even decades that have lots of power and clout to do things associated with revenue and not get canned on multi-year or multi-month projects. Then there are the thousands of new hires that are just fodder to try to quickly get a select few managers and engineers promoted before they are canned. They essentially don't get anything of value done and do throw away work. A lot of it has to do with perceptions.
    - pas 7y ago
      Initially you get small tasks on a small project. In a few months you are quite settled in for your position. (Let's say some integration service maintenance.)
- uncoder0 7y ago
  Not OP but, from what I've heard it sucks working at Amazon even in engineering.
viraptor 7y ago
While 3 and 4 may be true currently, it's a lame excuse. Amazon is the probably the largest provider of services like that at the moment. I think it's more than terabytes of data, but even then, it should be trivial to do for them - https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ If they're ok with losing 6+ billion, then what's the cost of 5 engineers and some large instances in comparison? So does it really boil down to - VP doesn't care enough? > 6. Devs last ~18 months so no one is there long enough to care about solving a cost issue. Are you saying devs set project priorities and cannot be assigned where the work needs to be done? > 7. There is NO REVENUE in catching thieves That directly contradicts point 2. Apparently there's a potential for preventing 6+ billion dollars of lost revenue. From the article: > $428,000 fencing stolen items, much of it on Amazon. That's enough to put a dev on this problem for a year with required infra and still save some extra money - just from that single pawn shop.
- bsder 7y ago
  > That directly contradicts point 2. Apparently there's a potential for preventing 6+ billion dollars of lost revenue. But not in a single budget anywhere in the company. And, it's all about MY local budget. You're asking ME to put a couple of devs on something that might pay off half a million dollars. Maybe. And, if it doesn't those devs could have been deployed elsewhere. Uh, yeah, no. Not on my watch. I'm going to put those devs on something that might get me a bonus or promoted, thanks.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    I'm sorry if that's really your view. There are both divisions in corps and people who think beyond a single bonus. I wish we started calling this out as "culture at Amazon enables thieves" rather than - here's a list of excuses why they can't do it. At the very least, the higher ups with the view of the overall budget have the power to start projects like that which assign the budget as necessary.
    - praneshp 7y ago
      > "culture at Amazon enables thieves" wow, one comment on HN, from an anon account, and you start coining bullshit FUD headlines. Then you'll turn around and moan about the state of the news media.
closeparen 7y ago
Amazon doesn’t collect its business data in an instance of its own warehouse product?
- one2know 7y ago
  You're looking at 4-5 different transactional systems with 1-1000 TB of data. You won't be getting access to those things since they process perhaps $1 MM of revenue per minute. Maybe you can use their ETL system if it is not overloaded. The query to join warehouse, shipping, delivery, orders, catalog probably will run 12 hours and cost $5000 dollars. Executives would rather have one line in their 300 page metrics booklet that says "item cost reshipped to customer suspected theft." If it is under $1 million per day I doubt they would care.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Amazon sells ETL, warehouse, BI, and analytical query tools as solutions to these problems; it’s surprising that they’re not dogfooded.
    - foobarian 7y ago
      For all we know they do have this system in place. But shit happens; one weekend some Hadoop nodes lock up, bunch of associated jobs fail, and maybe it's not high on the priority list to rerun the query or investigate or the person familiar with the job is away. And so this time a bunch of fraud goes uncaught.
    - one2know 7y ago
      Part of AWS sells those things. AWS started 12 years after Amazon.com. Amazon has large BI orgs to build custom systems costing tens of millions of dollars. AWS was not considered secure enough for Amazon.com critical data as of a few years ago, maybe still is not. Look at the capital one breach due to S3. Amazon does not just give a no-limit AWS account to each of their thousands of team. In fact they are more likely to tell the team to solve it with no resources. Rival teams will want an unpopular cost savings project like this to fail so they can have more headcount and budget.
xkcd-sucks 7y ago
Don't we always read articles about how Amazon is a rational, data-driven entity? Stuff like this makes it seem like Amazon is a normal big retail company like Walmart, and should be valued accordingly.
- asdff 7y ago
  It's valued as walmart+aws.

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago

Can you explain the last 8th point further?

one2know 7y ago
Thousands of managers. Not all are honest. As an example, I toured an FC once and there was a still boxed perfect $9000 TV sitting in the damaged area. Most retail has a policy that damaged has to be destroyed. In reality places I have worked, managers came through and picked through it. This is nothing new for retail or warehouses. If a manager is suspected of helping thieves, they might be moved around instead of fired due to politics.
- learc83 7y ago
  When I worked at Best Buy years ago our Inventory/LP manager was fired (and later arrested from what I heard) because he was involved in a theft ring with other Inventory/LP managers/supervisors across the district. If I remember correctly, they were transferring items between stores and then saying they never arrived.
- steve19 7y ago
  I have worked in the shipping industry (shipping as in ocean transportation). We had a very high rate of damage to pallets containing beer. A forklift clips a 6 pack on the corner breaking one or two bottles. Insurance pays out for entire pallet, stevedores go home with a lot of beer. Theft was considered a insurable cost of business. I am sure insurance rates were priced accordingly. I am also sure our rate of theft was no different to any other port in the country.

mlevental 7y ago

you know what I think is funny? if 3% loss is acceptable than why do these people even get prosecuted? deterrent so that it's not 4%? sure but there's something unsatisfying about that as justification for imprisoning someone. before someone accuses me of being a communist hippie I have a thought experiment for you: every 5 years I do spring cleaning by taking all of the boxes drawers etc of accumulated consumer goods junk I haven't looked inside of in the past 5 year and just take them to good will. I reason that if it hasn't been important in the last 5 years it never will be and that I would waste more time (money) looking closely. now the thought experiment: suppose someone had broken into my house over the last 5 years and stolen something from one of those receptacles that was eventually thrown out. should I be upset? now note that I'm not asking if I'm legally entitled to being upset but whether it would be rational to be upset. but let me actually put on my hippie commie beatnik hat: there is so much money sloshing around in the economy and inefficiencies that entrepreneurs exploit to become wealthy. most of it is above board but some of it isn't and whether those people get punished or not is largely a function of whether they're caught before they're super successful or not. what is the difference here? these people saw an inefficiency and took advantage of it. to put a sort of hyberbolic point on it: why is this theft but selling toxic cdos not? in both "transactions" ultimately one party profited at the expense of the counterparty. Edit: I love the downvotes. What exactly about my comment isn't "curious" as dang loves to exhort. God forbid someone questions the most totalitarian institution the human mind has ever conceived of: the law. HN is no different from every other pointless echo chamber that double speaks about freedom but suppresses dissenting opinions.

alasdair_ 7y ago
I, for one, would prefer my unused stuff went to a charity of my choosing than a thief.
EForEndeavour 7y ago
> suppose someone had broken into my house over the last 5 years and stolen something from one of those receptacles that was eventually thrown out. should I be upset? now note that I'm not asking if I'm legally entitled to being upset but whether it would be rational to be upset. A person's response to being burglarized is never purely rational. You've got the distress of the initial discovery, followed by the subsequent process of figuring out what (if anything) they stole, modified, or left behind, and the process of reporting the crime to authorities. Then you'll deal with self-blame about not investing more in home security and uncertainty about whether these thieves will come back for what they left behind (did they break in knowing you were gone, or did they mistakenly think you were home...?). Even if you had excellent video surveillance coverage that proved that they only took stuff you'd forgotten about, the burglar(s) violated your personal space, which obviously feels pretty awful, and may have broken something on their way in. The negativity of getting burglarized is irrational in nature and difficult to quantify in economic terms, but is nevertheless real. In conclusion, I'd say every victim of B&E has great reasons to be upset, regardless of what (if anything) was stolen.

soulofmischief 7y ago

Could you explain point 6 a bit more?

cloakandswagger 7y ago
What's there to say? Amazon is a revolving door of developers, most of which don't make it to 2 years. It would take a year or more for a dev to become familiar enough with their domain and its systems to even know to suggest a report that would sniff out this fraud, and even more time for them to have the political capital to get support for the project.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  That's what confuses me. I don't understand how anything gets done. It takes a year just to get settled in at a place like that.
  - one2know 7y ago
    There are PE's and people that have been there for years even decades that have lots of power and clout to do things associated with revenue and not get canned on multi-year or multi-month projects. Then there are the thousands of new hires that are just fodder to try to quickly get a select few managers and engineers promoted before they are canned. They essentially don't get anything of value done and do throw away work. A lot of it has to do with perceptions.
  - pas 7y ago
    Initially you get small tasks on a small project. In a few months you are quite settled in for your position. (Let's say some integration service maintenance.)
uncoder0 7y ago
Not OP but, from what I've heard it sucks working at Amazon even in engineering.

viraptor 7y ago

While 3 and 4 may be true currently, it's a lame excuse. Amazon is the probably the largest provider of services like that at the moment. I think it's more than terabytes of data, but even then, it should be trivial to do for them - https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ If they're ok with losing 6+ billion, then what's the cost of 5 engineers and some large instances in comparison? So does it really boil down to - VP doesn't care enough? > 6. Devs last ~18 months so no one is there long enough to care about solving a cost issue. Are you saying devs set project priorities and cannot be assigned where the work needs to be done? > 7. There is NO REVENUE in catching thieves That directly contradicts point 2. Apparently there's a potential for preventing 6+ billion dollars of lost revenue. From the article: > $428,000 fencing stolen items, much of it on Amazon. That's enough to put a dev on this problem for a year with required infra and still save some extra money - just from that single pawn shop.

bsder 7y ago
> That directly contradicts point 2. Apparently there's a potential for preventing 6+ billion dollars of lost revenue. But not in a single budget anywhere in the company. And, it's all about MY local budget. You're asking ME to put a couple of devs on something that might pay off half a million dollars. Maybe. And, if it doesn't those devs could have been deployed elsewhere. Uh, yeah, no. Not on my watch. I'm going to put those devs on something that might get me a bonus or promoted, thanks.
- viraptor 7y ago
  I'm sorry if that's really your view. There are both divisions in corps and people who think beyond a single bonus. I wish we started calling this out as "culture at Amazon enables thieves" rather than - here's a list of excuses why they can't do it. At the very least, the higher ups with the view of the overall budget have the power to start projects like that which assign the budget as necessary.
  - praneshp 7y ago
    > "culture at Amazon enables thieves" wow, one comment on HN, from an anon account, and you start coining bullshit FUD headlines. Then you'll turn around and moan about the state of the news media.

closeparen 7y ago

Amazon doesn’t collect its business data in an instance of its own warehouse product?

one2know 7y ago
You're looking at 4-5 different transactional systems with 1-1000 TB of data. You won't be getting access to those things since they process perhaps $1 MM of revenue per minute. Maybe you can use their ETL system if it is not overloaded. The query to join warehouse, shipping, delivery, orders, catalog probably will run 12 hours and cost $5000 dollars. Executives would rather have one line in their 300 page metrics booklet that says "item cost reshipped to customer suspected theft." If it is under $1 million per day I doubt they would care.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Amazon sells ETL, warehouse, BI, and analytical query tools as solutions to these problems; it’s surprising that they’re not dogfooded.
  - foobarian 7y ago
    For all we know they do have this system in place. But shit happens; one weekend some Hadoop nodes lock up, bunch of associated jobs fail, and maybe it's not high on the priority list to rerun the query or investigate or the person familiar with the job is away. And so this time a bunch of fraud goes uncaught.
  - one2know 7y ago
    Part of AWS sells those things. AWS started 12 years after Amazon.com. Amazon has large BI orgs to build custom systems costing tens of millions of dollars. AWS was not considered secure enough for Amazon.com critical data as of a few years ago, maybe still is not. Look at the capital one breach due to S3. Amazon does not just give a no-limit AWS account to each of their thousands of team. In fact they are more likely to tell the team to solve it with no resources. Rival teams will want an unpopular cost savings project like this to fail so they can have more headcount and budget.

xkcd-sucks 7y ago

Don't we always read articles about how Amazon is a rational, data-driven entity? Stuff like this makes it seem like Amazon is a normal big retail company like Walmart, and should be valued accordingly.

asdff 7y ago
It's valued as walmart+aws.