Consider this metaphor: You go on vacation. You stay at a hotel, not a “B&B.” Your vacation, your money, so you find a place close to the things you want to se

Consider this metaphor: You go on vacation. You stay at a hotel, not a “B&B.” Your vacation, your money, so you find a place close to the things you want to see, with plenty of free amenities like free continental breakfast and free WiFi. It’s somewhat reasonably priced, too. Now you go on a business trip financed by your employer, who books you into a “business class” hotel. It’s also close to things you want to see, and it has a few nicer finishes than your vacation hotel. But the service is worse! You have to order WiFi, and they have some annoying provider that puts roadblocks between you and their slow WiFi. There’s free coffee in the room, but if you want breakfast, you pay nosebleed prices for room service or you have to line up for a table in their brunch restaurant. And their “rack rate” for rooms is double what you paid on vacation! How could your employer be so stupid as to book you into this expensive hotel and force you to suffer worse service? Makes no sense. Ok, what’s the connection? ——— Well, WHY does your employer prefer the expensive place with bad service? The answer is that it provides good service for your employer, but not for you. YOU AREN’T THEIR CUSTOMER. The business-class hotel integrates with your employer’s billing and expense systems. Your company can easily book dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of rooms when they’re putting on a conference. They have incentive pricing that appeals to companies, not people. They have GREAT customer service when you’re calling about a billing code, but not when you’re calling about an extra pot of hot water for your tea. We don’t see that as guests of the hotel. So if we were to discover that the big hotel chain has hundreds or even thousands of programmers, we’d ask, “What do they need so many engineers for? All they have is a crappy web site that can take a reservation, in a crappy way.” We don’t see the people putting in the work to integrate with systems we can’t see, serving the needs of people and companies we don’t even know exist. I betcha it’s the same at Amazon. We can’t judge the complexity of their operations looking at the page they serve us when we buy a book online. We have no idea what’s involved integrating with the corporations that provide them with music, TV shows, and movies to stream. We have no idea how complicated it is to integrate with all the logistics systems around shipping products around the world, in real time. There’s a massive machine we can’t see. That’s what all those programmers are building and maintaining.