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I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of ge

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were being calculated correctly. They weren't. We eventually figured out something was wrong and went through a very annoying process of learning about royalties and how they interplay with prices, discounts, and other factors and then set things right. Still, if I were paid by Amazon royalties in any capacity I would carefully double check their math and read the fine print. Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running. There's also high turnover, so it's very easy to be the person on your team with the longest tenure and also be mostly in the dark about how your services should and do work. As I say, maybe it's greed, but I would never rule out the people responsible just not understanding (or doing) what they should be doing.

lotophage 5y ago
The nature of these kinds of errors is that when the error favors Amazon (or whatever company), it's "keep the lights on" mode. If it's the company losing money then alarm bells ring, and it's "all hands on deck" to fix the issue.
- banku_brougham 5y ago
  OP clarified the opposite here. As former amazon retail I can confirm we commonly lost money to vendors, sellers, and customers. Funny example was prime day promo fat fingered, with several expensive lenses shipped for $99.
  - bonestamp2 5y ago
    I remember that deal being shared online, and being corrected fairly quickly.
  - aloer 5y ago
    Fat fingered is one thing. The best price error I’ve seen was something else: In 2020 the German government lowered VAT in a reaction to covid from 19% to 16%. On the first day Amazon had reduced thousands of products by exactly 19% and only increased by 16% after a few hours. AFAIK they did honor every sale during that time. I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind? Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout
    - iqanq 5y ago
      >I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind? I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every country.
      - eru 5y ago
        VAT is baked into retail prices in Germany. And retail prices are typically either something round or end in .99 or so; ie not arbitrary. So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.
        iqanq 5y ago
        I know how VAT works. If the government changes the VAT overnight then prices won't round to .99 until merchants (or Amazon themselves) change the base price again. I don't see the issue.
        germanier 5y ago
        Usually in B2C prices are quoted and agreed upon as gross price (including tax). If the tax rate is lowered, this then raises the base price.
        eru 5y ago
        I mentioned this, because American retail prices as quoted typically don't include their equivalent of VAT.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors. I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors, and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of their customer obsession to their vendors. But yes, I expect if Amazon accidentally sold me an item for 1% of its actual value due to a typo they will honor it. I expect if they send me the wrong item they'll make it right. As a consumer, I'm not worried about them fixing any errors in their favor and ignoring any errors in my favor. I just don't expect them to treat their vendors the same way.
    - ldng 5y ago
      Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        Oh, I expect them to obey laws. And I certainly don't automatically believe that they are screwing over vendors in the same way I'll automatically believe claims of them going out of their way for customers. I was mostly pointing out that how they treat customers is not necessarily related to how they treat vendors.
- rsanek 5y ago
  Honestly, even that hasn't been my experience. I've seen multiple situations where there are known, significant under-billings but resourcing a project to clean that up somehow never materializes. Intuitively it doesn't make sense.
duped 5y ago
Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test? Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service without knowing if the calculations were correct!
- MetallicCloud 5y ago
  At faang companies, there's never a spec document.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    In FAANG, if people had to write accurate spec in addition to all of the other steps of the process to launch something at a big corp, nothing would ever get done.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  One problem with high turnover is that the people who have developed an understanding for how the systems should work, and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if you're lucky you know the people who knew them. A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties. I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.
- rtpg 5y ago
HWR_14 5y ago
Setting up teams to fail to calculate royalties correctly could be deliberate. I'm not saying you intentionally set out to defraud anyone, but supplying technically correct information that could be misinterpreted may have been a way for Amazon management to engineer the errors they want.
harry8 5y ago
It's not theft because it was "accidental" every single time in our favor is a new one. Don't think many courts would view it favorably if you don't have the extremely high priced lawyers Amazon will use to deter and defend this. You can't make mistakes like this any more than you accidentally burn one of Bezos' house to the ground "accidentally" trying to get proper restitution ringing his doorbell and it all going wrong somehow. It's just not an accident in any meaningful interpretation of that word. It's a level of incompetence that we don't accept as any kind of defense.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Actually, in the case I experienced we were overpaying publishers. The error was going against Amazon and we decided not to ask for our money back because we thought it would hurt customer trust. (This decision not to do anything about the amount we already overpaid was made above my paygrade, but that's my understanding of it).
  - harry8 5y ago
    You gave audible rights holders additional money or was it in Amazon's favor every single time in this utter debacle? I haven't yet heard of Amazon saying "we actually overpaid some audible rights holders" If you have evidence of it definitely add it to the discussion. Looks to me like that's not what has gone on.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  Amazon doesn't get sued for the instances that are not in their favor. Consequently, you never see those in the news. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al5_a6A.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al...
  - harry8 5y ago
    I don't get prosecuted when I visit someone's house and don't burn it down when I ring their bell. There is no excuse for this. None.
makeitdouble 5y ago
I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge. I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make. First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to them that it didn't warrant to be written. Welp. And a few iterations after we were still hitting blocks of "what ? didn't you know that in case of X you do Y?" due to us being outside of their field. Real world systems are hard. I'd still blame Amazon for not having caught these issues very early in the process, that's on them. But bugs and gross calculation errors are par for the course.
- radicalbyte 5y ago
  This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).
  - rob74 5y ago
    Sounds good, but I can see several obstacles to this, especially when it's not an internal tool (and most of the time it isn't, unless you're Amazon): e.g. that the people talking to the customer are not the same people developing the application (maybe the people on the customer's side are not the real domain experts either); or that the customer has a mentality of "we hired these guys to develop a shiny new system for us, but our guys are much too busy to act as counselors for them" etc.
    - radicalbyte 5y ago
      In the first case: natural selection sort of works for products. If you want to survive you need to find a way. In the second case: that is a massive smell and time to find a new job. Which from the comments regards turnover at Amazon seems to be the case :-)
cool_dude85 5y ago
Since you're so willing to share your experience, was your initial product overall saving Amazon royalties or causing them to pay out more in royalties?
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  We were overpaying royalties. Contrary to the ideas in this thread, I think most of the people working at Amazon really do believe in earning customer trust and customer obsession. I never experienced anything even remotely like someone saying "We could earn a bit more by cheating!" And if I had, I would have felt complete confidence in raising a red flag to literally anyone above me in the org chart (though, of course, I would've gone in order). Conversely, I did experience many, many genuine people expressing earnest opinions about what they thought was best for the customer. I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn that some element of the people responsible for getting this working correctly were not doing so in some way (either because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of relatively small sums of money though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tjbiddle 5y ago
"Never assume malice for that which can be better explained by incompetence"
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  I don't like this saying because it generalises too much. For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    The first two words of the rule are "never assume".
    - bitcharmer 5y ago
      Reductio ad absurdum. If you were really honest about the meaning of the quote you should say "never assume malice" because that's the actual statement here.
      - doctor_eval 5y ago
        Not at all. If you have two equally likely possibilities - malice and incompetence - you should assume incompetence. I have another saying though: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    "Attempting to invalidate random quotes you read on the internet by taking them to logical extremes is kind of missing the point." - Albert Einstein
  - alexcosan 5y ago
    I see this more as "do not assume until there's evidence of malice". Not that you should not look for evidence - basically, innocent until proven guilty. There's a tendency to judge every ignorant act as malice when, a lot of times, it's just that - ignorance/incompetence. Not talking specifically about this case, although it may apply, we just read a twitter thread.
bawolff 5y ago
As they say, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
- netcan 5y ago
  This is an important cliche to keep in mind, but the problem is that "games" play out. Incompetence can become willful or even strategic. Even if it doesn't start or develop as a mustache twirling plan, a year later someone might look at it and say "looks like it makes money, why fix it."
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  I'll just copy my comment from another leaf of this thread: I don't like this saying because it generalises too much. For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
  - koide 5y ago
    You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't mean to never investigate, but to never start with the assumption that it is malice. You can complement it with the famous "trust, but verify" quote. Or with "giving the benefit of the doubt".
    - bitcharmer 5y ago
      Nope, the quote is quite limited in terms of conveying the idea. It never says anything about verification or trust. It basically says: "never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place". That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        > never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place". Reading the quote literally i disagree. There is miles of difference between "adequately explained" and "possible" > That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age. I would actually argue the other way is naive. Assuming that all bad things that happen in the world are because of an evil person is what happens in movies and fairly tales. The real world is almost never that black and white.
Abodono 5y ago
> Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running I worked for Amazon as well, and I'd say it is greed, not in that the behavior was purposely designed to be malicious, but in the way they don't properly fund developers to work through their tech depts, and spend proper time and effort to make sure all the systems work, have been thoroughly tested, have lots of test coverage, that the teams manages to keep subject matter expert around, etc. Amazon doesn't because it's too expansive to have dev resources doing all that, so most projects get released using the bare minimum, and get maintained using the bare minimum.
- a2800276 5y ago
  I'm always amazed that people can't see this as greed. If the CEO of a medical equipment company said: "screw all these expensive software engineers, physicists and testers, I have a 14 year old niece who can code up our radiation therapy machine for nickels" no one would be blaming incompetence of devs. I don't see how all the lack of solid requirements, software development process, testing and means of recourse are any different, apart from the potential consequences being non fatal, obviously.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I just meant to differentiate it from people at Amazon going "Let's cheat the publishers out of their royalty!" Of course that might be what happened, but it would surprise me. If you want to think of not hiring enough people to do the work that's required as greedy - then I think it's fair to call greed as the source of the problem. Another element of this that cuts against "greed" as the motivator in my mind is that it isn't like anyone who would implement the details here would give a hoot if Amazon went plus or minus ten million dollars (or whatever the amount is). If you are the leaf node in the org chart making the exchange of money happen then you will get paid the same regardless of what happens. There may be some big boss guy somewhere who cares about that number, but he doesn't have the ability to actually do the cheating, he'd have to order someone else to do it. Again, maybe that's what happened, but it just seems unlikely to me as it would be so easy for the people receiving those orders to go "Hmmm, no, I don't think so."
krageon 5y ago
You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice. While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Agreed, feels like directed incompetence. If the errors were in the other direction, I wonder how quickly Amazon would direct focus to it.
  - LeFantome 5y ago
    Without data, my default assumption is that there are lots of cases where things are being done wrong that are not in Amazon’s favour. The “directed incompetence” theory assumes that clueless people are being intentionally allowed to be clueless with the full knowledge of somebody less clueless. I find it easier to believe, without evidence, that the cluelessness exists at all levels.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      I don't totally disagree, but people respond to incentives, and are thus going to be that much more motivated, at all levels, to notice, escalate, and solve a big that impacts the bottom line. It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it, as they say.
- plicense 5y ago
  I guess on the flip side, I was receiving 100$ per month in AWS credits for about 2 years for an Alexa skill I had disabled. This was also incompetence in this case.
  - swyx 5y ago
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Too bad these kind of „mistakes“ never happen in favor of the customer… always in favor of Amazon.
- drdrey 5y ago
  Not what OP is saying here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369741
mabbo 5y ago
But this goes to the heart of problem at Amazon: "Customer Obsession". Which really means "we only care about people paying us money". If Amazon cared about creators, they would have built an automated system that monitors royalties and ensures that no matter what changes occur, creators are being paid fairly, correctly. They'd have a small product manager team who are experts in royalties because it's their job to be. But that doesn't benefit a customer, so none of that exists. Because only people paying Amazon money are worthy of such attention.
ryukoposting 5y ago
One of the things I will never understand is software companies' insistence at throwing engineers at any and all problems, and leaving them to their own devices. For example: accounting problems, for which society has accountants.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  That's where I assume the greed comes in. They threw software people at an accounting problem, and when the numbers were wrong in their favor, they looked the other way.
SamBam 5y ago
I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting. That's not just a couple engineers confused about the specs. > Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated I really don't see how this is a valid excuse. "How the royalties should be calculated" is a lawyer's domain, an engineer should never have had anything to do with the decision, and any engineer who was tasked with coding the calculation without proper guidance should have pushed back.
- Arrath 5y ago
  >I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting. Sounds like easy profit from a captive audience.
davidgerard 5y ago
Treating the staff responsible with the sort of contemptuous malice you describe does not somehow absolve the company of culpability. Amazon set up these conditions and is happy for them to continue.
drakonka 5y ago
I self-publish on Amazon and there are so many recurring instances of royalties not being properly recorded and paid out, mostly in Kindle Unlimited. Page reads don't get recorded due to some apparent incident (sometimes admitted by Amazon, other times completely ignored despite it being obvious that something is off in reporting on a large scale), and when the problem is fixed and we start seeing proper reads again we just have to accept that we're collectively out of luck and will not be compensated for the missing hours/days of page reads. Trying to contact Amazon about this has been completely useless. This is one of the reasons for the uptick of new and experienced authors ditching (or making plans to ditch) Amazon KU exclusivity and going wide.
advael 5y ago
1. I doubt errors of this magnitude are tolerated for long when the financial beneficiary of the error is not Amazon, and if I'm correct in this, a systematic selection pressure of this kind is indistinguishable from greed in this context 2. I am no less uncomfortable with monopolistic publishers who exploit creators out of incompetence after becoming the only game in town and making any ability to walk away from negotiations with them a Hobson's choice at best than I am with ones where all of that is true except the harm is due to greed/malice instead 3. Corporations aren't people and even if you believe (as I don't) that they can meaningfully have intentions in the same sense that people do, those intentions do not matter in a context where the behavior is on the scale of an organization, and so separating incompetence from malice is a distraction in the first place
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
Hanlon's razor states ... "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

lotophage 5y ago

The nature of these kinds of errors is that when the error favors Amazon (or whatever company), it's "keep the lights on" mode. If it's the company losing money then alarm bells ring, and it's "all hands on deck" to fix the issue.

banku_brougham 5y ago
OP clarified the opposite here. As former amazon retail I can confirm we commonly lost money to vendors, sellers, and customers. Funny example was prime day promo fat fingered, with several expensive lenses shipped for $99.
- bonestamp2 5y ago
  I remember that deal being shared online, and being corrected fairly quickly.
- aloer 5y ago
  Fat fingered is one thing. The best price error I’ve seen was something else: In 2020 the German government lowered VAT in a reaction to covid from 19% to 16%. On the first day Amazon had reduced thousands of products by exactly 19% and only increased by 16% after a few hours. AFAIK they did honor every sale during that time. I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind? Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout
  - iqanq 5y ago
    >I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind? I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every country.
    - eru 5y ago
      VAT is baked into retail prices in Germany. And retail prices are typically either something round or end in .99 or so; ie not arbitrary. So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.
      - iqanq 5y ago
        I know how VAT works. If the government changes the VAT overnight then prices won't round to .99 until merchants (or Amazon themselves) change the base price again. I don't see the issue.
        germanier 5y ago
        Usually in B2C prices are quoted and agreed upon as gross price (including tax). If the tax rate is lowered, this then raises the base price.
        eru 5y ago
        I mentioned this, because American retail prices as quoted typically don't include their equivalent of VAT.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors. I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors, and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of their customer obsession to their vendors. But yes, I expect if Amazon accidentally sold me an item for 1% of its actual value due to a typo they will honor it. I expect if they send me the wrong item they'll make it right. As a consumer, I'm not worried about them fixing any errors in their favor and ignoring any errors in my favor. I just don't expect them to treat their vendors the same way.
  - ldng 5y ago
    Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Oh, I expect them to obey laws. And I certainly don't automatically believe that they are screwing over vendors in the same way I'll automatically believe claims of them going out of their way for customers. I was mostly pointing out that how they treat customers is not necessarily related to how they treat vendors.
rsanek 5y ago
Honestly, even that hasn't been my experience. I've seen multiple situations where there are known, significant under-billings but resourcing a project to clean that up somehow never materializes. Intuitively it doesn't make sense.

duped 5y ago

Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test? Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service without knowing if the calculations were correct!

MetallicCloud 5y ago
At faang companies, there's never a spec document.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  In FAANG, if people had to write accurate spec in addition to all of the other steps of the process to launch something at a big corp, nothing would ever get done.
ALittleLight 5y ago
One problem with high turnover is that the people who have developed an understanding for how the systems should work, and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if you're lucky you know the people who knew them. A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties. I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.
rtpg 5y ago

HWR_14 5y ago

Setting up teams to fail to calculate royalties correctly could be deliberate. I'm not saying you intentionally set out to defraud anyone, but supplying technically correct information that could be misinterpreted may have been a way for Amazon management to engineer the errors they want.

harry8 5y ago

It's not theft because it was "accidental" every single time in our favor is a new one. Don't think many courts would view it favorably if you don't have the extremely high priced lawyers Amazon will use to deter and defend this. You can't make mistakes like this any more than you accidentally burn one of Bezos' house to the ground "accidentally" trying to get proper restitution ringing his doorbell and it all going wrong somehow. It's just not an accident in any meaningful interpretation of that word. It's a level of incompetence that we don't accept as any kind of defense.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Actually, in the case I experienced we were overpaying publishers. The error was going against Amazon and we decided not to ask for our money back because we thought it would hurt customer trust. (This decision not to do anything about the amount we already overpaid was made above my paygrade, but that's my understanding of it).
- harry8 5y ago
  You gave audible rights holders additional money or was it in Amazon's favor every single time in this utter debacle? I haven't yet heard of Amazon saying "we actually overpaid some audible rights holders" If you have evidence of it definitely add it to the discussion. Looks to me like that's not what has gone on.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
Amazon doesn't get sued for the instances that are not in their favor. Consequently, you never see those in the news. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al5_a6A.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al...
- harry8 5y ago
  I don't get prosecuted when I visit someone's house and don't burn it down when I ring their bell. There is no excuse for this. None.

makeitdouble 5y ago

I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge. I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make. First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to them that it didn't warrant to be written. Welp. And a few iterations after we were still hitting blocks of "what ? didn't you know that in case of X you do Y?" due to us being outside of their field. Real world systems are hard. I'd still blame Amazon for not having caught these issues very early in the process, that's on them. But bugs and gross calculation errors are par for the course.

radicalbyte 5y ago
This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).
- rob74 5y ago
  Sounds good, but I can see several obstacles to this, especially when it's not an internal tool (and most of the time it isn't, unless you're Amazon): e.g. that the people talking to the customer are not the same people developing the application (maybe the people on the customer's side are not the real domain experts either); or that the customer has a mentality of "we hired these guys to develop a shiny new system for us, but our guys are much too busy to act as counselors for them" etc.
  - radicalbyte 5y ago
    In the first case: natural selection sort of works for products. If you want to survive you need to find a way. In the second case: that is a massive smell and time to find a new job. Which from the comments regards turnover at Amazon seems to be the case :-)

cool_dude85 5y ago

Since you're so willing to share your experience, was your initial product overall saving Amazon royalties or causing them to pay out more in royalties?

ALittleLight 5y ago
We were overpaying royalties. Contrary to the ideas in this thread, I think most of the people working at Amazon really do believe in earning customer trust and customer obsession. I never experienced anything even remotely like someone saying "We could earn a bit more by cheating!" And if I had, I would have felt complete confidence in raising a red flag to literally anyone above me in the org chart (though, of course, I would've gone in order). Conversely, I did experience many, many genuine people expressing earnest opinions about what they thought was best for the customer. I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn that some element of the people responsible for getting this working correctly were not doing so in some way (either because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of relatively small sums of money though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tjbiddle 5y ago

"Never assume malice for that which can be better explained by incompetence"

bitcharmer 5y ago
I don't like this saying because it generalises too much. For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
- throwanem 5y ago
  The first two words of the rule are "never assume".
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    Reductio ad absurdum. If you were really honest about the meaning of the quote you should say "never assume malice" because that's the actual statement here.
    - doctor_eval 5y ago
      Not at all. If you have two equally likely possibilities - malice and incompetence - you should assume incompetence. I have another saying though: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  "Attempting to invalidate random quotes you read on the internet by taking them to logical extremes is kind of missing the point." - Albert Einstein
- alexcosan 5y ago
  I see this more as "do not assume until there's evidence of malice". Not that you should not look for evidence - basically, innocent until proven guilty. There's a tendency to judge every ignorant act as malice when, a lot of times, it's just that - ignorance/incompetence. Not talking specifically about this case, although it may apply, we just read a twitter thread.

bawolff 5y ago

As they say, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

netcan 5y ago
This is an important cliche to keep in mind, but the problem is that "games" play out. Incompetence can become willful or even strategic. Even if it doesn't start or develop as a mustache twirling plan, a year later someone might look at it and say "looks like it makes money, why fix it."
bitcharmer 5y ago
I'll just copy my comment from another leaf of this thread: I don't like this saying because it generalises too much. For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
- koide 5y ago
  You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't mean to never investigate, but to never start with the assumption that it is malice. You can complement it with the famous "trust, but verify" quote. Or with "giving the benefit of the doubt".
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    Nope, the quote is quite limited in terms of conveying the idea. It never says anything about verification or trust. It basically says: "never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place". That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      > never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place". Reading the quote literally i disagree. There is miles of difference between "adequately explained" and "possible" > That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age. I would actually argue the other way is naive. Assuming that all bad things that happen in the world are because of an evil person is what happens in movies and fairly tales. The real world is almost never that black and white.

Abodono 5y ago

> Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running I worked for Amazon as well, and I'd say it is greed, not in that the behavior was purposely designed to be malicious, but in the way they don't properly fund developers to work through their tech depts, and spend proper time and effort to make sure all the systems work, have been thoroughly tested, have lots of test coverage, that the teams manages to keep subject matter expert around, etc. Amazon doesn't because it's too expansive to have dev resources doing all that, so most projects get released using the bare minimum, and get maintained using the bare minimum.

a2800276 5y ago
I'm always amazed that people can't see this as greed. If the CEO of a medical equipment company said: "screw all these expensive software engineers, physicists and testers, I have a 14 year old niece who can code up our radiation therapy machine for nickels" no one would be blaming incompetence of devs. I don't see how all the lack of solid requirements, software development process, testing and means of recourse are any different, apart from the potential consequences being non fatal, obviously.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I just meant to differentiate it from people at Amazon going "Let's cheat the publishers out of their royalty!" Of course that might be what happened, but it would surprise me. If you want to think of not hiring enough people to do the work that's required as greedy - then I think it's fair to call greed as the source of the problem. Another element of this that cuts against "greed" as the motivator in my mind is that it isn't like anyone who would implement the details here would give a hoot if Amazon went plus or minus ten million dollars (or whatever the amount is). If you are the leaf node in the org chart making the exchange of money happen then you will get paid the same regardless of what happens. There may be some big boss guy somewhere who cares about that number, but he doesn't have the ability to actually do the cheating, he'd have to order someone else to do it. Again, maybe that's what happened, but it just seems unlikely to me as it would be so easy for the people receiving those orders to go "Hmmm, no, I don't think so."

krageon 5y ago

You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice. While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.

darkerside 5y ago
Agreed, feels like directed incompetence. If the errors were in the other direction, I wonder how quickly Amazon would direct focus to it.
- LeFantome 5y ago
  Without data, my default assumption is that there are lots of cases where things are being done wrong that are not in Amazon’s favour. The “directed incompetence” theory assumes that clueless people are being intentionally allowed to be clueless with the full knowledge of somebody less clueless. I find it easier to believe, without evidence, that the cluelessness exists at all levels.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I don't totally disagree, but people respond to incentives, and are thus going to be that much more motivated, at all levels, to notice, escalate, and solve a big that impacts the bottom line. It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it, as they say.
plicense 5y ago
I guess on the flip side, I was receiving 100$ per month in AWS credits for about 2 years for an Alexa skill I had disabled. This was also incompetence in this case.
- swyx 5y ago

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Too bad these kind of „mistakes“ never happen in favor of the customer… always in favor of Amazon.

drdrey 5y ago
Not what OP is saying here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369741

mabbo 5y ago

But this goes to the heart of problem at Amazon: "Customer Obsession". Which really means "we only care about people paying us money". If Amazon cared about creators, they would have built an automated system that monitors royalties and ensures that no matter what changes occur, creators are being paid fairly, correctly. They'd have a small product manager team who are experts in royalties because it's their job to be. But that doesn't benefit a customer, so none of that exists. Because only people paying Amazon money are worthy of such attention.

ryukoposting 5y ago

One of the things I will never understand is software companies' insistence at throwing engineers at any and all problems, and leaving them to their own devices. For example: accounting problems, for which society has accountants.

vlunkr 5y ago
That's where I assume the greed comes in. They threw software people at an accounting problem, and when the numbers were wrong in their favor, they looked the other way.

SamBam 5y ago

I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting. That's not just a couple engineers confused about the specs. > Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated I really don't see how this is a valid excuse. "How the royalties should be calculated" is a lawyer's domain, an engineer should never have had anything to do with the decision, and any engineer who was tasked with coding the calculation without proper guidance should have pushed back.

Arrath 5y ago
>I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting. Sounds like easy profit from a captive audience.

davidgerard 5y ago

Treating the staff responsible with the sort of contemptuous malice you describe does not somehow absolve the company of culpability. Amazon set up these conditions and is happy for them to continue.

drakonka 5y ago

I self-publish on Amazon and there are so many recurring instances of royalties not being properly recorded and paid out, mostly in Kindle Unlimited. Page reads don't get recorded due to some apparent incident (sometimes admitted by Amazon, other times completely ignored despite it being obvious that something is off in reporting on a large scale), and when the problem is fixed and we start seeing proper reads again we just have to accept that we're collectively out of luck and will not be compensated for the missing hours/days of page reads. Trying to contact Amazon about this has been completely useless. This is one of the reasons for the uptick of new and experienced authors ditching (or making plans to ditch) Amazon KU exclusivity and going wide.

advael 5y ago

1. I doubt errors of this magnitude are tolerated for long when the financial beneficiary of the error is not Amazon, and if I'm correct in this, a systematic selection pressure of this kind is indistinguishable from greed in this context 2. I am no less uncomfortable with monopolistic publishers who exploit creators out of incompetence after becoming the only game in town and making any ability to walk away from negotiations with them a Hobson's choice at best than I am with ones where all of that is true except the harm is due to greed/malice instead 3. Corporations aren't people and even if you believe (as I don't) that they can meaningfully have intentions in the same sense that people do, those intentions do not matter in a context where the behavior is on the scale of an organization, and so separating incompetence from malice is a distraction in the first place

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

Hanlon's razor states ... "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."