What you and lots of other people (including me, until very recently) tend to miss is that high standards are one thing. High standards at scale are another.
What precedent do we have for standards at such a large scale? How many examples of organizations that have achieved that size do we even have and what do standards across those orgs look like?
This applies to software quality at unprecedented scale as well.
Is stuff like "your workers shouldn't collapse of exhaustion because you don't want to air condition your warehouses" something so difficult to achieve at scale? Is it even a particularly high standard?
Maybe before talking about high standards, we should start with low standards.
People on HN like to talk trash about Amazon and that's fine. All that I ask is that you don't do an AMZN_warehouse_worker == AMZN_SDE / AMZN_SE kind of argument. Warehouse work is boring, it's low paid, at the end of the day you're tired and you're dirty, and you didn't make a lot. During the winter it's cold and during the summer it's going to be hot - logistics companies heat warehouses just enough to keep product from freezing. The closest thing to a computer is a hand-held wireless barcode scanner. Them's the breaks of being a box b for any large logistics / supply chain company. UPS, FedEX, DHL, or UP, none of them are tech companies so we don't talk about them but the reality is supply chain is very price sensitive, the industry is low margin and competitive, it's not romantic, and it's classist. No one turns down Stanford to work the graveyard shift unloading tires. The people there will be randomly drug tested and they will be checked on occasion when they're leaving. Argue there is honor to any job done well and I'll agree with you but stop with this Amazon Logistics goes out of it's way to be cruel narrative.
While I agree with your underlying point, Amazon does deserve special attention because it tries to win hearts and minds, in fact it's the backbone of their branding operation. This letter is a perfect example.
FedEx does not have the hearts and minds of customers, everybody expects their employees to piss in bottles and would switch to the first lower cost provider available. Amazon is turning into a larger and much more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass and is allowed to spout this bullshit with a straight face about how 500.000 bottle-wielding Amazonians are making the world a better place.
> Amazon is turning into a larger and more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass
They're not getting a free pass. I've been reading about Amazon abuse stories non-stop for ten years in the mainstream media, as it pertains to their treatment of labor in logistics.
We're discussing this right now on HN, and every big story about this sort of thing re Amazon shows up on HN, precisely because they have not been getting a free pass. It's closer to universally understood that Amazon doesn't take good care of its logistics workers (and it may be wider than that based on some past stories). Every time something happens in that segment of Amazon's business, it makes the NY Times and the frontpage of all US media (just as the bottle pissing did, or the building air conditioning story did before that, or the employee cancer story).
I don't believe that high standards inhere in small scale. I have also not read or heard anyone articulate a reasonable explanation for why that is necessarily the case. Figuring out how to operate a business with high standards at scale is arguably the primary job of anyone who operates any business at scale.
It's easy to create a process that hits 99.99% yield when the absolute value of complex goods being produced is 10 items.
Can you maintain 99.99% yield when producing 100,000,000 of those items? Almost certainly not. Does hitting 80% yield mean you have lowered your standards when every other manufacturer of similar scale can only hit 60%? No it doesn't. It means you have maintained high standards, it's just the context around you has changed and so the measurement of high standards has changed along with it (as it should).
I couldn't disagree more. Standards are not relative. What you're describing in your example is an instance of lowering a standard. The standard does not change because one's tolerance for meeting it is lowered. You're simply accepting that you've failed to meet the standard. You can say whatever you like to excuse it, but it's an excuse nonetheless.
That looks like a whole load of horseshit to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Reaping record-breaking profits while workers are mistreated and paid a pittance is not a "problem of scale" or whatever it is.
It does. The global amazon experience is imperfect, but amazing compared to what we had before it, unmached by competition and life changing enough that we use it for everything.
Or if you're in Austria, you are conditioned to accept that delivery dates offered are 1-2 days off. The warning about "purchase within the next xx hours to receive it in 2 days" is absolute garbage. And the fact that I can select whether it's delivered on Saturday is bullshit, because no courier service here ever delivers anything on Saturday. Yet years later, my Prime packages are still being offered to be delivered on Saturday. I guess I shouldn't complain though, their estimated delivery times are still on par with every other eShop.
