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Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#221
post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

A little behind the scenes info, I work for a pretty good sized seller on Amazon. If a customer who purchased an item reports it as counterfeit

* All items we sell of that brand are taken down

* We are required to email a copy of an invoice of between us and that vendor. I think there is a date requirement here also

* We are not permitted to ship comingled FBA shipments for that brand until resolved

If the manufacturer is participating in the counterfeit program, they can whitelist sellers who are permitted to sell their goods and avoid the above.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#222
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mystified by this personally. I frequently purchase from Amazon, and haven't(to my knowledge) received counterfeit goods. Generally I stick to "fufilled by Amazon" or otherwise first-party sellers, so that may have something to do with it. Maybe I'm not purchasing niche enough products to run into this issue.

Try searching for UnderArmour clothing or other popular clothing. Generally you will find items priced 30% to 50% less than elsewhere.

So the risk of counterfeit is priced in? Market forces at work!

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#223
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. ...You just described the legislative branch. Direct democracy has its own problems; even if you scale for proportions of people, the people leading their everyday lives do not have the time to inform themselves en masse of particulars about issues, and…

*voila. Unless you really meant "raped", but for some reason I feel like this isn't it :^)

Touché. Though at least I was closer than he was :)

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Amazon for almost five years. Like every leadership principle, this one was easily perverted. Many people I worked with took this to heart, and among peers there was often an honorable sense of "OK, I will disagree and commit on this one". But I also spent a few years in an org where I don't think I ever saw someone more senior disagree and commit to the opinion of someone more junior. At each level of th…

> You wouldn't believe the range of things I saw justified as "customer obsession". I would like to hear some of them if you have the time and inclination.

Sure. Realizing as I go through them that all of these were from my peers in middle management; ICs tended to be much more genuine in their communication. Such is the nature of politics.

Things justified based on "customer obsession":

-Forced weekends and extra on-call assignments. This was bad managers making up for their poor planning and trying to use company values as a stick for their employees.

-Delaying the launch of a feature beta testers were raving about for six months to meet an operational metric that would clearly be made irrelevant by the launch, but for which the complainant had a goal in his commitments.

-So many similar things related to goals that someone needed to hit. Managers would say to other managers, in only slightly more words, "you are not helping my team, therefore you are not customer-obsessed". There was no consideration given as to what other impacts might fall out of the demanded action and how those might affect the customer.

-One that happened to me: I disagreed with the (clearly faulty) analysis of a dataset made by a higher-up manager. He was about to make a decision with his analysis that was going to affect several engineer-years worth of commitments, so I did a reply-all to his analysis respectfully explaining his mistake. He emailed my boss's boss (his peer) to complain that I lacked customer obsessions and to question whether I was a good fit for the team.

Essentially you can pervert anything to be about customer obsession (or any company value) if you want to. There's a fantastic book called Moral Mazes that does an excellent job of illustrating and explaining this phenomenon. It puts all of my examples above to shame.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#225
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole time I thought it meant how long your money has going to last.

Are you thinking of the term "burn rate", perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_rate

I think so it was from the show Silicon Valley. I know way to base your facts on a show. But I did hear that the show had at least one real engineer advisor.

Even so with regard to work vs. time what determines the time? Launch date?

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#226
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that refusing to leave someone else's private property makes the use of force inevitable. I know Americans are a bit high-strung when it comes to "property rights", but here's one example: It may be your property all you want but you can't call the police to kick your tenants out because you decided you don't want them there any longer. IF there has been a contract violation, you can go to court and eventuall…

Tenancy has strong and unique protections. If you are a tenant you can call the police to kick out your landlord if they are not within their access rights. Someone has the exclusive right to use the space, but it is not the landlord. I think both of us have a very strong sense of property rights, only we disagree who to ascribe them to. I think it belongs to the airline, so if the man wants to create a dispute with…

Sure, tenancy is special. But so is common carriage: "A common carrier holds itself out to provide service to the general public without discrimination (to meet the needs of the regulator's quasi judicial role of impartiality toward the public's interest) for the "public convenience and necessity". A common carrier must further demonstrate to the regulator that it is "fit, willing, and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority."

We are not talking about a random piece of property being trespassed upon here. We are talking specifically about a situation where the airline is licensed to take money from the public in exchange for letting people put their "arses" in those seats.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it used to be a no-brainer to buy things on Amazon, one click and done. Now I have to very carefully vet the listing before buying, inspect the product once received etc. Certain categories of items I would now never buy from Amazon in its current state (vitamins, fish oil etc.) Amazon has built a great reputation and trust with their customers, and they're going to lose it the way they're going.

What you're essentially describing is the blind trust people think they can put in a brand name, applied to a store. I like and use Safeway, but I would hardly fault them if they carried something I didn't thoroughly check out if it turned out to be a shitty brand. > Now I have to very carefully vet the listing before buying, inspect the product once received etc. Did you not research products before you bought them…

> I like and use Safeway, but I would hardly fault them if they carried something I didn't thoroughly check out if it turned out to be a shitty brand.

Isn't it much easier for Safeway to answer the question, "Are we buying these earphones from Apple?" than it is for a shopper to answer, "Are these genuine Apple earphones"?

> It's not a platform's job to do your research for you

A platform can choose to do whatever job it wants. If Platform A sells significant fewer counterfeit goods than Platform B then customers will prefer Platform A.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#229
post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

The most frustrating part as a seller on Amazon is that they are taking severe action against sellers that receive complaints. I just got through a month long process of getting my account reopened after a suspension. All it took was a few complaints from a vindictive competitor.

While they are harrasing long time sellers with years of positive feedback, they allow Indian and Chinese sellers to open accounts way faster than they can be closed for selling counterfeits.

The model from the perspective of the counterfeiters is easy. Simply open an account, sell as much counterfeit goods as you can then get closed down due to complaints. Amazon then holds your money for 90 days in order to pay for any returns that may show up, but a good percentage of buyers will never know any better or won't bother to return.

At the end of the 90 days, you collect the money that is left. In the mean time, you can open several seller accounts to keep the process rolling.

If a part time Amazon seller can see exactly what is happening. There is no way that at least middle management at Amazon doesn't know exactly what is going on and that they are profiting immensely from it.

Many scam sellers are extremely obvious. Why would Amazon allow Indian sellers to list hundreds of American textbooks for sale that ship from Amazon?

The most frustrating part is to be harrassed incessantly by the half wits in their "seller quality" department when all this is going on.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#230
post #22
post #2

"A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp." Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlin…

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the…

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