> Amazon clearly does not compete by hiring the best engineers. Rather, they compete by throwing money at the problem and undercutting everyone else, getting by with mediocre engineering.

Evidence please. Amazon has a lot of freaking fantastic engineers and "throwing money at the problem" is definitely not how they solve problems.

It's a huge company and not every single engineer is excellent and there are definitely rotten bits but that's true of _every_ company that's large enough.