It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there.

The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.

Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.

But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.

At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.

> Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.

Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.

As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.

At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.

Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now.

OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.

Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here.

Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.

And it keeps going. Manager II will tell Manager III "Here are the things my org has done!" and Manager III will tell VP "Here is what my product line has achieved!" and VP will tell CEO "Here is how profitable my business unit is!" and CEO will tell the board and the world "Behold what I have done!"

It's credit-taking all the way up.

Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea?

If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.

> ... because the company is toxic

I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon

This same process can be applied on a community/country level.

Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.

Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.

They care more about “who made it happen”.

That PM who can barely open a spreadsheet made it happen, of course.

Amazon might be unethical or immoral or unpleasant, but it is extremely successful at its founder's goal.

It has succeeded at making Bezos money.

It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them.

As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.

One can imagine AWS surviving longer than the marketplace in 10-20y

>> everyone knows who did the work.

Not the people deciding rankings and promotions.

Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.)

Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion.

And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.

Or they're the "smartest guys in the room!"

/s

>But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.

I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement.

Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.

Depending on the corporate culture: feature, not a bug.

There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.

And an interpretation more cynical than that:

The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget.

Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.

People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time

In that case, the market should take them out, right?

Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.

If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data).

If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.

A venal, decrepit empire can last for hundreds of years.

Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.

So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.

That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall?

Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...

I would think technical employees would have an analogy closer to useful things like tools, rather than aesthetic stuff like art. But I’m not sure what the analogy is getting us here, anyway.

Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.

It may still be worth hiring those people if it prevents them going to competitors. Even if you also hire a bunch of mid-range devs that cheat or get lucky. It's a classic example of uncompetitive practices being very wasteful but lucrative to the directors.

It's a bit like their abysmal process for detecting product fakes and review fakes.

How about the lack of personal ethics correlating with success in what we know to be highly unethical companies…

Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible.

I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.