I like to think that I would. Primarily because I tend to seek to spend and invest money in a way that does not require me to make compromises in terms of humanity.
Granted, I've never invested money in anything of Amazon's level, so I cannot know -- all I know is what I hope I'd do.
Yes, this is a classic example of a skew risk. Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff.
And of course this will never, ever come up in your case studies as a recurring risk, because you're encouraged to read everything as a nice little story in business school. The one or two cases where it does happen will just be chalked up to some admonition about hiring better staff or some other BS.
"Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff."
Are you implying that Bezos and Amazon's investors are just dumb and don't think about the long term implications of their hiring practices?
You can always short Amazon's stock if you're that confident.
Maybe they did think about it all, and reached the conclusion that this culture and hiring practices will have a better return on the long term.
It is far too easy to say what other people should do with their money...
Yep, and that should be minimum wage, not "good working conditions for highly-paid white collar workers". [Edit: sorry if the tone sounds bad, no intend to offend]
Disclaimer: I'm a highly-paid white collar worker.
There's enough competition in the tech industry that this isn't a problem, let the market regulate itself in this case, it's working. I wouldn't work at Amazon under those conditions, but if some people would, let them.
That's a bit glib considering you also need to deal with funding, investor relations, market fit, and all kinds of other issues that have a lot more impact on longevity than developer salary.
It also ignores the fact that markets are structured to reward cheap and greedy behaviour and C-suite narcissism, and to punish - or at least get in the way of - bottom-up worker democracy and other more fluid and less myth-of-the-holy-CEO management structures.
As for Amazon - the company can clearly afford to treat its workers better. The actual effect on profitability is likely to be positive, not negative, because better people will stay for longer, less churn means more stability and less random technical debt for new hires, and better publicity makes it easier to keep customers than lose them.
Bezos seems to think the tradeoffs are fine as they are. I think he's wrong about that. Amazon's model is quite brittle, and it's open to any number of competitive attacks. And Bezos has made some very poor decisions (phone, etc.)
Amazon will be fine in the short to medium term, but I'll be surprised if its business model isn't seriously disrupted by competition within less than a decade.
IMO treating workers better would make the company more creative and resilient, not less - and probably more profitable too.
