It's because Western governments do a much better job of legitimizing their corruption or just doing it "transparently" (which makes it okay, you see?).
Best example is registered lobbying. If you have the money, you absolutely can brazenly bribe politicians and not only is it okay, in the United States its been backed by the highest courts as a form of "expression".
Bribing is okay in the West because its not bribing, its legitimized entirely with weasel words like "lobbying" or "fundraising". As long as you're "transparent" about it then its fine.
Relative poverty and enforcement: if a cop accepts a bribe they can lose their job. It’s not worth accepting £20 (or even £2000) bribe and forfeit larger future earnings.
So when bribes do happen it’s for much greater amounts (or nebulous, hard-to-trace things like favours), which rules out bribes for minor infractions.
Do these things actually work? I've seen way too many gurus on twitter claiming to make 10K+ MRR every month. And then they quietly start applying for jobs. or selling courses instead of cashing in.
From the amazon I know, people only care about a. not getting fired and b. promotions. For devs, the matrix looks like this:
1. Shipping: deliver tickets or be pipped.
2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed is a sign of bad quality. L7 and above use this metric to Pip folks.
3. Docs: write docs, get them reviewed to show you're high level.
Without AI, an employee is worse off in all of the above compared to folks who will cheat to get ahead.
I can't see how "requesting" folks for forego their own self-preservation will work. especially when you've spent years pitting people against each other.
> 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed
I'm very far away from liking Amazon's engineering culture and general work culture, but having PRs with countless of discussions and feedback on it does signal that you've done a lot of work without collaborating with others before doing the work. Generally in teams that work well together and build great software, the PRs tend to have very little on them, as most of the issues were resolved while designing together with others.
If the review tooling is any good, getting the code somewhere it can see it is a convenient way for people to give and receive feedback. As the saying goes, the system is what it does!
(And/but yes/no, I have never worked at NAGFAM...)
Eh I feel like there are some features where you just have to get in the weeds to even design it and the code review itself is part of the process of designing/figuring out the edge cases.
> Eh I feel like there are some features where you just have to get in the weeds to even design it and the code review
I agree, but those are separate tasks completely (in my view) compared to "Someone writes code that goes into production", usually called "spikes" or something else to differentiate them from "normal" tasks. They're quite literally just about exploration and figuring out the design, before the "real" work starts.
> Half will come 20 years after their first qualifying Olympic appearance or at age 45, whichever comes later. Another $100,000 will be in the form of a guaranteed benefit for their families after they pass away.
The terms are atrocious. imo dude will move money into a his own charity which will hold onto it since no athlete qualify for the next 20 years. After a few years, he will quietly cancel the grant and use it elsewhere.
It's been a part-time project since January 2023. I left my part-time job in July and started on this full-time in August after some vacation. Here's a recent blog post about going full-time: https://blog.gametje.com/posts/2025-09-16/
Would love to connect and trade some ideas. You can find my contact details at the bottom of the blog.
I really liked the concept of games like cards against humanity, quiplash, whose line is it anyway etc. However, there was no virtual way to play it with a group of friends. Quiplash required steam setup (which was not possible on my corporate mac). So i built this as an alternate to build upon the formula.
what's the whole mechanism keeping things functioning?