Just going by the standard that you set forth:

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded,

The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.

it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing

But that doesn't seem to have occurred. Until the Wall Street Journal leak, few if any people outside Amazon were aware of this program. It's not as if any of the retailers that WSJ spoke to said, "Oh yeah, we quickly grew suspicious of Big River Inc, and shut down their account after we smelled something fishy." On the contrary many of them were surprised that Amazon was accessing their seller marketplace through a shell corporation.

I didn't see any examples mentioned in the WSJ article of Amazon employees cutting corners or making simple mistakes that might have compromised operations. Instead, they seemed to be pretty careful and conscientious, making sure to not communicate with outside partners with their Amazon.com addresses, being careful to maintain their cover identities at trade conferences, only communicating with fellow Amazon executives with paper documents (and numbered paper documents, at that), etc.

I would argue that the practices used by Amazon to conceal the link between itself and Big River Inc. were at least as good as the operational security practices of the GRU agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal.

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded, it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing.

That's not the impression I got. From the article, it says that many of the retailers that the Wall Street Journal had contacted regarding Big River had no idea that the entity was affiliated with Amazon (even despite the rather-obvious-in-hindsight naming, LinkedIn references, company registration data pointing to Seattle, etc). It seems like their operational security was unusually good, good enough that no one at the other retailers bothered looking beyond the surface. Yes, eventually someone talked to the press, but even then, Amazon had a plan in place to handle the program coming to light in a public forum.

In general, it seems like Amazon did this pretty competently from start to finish, and the leaders were pretty well in control of the operation all throughout.

(with an all-in-one solution they just buy one thing and are done)

That's a very common misconception regarding all-in-one tools. In practice, all-in-one tools always need a significant degree of setup, configuration and customization before they are useful for the customer. Salesforce, for example, requires so much customization, you can make a career out of just doing Salesforce customization. Sharepoint is similar.

Thus the trade-off isn't between a narrowly focused tool that does one job extremely well versus an all-in-one tool that does a bunch of things somewhat well. The tradeoff is between a narrowly focused tool that does one job extremely well immediately, with little or no setup versus an all-in-one-tool that does many things somewhat well after extensive setup and customization, which itself might require hiring a specialized professional.

To use the Anrok example, is it possible to do VAT calculations in the existing tools that the business already has, such as ERP systems or CRM software? Yes, of course. But that software would need to be customized to handle the specific tax situation for the business, which is something that Anrok might handle out-of-the-box with little setup required.

I also have a “Done” column, which is arguably pointless as I just delete everything off the “Done” column every couple weeks,

Having a "Done" column (or an archive board) can be very useful if you want to see when was the last time you completed a recurring task. It helps prevent tasks with long recurrences (quarterly, biennially, etc) from falling through the cracks. For example: dentist appointments. They're supposed to happen once a year. And, ideally, you'd create a task to schedule the next one immediately when you get back from the previous one. But let's say that doesn't happen. You got distracted, there was some kind of scheduling issue, life got in the way. Then, months later, you wonder, "Wait, how long has it been since I've been to the dentist?" Archiving completed tasks instead of deleting them lets you answer that question immediately.

The last answer is especially gross:

He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It’s just obvious what his name is.

Can we apply the same logic to doors? "It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so..."

Or people's dress choices? "She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so..."

Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.

The second wheelbarrow example has a protagonist who knows the true value of the wheelbarrow, but still loses out:

At the town fair, a wheelbarrow is up for auction. You think the fair price of the wheelbarrow is around $120 (with some uncertainty), so you submit a bid for $108. You find out that you didn’t win—the winning bidder ends up being some schmuck who bid $180. You don’t exchange any money or wheelbarrows. When you get home, you check online out of curiosity, and indeed the item retails for $120. Your estimate was great, your bid was reasonable, and you exchanged nothing as a result, reaping a profit of zero dollars and zero cents.

But, in my example, Burry wasn't outbid by "some schmuck" who thought that Avant! was worth vastly more than it ended up being worth. Burry was able to guess not just the true value of Avant!, but also the value that other market participants placed on Avant!, enabling him to buy up shares at a discount compared to what the company ended up selling for.

The implied question in my post was, "How do you know if you're Michael Burry, or the trader selling Avant! shares for $2?"

That point is contradicted by the wheelbarrow examples in the OP, which seem to imply that either you'll be the greater fool or you'll be outbid by the greater fool. Why wasn't Burry outbid by a fool who thought that Avant! was worth $40 a share?

This is why I disagree with the OP; like you, I believe that it's possible to gain from informed trading, even in a market filled with adverse selection.

I don't think the Widgets Inc. example is a good one. Michael Lewis has a good counterpoint in The Big Short, which I will quote at length:

The alarmingly named Avant! Corporation was a good example. He [Michael Burry] had found it searching for the word "accepted" in news stories. He knew, standing at the edge of the playing field, he needed to find unorthodox ways to tilt it to his advantage, and that usually meant finding situations the world might not be fully aware of. "I wasn't looking for a news report of a scam or fraud per se," he said. "That would have been too backward-looking, and I was looking to get in front of something. I was looking for something happening in the courts that might lead to an investment thesis." A court had accepted a plea from a software company called the Avant! Corporation. Avant! had been accused of stealing from a competitor the software code that was the whole foundation of Avant!'s business. The company had $100 million cash in the bank, was still generating $100 million a year of free cash flow -- and had a market value of only $250 million! Michael Burry started digging; by the time he was done, he knew more about the Avant! Corporation than any man on earth. He was able to see that even if the executives went to jail (as they did) and the fines were paid (as they were), Avant! would be worth a lot more than the market then assumed. Most of its engineers were Chinese nationals on work visas, thus trapped -- there was no risk that anyone would quit before the lights were out. To make money on Avant!'s stock, however, he'd probably have to stomach short-term losses, as investors puked up shares in horrified response to negative publicity.

Burry bought his first shares of Avant! in June 2001 at $12 a share. Avant!'s management then appeared on the cover of Business Week, under the headline, "Does Crime Pay?" The stock plunged; Burry bought more. Avant!'s management went to jail. The stock fell some more. Mike Burry kept on buying it -- all the way down to $2 a share. He became Avant!'s single largest shareholder; he pressed management for changes. "With [the former CEO's] criminal aura no longer a part of operating management," he wrote to the new bosses, "Avant! has a chance to demonstrate its concern for shareholders." In August, in another e-mail, he wrote, "Avant! still makes me feel I'm sleeping with the village slut. No matter how well my needs are met, I doubt I'll ever brag about it. The 'creep' factor is off the charts. I half think that if I pushed Avant! too hard I'd end up being terrorized by the Chinese mafia." Four months later, Avant! got taken over for $22 a share.

Why should Michael Burry have assumed that he had more insight about Avant! Corporation than the people trading with him? When all of those other traders exited Avant!, driving its share price to $2, Burry stayed in. Would you have? Or would you have thought, "I wonder what that trader selling Avant! for $2 knows that I don't?"

Why isn’t there a standardized test given by a third party for job relevant skills?

That's what Triplebyte was trying to do for programming jobs. It didn't seem to work out very well for them. Last I heard, they'd been acquired by Karat after running out of funding.

My intuition here is “actually fairly good.” Firms typically spend a decent amount on hiring processes—they run screening tests, conduct interviews, look at CVs, and ask for references. It’s fair to say that companies have a reasonable amount of data collected when they make hiring decisions, and generally, the people involved are incentivized to hire well.

Every part of this is false. Companies don't collect a fair amount of data during the hiring process, and the data they do collect is often irrelevant or biased. How much do you really learn about a candidate by having them demonstrate whether they've managed to memorize the tricks to solving programming puzzles on a whiteboard?

The people involved are not incentivized to hire well, either. They're often engineers or managers dragged away from the tasks that they are incentivized to perform in order to check a box that the participated in the minimum number of interviews necessary to not get in trouble with their managers. If they take hiring seriously, it's out of an altruistic motivation, not because it benefits their own career.

Furthermore, no company actually goes back and determines whether its hires worked out. If a new hire doesn't work out, and is let go after a year's time, does anyone actually go back through their hiring packet and determine if there were any red flags that were missed? No, of course not. And yet, I would argue that that is the minimum necessary to ensure improvement in hiring practices.

The point of a prediction market in hiring is to enforce that last practice. The existence of fixed term contracts with definite criteria and payouts for those criteria forces people to go back and look at their interview feedback and ask themselves, "Was I actually correct in my decision that this person would or would not be a good fit at this company?"