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Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

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Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#31
post #12

Amazon is a company that clearly lets the strategists actually implement their strategies. That's working reasonably well for them (with some obvious flops, but more than enough success to make up for it and then some). It's no surprise MBAs want to go there. Strategy jobs are some of the most hotly sought after roles -- my wife went to a top tier MBA program and I regularly have to hang out with people she want to s…

This is exactly why Amazon is a horrific place to work for engineers and why they are such a complete failure with products.... for every success Amazon has about a hundred failures (Amazon catalogs online, amazon moving listings, A9, etc.) Amazon throws money at ideas and throws ideas against the wall to see what sticks. AWS was launched as a fraud (using no amazon infrastructure at the time, they claimed it was bui…

Amazon engineer here! I love our culture of strong ownership and autonomy, and that we'll take risks, tolerate failures and give things around 7 years to mature and pay off. It's super rewarding to be able to own things and see them through, and to see things like AWS, Kindle and Alexa go big places. I've had my own projects work out and I've had things abandoned, and both experiences have been positive in the long run, if a little painful at the time.

As for the AWS thing ... I joined AWS pretty early in its history and even then we had amazon.com workloads and it was definitely the same infrastructure (data centers, network, operations, etc) as Amazon.com . My first two years I was writing code and building AWS services, while also supporting retail operations and dealing with the order pipeline - and I worked in Infrastructure; things were fairly integrated.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#32
post #6

My understanding (from multiple sources) is that culturally speaking, you basically need an advanced degree (MBA, Exec MBA, etc) in order to reach a certain level of management at Amazon.

Not entirely true. I met a few former Brigadier and Major Generals at high levels within amazon (you can consider that snark if you want). There's still a wall though at the VP/SVP level where advanced degrees basically become meaningless. You either need to be close friends/confidants with every single person above you (and by that, I mean across the board, not just direct reports), or you need to come from a C-leve…

Don't senior officers in the US military need advanced degrees anyway ?

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#33

Interestingly Amazon doesn't offer any incentives to get an MBA if you're already working there. No tuition reimbursement, raises or promotions. You're more valued as an external MBA hire.

I know I'll sound like a cultist, and I am, but I earnestly pitch to people that working at Amazon is an opportunity to get a free MBA.

People now realize that Amazon has been doing dev-ops for a long long time, but we've also been doing BizDevOps. If you want to, as an engineer, as project manager, as any role really, you can step up and get deeply involved in the business. It's never not your place.

As engineers, we can talk to customers, we can help decide pricing, more than that even - we can think about pricing as a technical parameter that can be used to influence the design of the system, we can choose the service name ("CloudFront" and "Route 53" came from team whiteboard sessions with beer and Chinese take-out). We can write the proposals for products, and so on. Now as a senior engineer, this year I contributed heavily to 3 different organizations strategic plans. No-one stopped me! I've learned a lot about business from our business review meetings, everything from relevant legal matters to how a P&L really works, how marketing works, and more.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#34

Have a look here at their MBA landing page. https://www.amazon.jobs/team/university-mba-graduate I know that some people love to hate on MBA's but a couple of things: - Amazon is a pretty data driven company, if MBA's provided no value, or negative value as some HN's readers seem to think, they wouldn't be hiring them. - Jeff Bezos worked for a well known hedge fund before amazon, he's no stranger to having MBA's aro…

> Amazon is a pretty data driven company, if MBA's provided no value, or negative value as some HN's readers seem to think, they wouldn't be hiring them. Having been the guy whose job it was to collect, analyze, and present data to these MBAs, I can honestly say that 99% of them are dead weight for their analytic capabilities. MBAs do much better at managing people. And by that, I mean only 70% of them are dead weigh…

the reason I'm not in jail for arson right now

Lawyer with an MBA get you off? :-)

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely true. I met a few former Brigadier and Major Generals at high levels within amazon (you can consider that snark if you want). There's still a wall though at the VP/SVP level where advanced degrees basically become meaningless. You either need to be close friends/confidants with every single person above you (and by that, I mean across the board, not just direct reports), or you need to come from a C-leve…

Don't senior officers in the US military need advanced degrees anyway ?

No, technically, tho depending on service and specialty, can be a reason for not getting to lt.col. Just need to not be a dumbass for a majors board

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#36
post #7

Have a look here at their MBA landing page. https://www.amazon.jobs/team/university-mba-graduate I know that some people love to hate on MBA's but a couple of things: - Amazon is a pretty data driven company, if MBA's provided no value, or negative value as some HN's readers seem to think, they wouldn't be hiring them. - Jeff Bezos worked for a well known hedge fund before amazon, he's no stranger to having MBA's aro…

> negative value as some HN's readers seem to think, they wouldn't be hiring them. HN's negative criticism is that MBAs don't know how to start things, not necessarily that they can't run things.

I think the other criticism of MBAs is that they're taught to take a very narrow view to running a business that is overly focused on growth and efficiency. As much as startups are lionized around here, I like to hope that a lot of us also respect the "lifestyle" approach to business, bootstrapping and other approaches that are less focused on growth.

I have a parent who taught at a top-10 business school. A number of years ago, she had the opportunity to act as the faculty chaperone for the student trip to meet with the leaders of various Japanese businesses and I got to come along. One of the businesses we visited was a Sake brewer that had been family owned since the 1600s. The Q&A period was particularly enlightening to me and it had more to do with the questions that the MBA students asked than it did with the answers they were given. They peppered him with questions about growth, international expansions, taking on debt for advertising campaigns, new product lines that would appeal to a younger demographic. It went on for over an hour. And, to his credit, he patiently answered them all with a variant of the same answer. He wanted to run his company like his ancestors have run it for centuries. He wanted to make the best sake he could possibly make, just as his ancestors had done. He wanted to provide a comfortable life for his family and pass the business on to his children. And he wanted to supply good jobs for his employees since he viewed them as his extended family. None of the stuff the MBAs were interested in interested him. He was happy running a stable, self-sustaining business that didn't need to grow. Life, mastery of his craft and being happy were more important to him. If it had ended with that, I might not have taken such a dim view of MBAs. But on the bus ride home, all I heard from these early-20-something-self-proclaimed-future-leaders-of-America was how stupid the guy was and how he was ruining his business. I couldn't help but think that they'd entirely missed the point of his answers.

A few years later, I worked at a company that served small businesses building a product that handled reputation management and lead sourcing. We tried a number of iterations that ended up failing. It wasn't until we made the realization that small businesses didn't want growth as much as they wanted stability. Too much business could overwhelm them. Too little could starve them. They needed a product that kept them as close to full utilization as possible without ever going over. Even after we made that leap, it took a ton of effort for us to convince our own management to allow us to take the product in that direction. There was something about their own MBA training that made it difficult to accept that this view could be correct.

My own view of MBAs, considering I have a parent that has helped produce multiple generations of them, is that they're very valuable when applied to a somewhat narrow band of situations but that, as a society, we've applied them to many circumstances where they're counterproductive. I think we produce too many of them and the ones that are misapplied end up giving the rest a bad reputation.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#37

I've taught many MBAs and I can attest to their disappointing analytical skills. However, a company like Amazon already has plenty of analytically skilled employees. What they need from the MBAs are their management skills. I suspect Amazon is particularly targeting those MBAs who have experience with operations and supply chain management experience. At Amazon's scale, even a small reduction in costs is worth the co…

I would take the other side of this. Not all MBAs have good analytical skills, but I have seen almost no non-technical non-MBAs have good analytical skills. They come with many other things, but if they lack a technical or business background, the odds that they could product a business model is very tiny.

I'd say that the MBA is a good predictor in the absence of a technical degree, but you still have to do a lot of screening post-MBA.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#38
The number of MBAs seems related to the number of products for each company. Also, Amazon and Microsoft are focused on operational excellence (do more and more stuff, focus on process), whereas Google and Apple are focused on a strategy (do fewer things, differently from the competition). Operational excellence is MBA-intensive.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#39

The number of MBAs seems related to the number of products for each company. Also, Amazon and Microsoft are focused on operational excellence (do more and more stuff, focus on process), whereas Google and Apple are focused on a strategy (do fewer things, differently from the competition). Operational excellence is MBA-intensive.

Operational excellence sounds like Apple's forte to me.

Re: Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close

#40
As a recent MBA grad of one of the schools listed in the article I would like to note a few things:

First, Amazon is 3x the size of any of the tech companies it is compared to. Google actually hires more MBA's per capita and Amazon hires about as many as Apple and Microsoft, per capita.

Second, I keep a close eye on these things, and 72% of my class went to finance or consulting. Consulting is still the biggest draw and has been since the financial crisis.

Third, this is good news for tech. See the HBS Indicator for more on why: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/harvardmba_indicator.asp I'm not going to defend or bash the MBA degree. It doesn't say much about you except that you are a competent professional that likes money and can play the game. Those traits are often enough to make an employee worth their salary, but many MBAs have additional skills, analytical or otherwise. Sometimes it means you hire somebody a little too slick. This is probably why tech has such a phobia of the MBA. Fair, but overgeneralizing, in my opinion.

Finally, I think the reason you see more MBAs in tech these days isn't necessarily Bezos' finance background or the need for analytics, but that tech companies are maturing and they need middle managers. MBAs tend to be predictable worker bees that do a great job at filling out the ranks of a large bureaucracy. Most business is really about project planning, reporting, managing expectations, coordinating teams and delivering on time. It's not terribly rewarding or creative work, but it's what MBAs can reliably produce.

*edited typo in last paragraph

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