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Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

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Re: Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

#4
post #2

Well if that's the case, it shouldn't be too much longer before programmers don't ;)

I've heard so many bad things about it. Someone always eventually chimes in with "it depends what team you're on" but somehow I don't find that very comforting. My point is programmers already shouldn't want to work there, but it's Amazon, so.

Re: Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

#5
post #2

Well if that's the case, it shouldn't be too much longer before programmers don't ;)

I've heard so many bad things about it. Someone always eventually chimes in with "it depends what team you're on" but somehow I don't find that very comforting. My point is programmers already shouldn't want to work there, but it's Amazon, so.

I have as well, a coworker of mine at my last job came from Amazon. He said he only stayed as long as he did so his resume wouldn't look bad for quitting after just a couple months.

I can't help but think that this is related to the mediocre (imo) UX of a lot of their products. Both AWS and Alexa seem to take the approach of just jamming as many features in as possible without much regard to user experience. It seems like a business/economics view of things is overwhelmingly dominant, and the human element is ignored. But I could be extrapolating too much.

Re: Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

#6
A common complaint everywhere within Amazon is that there are too many chiefs not enough indians. For every doer, it feels like there are 20 talkers with ideas but no ability to execute on them. Everybody wants to be the strategy guy. Good leadership, in practical terms, becomes your ability to convince a technical team or analyst to add something to their already overloaded queue of things to do, in between your scheduled pointless meetings where you talk strategy with fellow MBAs. To an engineering manager, it often feels like being told to build mansions with the budget of a house of cards.

Hopefully Amazon takes all of the MBAs and keeps them.

Re: Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

#7
post #2

Well if that's the case, it shouldn't be too much longer before programmers don't ;)

They recently hired a new layer of product managers on my team... nothing like watching someone who has never written a line of code in their life try to micro-manage Sr. devs. (And for what it's worth, I recognize some level of effective product mgmt is necessary)

Re: Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon

#9
post #2

Well if that's the case, it shouldn't be too much longer before programmers don't ;)

I've heard so many bad things about it. Someone always eventually chimes in with "it depends what team you're on" but somehow I don't find that very comforting. My point is programmers already shouldn't want to work there, but it's Amazon, so.

Ironically, the worst job I've had in tech was getting blind allocated onto one of Google's brainfarts. My point? It always depends on what team you're on...

Or what's worse? Your manager is a tech ignorant Stanford MBA at Amazon or your boss is an out of touch Stanford grad rest and vester at Google?

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