Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 84 posts

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

#11

Post by base698 »

saosebastiao wrote: post #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 sch…

Partly as a joke, I've started wanting to ask the question, "Will I be reporting to an MBA?"

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

#12

Post by thrownawayaway »

jrs95 wrote: post #5
whipoodle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now if only Android phones stopped becoming Android bricks after a year or so of mandatory app updates, I might actually start to think Google is getting better about their UI.

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

#13

Post by thrownawayaway »

saosebastiao wrote: post #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 sch…

Too much levels 5 and 6, not enough levels 7 and 8 actually. So you get a bunch of 6s who start to think they're 10s.

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

#15

Post by francisofascii »

saosebastiao wrote: post #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 sch…

Is Amazon the type of place where you must learn to speak MBAese? (a term I first heard from Spolsky on a Stack Exchange podcast.)

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

#16

Post by whipoodle »

jrs95 wrote: post #5
whipoodle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe... I work somewhere that works very hard to provide nice UX for people. It's a shitshow. But I'd still much rather have this job than work for Amazon.

Basically the longer I work in this industry the more thoroughly convinced I become that nobody knows what the hell they are doing.

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

#18

Post by notyourwork »

whipoodle wrote: post #4
jrs95 wrote: 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.

> My point is programmers already shouldn't want to work there, but it's Amazon, so.

I don't understand how you can make a blanket statement like that. Why should programmers not want to work there?

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

#20

Post by 1_2__4 »

I’m watching tech companies be more and more infested with these business types. As in, it used to be you’d see technical product managers, but they’re largely MBA types now. Ditto for engineering upper/exec management. Ditto for sales engineering. Ditto for professional services. Ditto for customer support.

They churn through technical H1Bs at a shocking rate, treat engineering like shit, and add almost no value beyond blowing hot air and shorty software development practices. They always have lots of reasons why things aren’t getting done predictably and slide decks on how to fix it, all of which involve further neutering engineering and especially engineering management. They like to build fake engineering teams outside the engineering organization with absolutely atrocious engineering practices but because they deliver on short notice - never mind what they’re delivering is garbage - the sales idiots and execs love them to death.

They and PMO are cancers on the tech industry and it’s just getting worse.

Post reply on HN