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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

#31

Post by _pmf_ »

1_2__4 wrote: post #20

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 bey…

> but because they deliver on short notice - never mind what they’re delivering is garbage - the sales idiots and execs love them to death.

You seem bitter that you cannot treat your workplace as an opportunity to experiment with new technologies and pad your resume, and I'm uncomfortable having to tell you this[0], but companies outside the infinite SV investment bubble have to deliver products and not proof-of-concepts of tech stacks or methodologies du jour. Software engineers ignoring business use cases and delivering technically correct, but completely useless products are quite common.

[0] Actually I'm not, of course

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

#32

Post by nugget »

1_2__4 wrote: post #20

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 bey…

Doesn't bother me too much. Companies who succumb to this trend will quickly head sideways and eventually become irrelevant, creating more opportunities for startups and new entrants.

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

#33

Post by jrs95 »

whipoodle wrote: post #16
jrs95 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you on that. I don't think it's just this industry either. I've had jobs where I've been amazed that the business can even continue to exist with the amount of disorganization and lack of any real coherent strategy. From a theoretical standpoint, you'd expect them to be eliminated by competitors...but in practice, since hardly anyone knows what the hell is going on, that just doesn't happen.

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

#34

Post by notyourwork »

sp527 wrote: post #29
notyourwork wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Amazon has developed a public reputation for being an intense environment where employees are generally overworked [0]. Unsurprisingly, (based on conversations with engineers I know there) it varies depending on your team and even geographic location. But, based on the anecdotal data and the reporting that’s been done, it sounds like you can end up really miserable if you get screwed. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2…

You can end up really miserable at any company that has a toxic team. This isn't unique to Amazon. I tend to think companies are on a spectrum where you have a few bad apples, a few exceptionally great teams and a most fall into the average like everywhere else in the world.

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

#35

Post by jbob2000 »

ryandrake wrote: post #25

Sigh, looks like this one's going to be the weekly HN MBA Hate Thread™. In defense of the degree: Has it ever occurred to you guys that maybe some (many?) of these people were hackers prior to getting their MBA, and are very competent? Quite a few of my classmates had engineering (including software) backgrounds, and even the ones who had engineering degrees but didn't actually code were still clued in. Why this blan…

When someone says "MBAs are bad/dumb/incompentent" that's not actually what they mean, it's just a shortcut for not being able to adequately explain themselves. It's tough to give words to all the little nuances that form this kind of opinion.

At a high level, when a company is bringing in the MBAs, it means they have found their gold mine and the MBAs are being brought in to mine every little cent from it. When this happens, the development priorities change. Your features get chopped up into buckets that the business charges clients more for. A simple, dinky little feature that is probably two lines of code gets walled off from those users so we can charge these users 10x more. We sit there, as developers, saying to ourselves, "wtf, why would they do that? It doesn't cost the company anything extra to run two lines of javascript...". On and on this goes until you reach the point that you stop developing entirely because your clients can't be squeezed for cash any more.

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

#36

Post by choward »

uptownfunk wrote: post #14
jrs95 wrote: post #2

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

Some of us MBA's have also written (and write) code and can also think from a dev mindset. Why all the hate for MBAs on here?

Not to trying to bash your skills but I think that can be part of the problem. It's good that you know how to program and that helps understand technical problems better. But don't think just because you know the problem it means you know the solution. It doesn't mean the solution is trivial and that it should be fixed in a day.

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

#37

Post by vasilipupkin »

ryandrake wrote: post #25

Sigh, looks like this one's going to be the weekly HN MBA Hate Thread™. In defense of the degree: Has it ever occurred to you guys that maybe some (many?) of these people were hackers prior to getting their MBA, and are very competent? Quite a few of my classmates had engineering (including software) backgrounds, and even the ones who had engineering degrees but didn't actually code were still clued in. Why this blan…

Look at average earnings of an MBA 10 years out vs average earnings of a CS grad 10 years out and tell me which one is more useful for maximizing one's career options.

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

#38

Post by jrs95 »

gaius wrote: post #22
jrs95 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a lot of them just want to live out some sort of Steve Jobs fantasy

Spolsky was a PM at MS, I don't think Jobs ever was.

I didn't mean it that literally. Just in general, I can imagine a bunch of people buying into some sort of faux-enlightenment aesthetic and parading around as product gurus.

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

#39

Post by johngalt »

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…

Top heavy teams also mean that your few 'doers' spend more time defending themselves and their schedule.

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

#40

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

1_2__4 wrote: post #20

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 bey…

> atrocious engineering practices but because they deliver on short notice - never mind what they’re delivering is garbage

I am pretty sure this is true for most companies. Product and sales never care what the code looks like. They care about velocity. Remember your code can be a work of art, well tested, and the epitome of best practice; none of that means anything if you don't ship or if you're always pushing back on deadlines or wont switch context to fix something more high in business priority. (as engineers we build our own dream or someone else's)

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