
Amazon is hiring the most MBAs in tech, and it’s not really close - peterkshultz
https://qz.com/636539/amazon-is-hiring-the-most-mbas-in-tech-and-its-not-really-close/
======
robterrin
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](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

~~~
sharkweek
I'm not an MBA and don't really have the intention to get one - so pardon my
naive question, but what does it mean to "play the game?"

~~~
aslkdjaslkdj
His last sentence mostly. "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."

Aka stakeholder and expectation management. The above sounds easy but requires
a large number of "soft skills" to do well in a large organization.

------
chollida1
Have a look here at their MBA landing page.

[https://www.amazon.jobs/team/university-mba-
graduate](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 around.

\- Most of these MBA's seem to be in operations, which makes alot of sense as
one of the largest portions of an MBA degree is how to runa company:)

Amazon is also not alone in vacuuming up new MBA grads.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-amazon-hiring-
mb...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-amazon-hiring-
mbas-2017-4?op=1)

Whether you want to admit it or not, MBA's provide a lot of value to larger
organizations, tech or not.

At this point, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all hired alot of
MBA's in the past few years. These companies voted with their cash and made it
very clear, MBA's provide alot of value.

~~~
mbesto
> 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.

~~~
staunch
Yes, it's a master's in business _administration_ not business _innovation_.

Amazon is the perfect example of where MBAs can be extremely effective. The
way Tim Cook helped Apple optimize and improve its operations a great example.

~~~
mi100hael
The way Tim Cook Ballmerized Apple into a company coasting on its past success
rather than continuing to innovate is a great example of the pitfalls.

~~~
staunch
Steve Balmer is no Bill Gates. Tim Cook is no Steve jobs.

Not exactly their fault for failing to live up to some of the most impressive
founders in history. At least Tim Cook is humble and wise enough to know his
limits.

------
amateurpolymath
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 cost of hiring all these MBAs.

~~~
mathattack
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.

------
sulam
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 school with. They all
either have strategy roles or wish they did (minus the one person in finance
-- in the SF Bay Area that's just not as cool as strategy). They also tend
(with exceptions) to have egos bigger than big, which seems to line up nicely
with thinking that the right job for you is to have the ideas while other
people implement them. :)

~~~
rothbardrand
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 built on the reliable services of Amazon.com) and became a
success.... so long as you have unlimited investor money to burn you can
eventually be successful this way.

But it is a terrible place to work, because outside of the AWS organization
you end up working for idiots.

~~~
colmmacc
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.

~~~
uji
I agree with rothbardrand@ here, I recently moved from AWS. Amazon is very
top-down where developers are heavily managed by their immediate managers (and
thats why they need so many MBAs). Our team of 15 engineers had 4 managers,
who would push engineers to the edge to meet deadlines. From what I observed,
this leads to very high turnover rate, and teams with lot of junior engineers
who are asked to assume roles of previous project leads. New hires are
brainwashed about increase ownership and responsbility. But after some years,
they all realize the game and move over to different company.

------
kelukelugames
Haha, I live in Seattle and signed up for a dating app earlier this year. Over
half of my matches were MBAs working at Amazon. So I have Bezos to thank for
my dating life.

~~~
make3
They are male or female? I hope this isn't an inappropriate question

~~~
kelukelugames
Women. I was on Coffee Meets Bagel which really should have been named Coffee
Meets MBAs from Amazon.

The women complained about too many male engineers from the local Seattle
companies. I had the foresight to not joke that they were, perhaps, the female
equivalent. But I didn't have the foresight to realize some of them knew each
other. I learned more about dating this past few months than I had the
previous 30+ years. Thanks again Jeff!

Edit: want to add one more part. My college roommate was on the same app and
we shared a lot of the same matches. But they picked him over me literally
every time because he's taller and better looking. :*(

~~~
make3
I currently get about zero matches on Tinder and OkCupid, and I've always
thought of myself as an atleast ok looking guy. I don't know where I'm going
with this ; you're not the worst is what I'm saying I guess, for whatever
comfort that can give you

------
legitster
A couple of cents: 1\. Seattle is full of MBAs. A lot of them came out of the
Microsoft system and obviously got scooped up by the Amazon system. And a fair
share of them are "executive MBAs'. They had some non-business degree and went
back to school as part of the management grooming process. UW has one of the
top programs in the country for this. 2\. A four year business degree on its
own is a pretty lousy education for making any impactful business decisions. I
would say that an MBA is worth more than the equal number of years in the
sales trenches.

------
beastcoast
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.

~~~
colmmacc
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.

~~~
UK-AL
Unfortunately companies hire based on things that are easy to verify.

MBAs are easy to verify.

A software engineer claiming to things that mba knows is hard hard to verify.

------
agoodthrowaway
I honestly believe MBAs suck the lifeblood out of a company. I was at an event
for Microsoft Ventures and I was the only engineer there. I had never had so
many conversations where the content contained so many syllables and yet had
no content whatsoever. The vast majority of these people had product
responsibility at Microsoft. I left with the impression that Microsoft simply
was overloaded with these people, most of whom understood nothing about
technology. In companies I've worked at, these people routinely demonstrate
the inability to see and respond to innovation. I've yet to see how an MBA
brings value to a tech company beyond a basic understanding of accounting
principles.

------
saosebastiao
> Amazon managers often prefer to employ MBAs over someone from a traditional
> background “because they value the deep analytics and fresh perspective of
> an MBA hire,” she wrote.

Considering the "deep analytics" and "fresh perspective" MBA managers I worked
with and saw everywhere at amazon, I'm surprised anybody who works there could
say such a thing. Deep analytics means nothing more than squinting at reports
that other people created and pretending to understand, while fresh
perspective means to treat every problem exactly the same. It's a hive mind of
people who think they are quantitatively intelligent because they know what
_bps_ means.

~~~
allritenow
As a former operations manager in multiple Amazon warehouses I completely
agree. Out of all of the "Pathways" managers I worked with, maybe 10% could
effectively manage their people, shift, and metrics. Most hid behind their
laptop and prayed that someone else would take care of the "hard" problems
like talking to someone not hitting their rate or making quality errors. Their
"deep analytics" knowledge meant nothing when running an operation.

------
clairity
many of the comments here conflate the MBA degree with their perception of the
degree holder. that's understandable, but i'll repeat that the educational
content of the MBA degree is quite valuable (e.g., yc's startup school present
a condensed version of that content).

on the other hand, being overconfident, out of your depth, mistake-riddled,
ambitious, and all of those other perceptions are just part of the general
human condition. engineers and executives and artisans and small business
owners and more all have those failings (if you want to see them as failings--
there are multiple perspectives). i'd say it's our duty as humans to do our
best to understand the person in front of us rather than rely on these short-
circuited, imagined archetypes sitting in our heads.

~~~
agoodthrowaway
Sorry but I disagree. The most valuable part of the MBA is the accounting bit.
This can be learned by smart people OJT. It's valuable to study cases but you
don't need an overpriced MBA for that.

The rest is mostly horseshit. Source: 20 years building technology businesses.

In my view an MBA is good if say you work for a paper towel company and you're
trying to decide how many paper towels go in a roll. That's something you
don't need the big brains for but you need someone who understands simple P&L.

I can't for the life of me understand why a person with MBA is almost
automatically considered "leadership material" at some companies, particularly
technology companies.

------
arcanus
Does this mean devs are more likely to be reporting to an MBA at AMZN?

~~~
cachemiss
No, generally you report to a former engineer, even up to a VP level in most
cases, in AWS its usually former engineers until you get to s-level.

edit: those people may have ALSO gotten an MBA

------
mbesto
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.

~~~
saosebastiao
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-level position from some
other public company.

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

~~~
saosebastiao
Some can and do pursue advanced degrees, but of the handful of generals I've
met, most don't. The most interesting exception was a brig who spent his
entire career in SOCOM, most of which was literally on the ground with troops,
weapon-in-hand. Of course his PhD and 4 post-docs were in Military Science and
Military History. He got fired from Amazon for calling an SVP a cunt for not
wanting to be seen working alongside wage employees. He went on to start a
security contracting firm, which probably was a better fit for him anyway.

------
paulsutter
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.

~~~
gareim
Operational excellence sounds like Apple's forte to me.

------
didibus
Who else should they hire for business and administration roles?

------
jrs95
This might be the strongest evidence that Amazon is in fact The Evil Empire of
our times

