Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

Managers have all sorts of ridiculous beliefs, but the root cause of management incompetence is this: that managers believe that a manager can manage anything. Running a store, developing a phone, building a house, designing a rocket to go to the moon, it's all the same thing according to them. Getting info, negotiate, motivate a team, giving speeches, running projects, ... Some go further in this, and some hold up the idea that something like "management science" exists.

This directly leads to the second ridiculous belief, which causes a feedback loop : that they can hire other managers anywhere, absolutely no concern for what they did before, as long as they had slightly less "reports" (so they are "promoted" into their new position), for any management function.

Then, of course the second belief leads to negotiation, to trading business efforts for jobs. If you make my department look good (internally "hire" us as consultants because your financial performance is down the crapper anyway and we'll hire you next quarter after your division gets nixed). Nothing is so damaging to companies, as the main thing being traded is making disasters far worse in trade for personal exits, but the people who'd have to do something about it are of course managers, who have negotiated for jobs and have further negotiation in place for moving up.

For "some reason" managers never ever start any company. Companies are started by people who actually know what the company is supposed to do. Companies are (were) started by mechanics, by engineers, by traders (ie. shop attendants), by software developers, sometimes by experienced investors, by ... The best companies were started by people who had the skills to do well in 2 different fields. Generally what happens is that at some point a deep and explosive conflict happens between these founders and some employees of their companies, and then someone is brought in to prevent this. In reality, this is normal. Meet enough people, raise the stakes high enough and you will clash very seriously with other people. And the bigger your company gets as a founder, the more is at stake, and the more people you will have to deal with. So a conflict escalating is a matter of time, but it is human nature to compensate : founders will bring in a manager to deal with this sort of thing, and then the job trading begins. As everybody who's held a job at a large company knows, this does not prevent personality clashes, quite the opposite, but once this position trading starts, it is incredibly hard to stop.

If anything, these layoffs seem to correllate with some of the commentary in the recent NYT article about Amazon.

The people that built the flop get to look for a new job building someone else's future flops.

I'm waiting for the surge of native developers fleeing from the food delivery gold rush startups before starting on our native app.

They had to go big or go home. They really should have gone home though.

Because they are investing their cash in the business, not just spending it. Investing means knowing when an investment is doing poorly and not throwing good money after bad.