Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon | Hacker News Reader

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

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54 pointsrobertgk78 comments

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 blanket dismissal of anyone with the degree?

This kind of generalization, "All X are bad/dumb/incompetent" would be shunned here and down voted to oblivion if X were "women", "men", "offshore developers", "no college degree", "interns", etc. But somehow "MBA" is totally OK. Bash away!

Because of this bizarre stigma in Silicon Valley (by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus), I tend to not even mention mine unless asked. When it comes up and I mention that I did the MBA thing a decade ago, I get reactions from my software colleagues ranging from "Wait, but you seem to know your shit!" to "Why would you do such a thing??" There are competent MBAs and there are shitty ones. Why can't this be acknowledged? Such a strange little quirk of our bubble out here...

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.

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.

I think if you compare across all MBA programs in the US and all CS programs, and account for debt, you'll find that the average CS program has a better return. This is because even shitty MBAs cost a fortune and don't necessarily teach a lot of useful skills, whereas even a shitty CS degree teaches you to program enough to be employable.

Now if you compare a Harvard or Wharton MBA to say a Stanford or MIT CS degree, then you'll probably find that the MBA outperforms by miles. But I think that's because those programs sell a deep network of rich and powerful people. Harvard MBA go off to run large companies, and Stanford PHDs go run research projects. I'm generalizing, but at the top end they're using very different optimization functions.

>whereas even a shitty CS degree teaches you to program enough to be employable

I met someone with a CS degree from Stanford who couldn't do a basic HTTP request in their main programming language (with access to Google / documentation), nor implement and reverse a linked list. These seem like really basic things that anyone with a CS degree should be able to do...

I think you should rephrase your statement to "even a shitty CS degree will convince companies that you are employable".

Maybe they hadn’t worked in that area recently. If you work on a large software application your focus might be very narrow.

It’s like saying you don’t know what 13 times 14 is off the top of your head so you aren’t good at maths.

It's more like saying you can't figure out what 13 times 14 is with access to a pen (or pencil) and paper.

Eh, some languages make HTTP really annoying, and if you never work with that it could be a slog. But, this is anecdata. I guess I could clarify; mediocre to poor CS programs serve as a strong employability signal than an equivalent MBA often for less than 1/4 the price, and programming offers a number of good opportunities to rub digital elbows with well known/connected programmers. No such opportunity exists for MBAs insofar as I am aware.

I guess my thesis is that if you can't go top 10, don't get an MBA unless you company pays for it.

> by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus

Maybe that's why they will never come up with the next Apple/Google/SpaceX/etc.

Every single MBA I have met, without exception, has been extremely good at talking and making presentations. Ask them to do real work, and they will find a million excuses.

Another thing I have noticed, is the kind of people attracted to doing an MBA. They have seen all of Steve Jobs' talks/speeches, talk incessantly about Brand Building and strategy. Ask them to dial for dollars and you get radio silence.

What qualifies as "real work"? A competent decision maker/consensus reacher is, ime, more valuable than an extra engineer in any software project of a non trivial size. Not every product decision can be made based on logical merits. I don't care what someone's background is if they help maintain organizational coherency.

Organizational coherency?

I have a MBA, but I'm also the lead developer (and project manager) of my project. I rather be coding instead of being in front of people and giving presentations, but I do those things to ensure my project is successful (and that it grows). And I think most of business books and ideas are recycled non-sense.

Maybe we'll meet in the future, but not all developers with MBA's are that bad...

SpaceX? Elon Musk studied Business and Physics at Wharton/Penn and recommends that any founder should have some MBA style business training.

Wharton is an elite school for Business. Very few schools match their education in business. Had Elon went to a random state school that isn't a top 5 business school, he might not be saying that.

Late reply, but business training and MBA are 2 separate things.

Elon has categorically stated that MBAs are a bad idea : http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201311/profiles.cfm

I'm a developer who is interested in getting an MBA. One thing I've learned is that like any degree, an MBA from one school is not equal to an MBA from another.

Finding an online MBA offering that is decent quality is next to impossible or the price far exceeds what most people are willing to pay. I've tried some courses from MIT & Wharton online. Their content is great & possibly well worth the price if you are able to relocate & can afford the cost. I would imagine a few of the other top schools are worth it as well. After that, I would seriously question the value from most any other MBA.

On a side note, many people with an MBA often say the most valuable thing they received was a "network".

I think a lot of the disdain for MBAs comes from the fact that while most positions have had stagnant or declining wages for the last few decades, upper level management has seen gains that far surpass inflation even though their job is fundamentally no different than in the 70's. Management's job is important, sure, but is it significantly more important than the grunts who provide the actual value to the company?

I've found that there is a certain type of engineer who falls prey to their own arrogance. They are good at the job so they don't see the value in having someone else come in to tell them what they should be doing. As far as they see it an MBA isn't doing anything special that they couldn't do themselves. You see the same thing with developers who don't see the point in UX people. Being good enough (which is not the same as being good) at something often makes people believe that something is easier than it actually is.

In some respects they're right. If you are a team lead, you could probably do most of what an MBA does. If you have finished an undergrad CS degree you can definitely finish Business School. It's just that this point completely neglects the fact that if you could do all the management tasks AND develop at the same time, your company probably wouldn't be paying a MBA an exorbitant amount of money to do the management work. Yeah a lot of times it seems like management just moves from pointless meeting to pointless meeting especially as an engineer sitting in on them, but that flow of information between stakeholders is incredibly important. It's absolutely inefficient, but unfortunately there's often not a better way. Like 90% of management responsibilities are just coordinating and communicating.

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.

> 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

What you've quoted (or any other part of the parent post, for that matter) is not an example of the attitude you are attacking.

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.

I think of it like a parasite. They will extract everything from the host, propagate to several other hosts, and kill it. If you look at it that way it is something we should all actively work to control or cure it as it will continue to wreak devastation upon the whole of the community. That is unless of course you wish to join the parasitic parade yourself.

> 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)

I wouldn't apply startup thinking to "most companies." Things are really weird when you're just trying to build an empire to sell it off. Obviously other companies care about growth too, but knowing that your company and its products will continue to exist in five years gives everyone a reason to focus on quality and maintenance.

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.

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.

I'm constantly amazed that anything computerized works at all, ever.

People think I'm foolish or some kind of a Luddite for wanting dumb, electro-mechanical appliances and vehicles. But once you are familiar with how the sausage is made...

> 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/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amaz...

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.

Many companies don't have the reputation Amazon does.

Not everything can be explained away with "it can happen everywhere." There's too many stories, cases, and anecdotes about working there to ignore.

It doesn't even take an entire toxic team! One bad person, usually a manager, can fuck the whole thing up.

Because it seems like a nightmare based on many things, but, again, you always get the people that are like "my team is amazing and full of geniuses who ship everything on time and never disagree".

Look, if you want to work there, go nuts. It seems like a mostly bad place to me. I'm sorry for that "blanket statement". (Of course if I said it seems like a great place to work that would be just fine.)

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)

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?

Because the tech landscape changes, and in a few years the tech skills you have will become outdated. Nobody will tell you this, though, so you'll confidently and move forward in your MBA career thinking you're still as good as you were when you developed full time. In a few years, you're going to butt heads with a developer who tells you you are wrong, but because you are an MBA and you used to develop, you must be right.

I deal with this all the time as a developer. I am tired of guys who "used to develop, so they know what they're talking about".

Would that also apply to any technical managers and directors?

That is a fair point, will be mindful of this going forward.

Because out of all the PMs I've worked with, over 90% were awful. I'm sure you are an exception but the general rule holds

Interesting to hear, what makes them awful? FYI There are some of us who welcome feedback, so would like to hear your thoughts to be mindful.

I cannot speak for the original poster, but I found that many who came in were not interested or did not understand technology. They came in with 'reputation' (worked for IBM in project management, etc) and were probably hired for it. There was little on the job understanding and no effort to understand the how's and why's of the product. What was important to them was that 'project schedule lines' could be filled in regularly. They had no context, and were rarely interested in why something was missed, but were eager to fill in the next column which was 'Expected Completion Date'. When feature requests came in from a client it was pushed down without consult to the overall project; they basically did not like saying 'no' to a client.

The company was a tech company but the people with influence were ignorant of general SW development practices. If a project manager did not cut it, they were replaced with another one just like the previous one. Tech had little input on the next choice - after all, it was the project managers dept. I suspect there are good PM's with a tech bent, but they are hard to come by.

I hope you can make a difference by hiring and encouraging others PM's who do want to improve and understand the technical environment they are in, and not just live on the 'project schedule line'. Spend a day with support, spend a day with QA, talk to an engineer and find out why one task on your schedule is dependent on the other. It will make for a better cohesive team with common goals (and ideally less departmentalism).

Its a misnomer to think that anything can be managed at a abstract level. Managing things requires understanding and working on them at a very intricate level. MBA thing is based on the exact opposite.

If you don't do this- Us Vs Them kinda environment emerges rather too quickly.

I was just joking, although some people seem to be more serious. To me, it's just kind of a funny meme.

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.

Very true.

Some of my worst managers think they know everything, they think they know how quickly something can be done, when they simply don't.

Many times they are downright disrespectful because they think they know it all.

From my perspective:

Some companies hire these MBAs straight out of college, and put them into fast track programs. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it means you can end up with a (S)VP or C level who has never actually worked in the area the company is in.

This leads into "great" ideas being generated (e.g. every new hire has to be signed off by the VP of the division, all purchasing needs 2 levels of sign off etc), that may sound great, but to people actually living with the ideas, it causes massive issues.

Without fail, everytime I have seen a policy like these that makes me groan out loud, when we find out who came up with it, they have an MBA.

Because too many people have gotten burned by bad ones. Stereotypes don't just spring into existence from nothingness.

i took a lot of classes with MBAS, they were a lot of fun and seemed like nice people

It's almost as if different people are different.

Every time the topic of an MBA comes up here, I am confused at the vitriol it inspires. There seems to be a significant portion of the HN audience that is convinced that all MBA's (100%) are empty suits who add nothing but fancy powerpoints and bureaucratic layers.

This has always confused me. After, all I have an MBA and I'm not like that (I think). Furthermore the majority of MBA's I know are not like this either, although some certainly are. And what of the people that were engineers before the got their MBA? Twenty nine percent of my MBA program (UCLA) was made up of people who got their degrees in Engineering, Math or CS. Did this entire cohort lose their brains during the procress?

Why the disconnect? I have a new theory: selection bias.

Very few people I work with know that I have an MBA, because it doesn't come up or really matter. I don't have "socalnate1, MBA" as my e-mail signature or on my business cards. I rarely if ever mention my degree in conversation, even if I am using a tool I learned at B-school. My linkedin profile only mentiones it under education. My diploma hangs in my home, not at work. However, there are a number of people who REALLY want you to know that they have an MBA (weirdly, these people tend to come from 3rd tier schools). It's on their signature, they lead with it as a qualification or reason they should be listened to. I have no doubt that this group of people fit's the caraciature that is painted here.

So anyway, that's my theory. People who "make sure you know they have an MBA" are over represented in the collective Hacker News hivemind, and those competent folks who you didn't even know had an MBA are not.

"There seems to be a significant portion of the HN audience that is convinced that all MBA's (100%) are empty suits who add nothing but fancy powerpoints and bureaucratic layers."

Maybe we speak from experience. We witness how the three letters magically can override any level of business experience or knowledge necessary to make an organization function. C-level management somehow believes having a headcount with that diploma will magically fix their business problems or get their company on the hockey stick. It never happens.

Kawasaki's Law of Pre-Money Valuation ("For each full-time engineer, add 500K. For each MBA, subtract 250K") wasn't written in a vacuum.

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.

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

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.)

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

I've had a similar problem where sometimes it seems like my company has too many "software architects".

That would explain some of the stupid things that are going on at Amazon right now - e.g. they are now witch-hunting new sellers to prove they aren't selling counterfeits by disabling their accounts right after they list their first items literally seconds after they do it and then demand all kinds of proof. I was shown an email where Amazon stated: "you might be selling counterfeits" without company selling a single item as a fresh new account (and having reputable suppliers that don't risk supplying counterfeits). To me it seems like ML + MBA fail (ML for identifying risks with too many false positives, MBA for setting up such an insane policy since June)

Wow, this is amazing news! Amazon is actually doing something about counterfeits?

Yeah, like ignoring those Chinese companies that spawn up quickly, dump 100,000 items on the marketplace, then disappear; and instead chase naive new sellers that didn't expect to climb algorithmic wall when they paid for "seller privileges"?

While I was at Microsoft this summer I learned that the PM position has become highly sought after by MBAs from schools like Duke etc.

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.

I've been in the industry 20+ years and I still have no idea what a product manager actually does. As far as I can tell everyone completely ignores them. Maybe their job is just to be a warm body filling a chair in pointless meetings, so programmers can do real work? Seems perfect for an MBA when the weather's too bad to play golf.

Or maybe they want to participate in the tech industry?

Programmers don't have a monopoly on being interested in technology, nor do they have a monopoly on positive contributions in it either.

Probably because the salary is comparable to dev, but with potentially a fraction of the work.

I still don't fully understand the PM role here at MSFT. At previous companies I was at, the nearest equivalent of a PM was involved closely with engineering to organize projects, discuss features, etc. Here, they're just in meetings all day and emailing each other rhetorical questions. Having attended many of those meetings, the value-add seems trivial to me.

Maybe their job is actually really demanding and I'm just way off the mark though. It also likely varies from team to team.

I don't know what you count as "work" but the PMs I know are all way too plugged-in to email, work longer hours, and stress out more than engineers. I think it's harder for them to prove their value via concrete deliverables and so they compensate by excessive enthusiasm.

I think it would help if we understood what kinds of things they're accomplishing through email, meetings, etc.

I think the 'way too plugged-in to email' is what bugs me. I'm the recipient of _hundreds_ of PM emails a day. As an engineer it's easy to see this as lots of talking and little doing. But you're right, it's probably a result of not being able to have more tangible results.

Yeah, you get to be someone's boss (as in telling them what to do) without all the icky parts of actually being a manager. The structure of tech companies now is so bonkers, the person who tells you what to do isn't your manager, and your manager is really just there for, I dunno, moral support and to give you a performance review every 6 months even though they don't actually work with you.

I'm not sure if that's a good sign

I am an MBA, and also have a Masters in Comp Sci. Technical Nerd. Why all the hate?

is it just me that has a problem with the paywall or does everybody else on HN have a wsj subscription?

never mind, it seems like google is filtering my results, but bing to the rescue: http://www.morningstar.com/advisor/t/120651764/forget-wall-s...

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