His description of presentations to Bezos reminds the infamous BillG reviews
Exactly.
A few years back, I found myself in a one-on-one saying: "you would think someone taking a job managing a hog farm would at least know what a hog is."
Though, that was about web-development.
A suitable allegory.
Lou Gerstner and Meg Whitman are two examples from the technology world. Both came into their jobs at IBM and eBay with zero tech experience, but got up to speed very quickly. Of course, had they failed to do so they would have been out within a year or two.
Once you obtain certain scale, you can't do everything. It's equally ignorant to think an engineer can run a business top to bottom as it is to think an MBA can fully run an engineering company.
I so often read here MBA used pejoratively, but remember that most small businesses fail because they're run by people who have skills but no idea how to run a business. A major corporation needs both (and more!) skills.
Speaking of Yegge and Amazon: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-clic...
Amazon has continued to grow in simplicity and coverage, including ease of purchase with third-parties (eBay's dealer market). Meanwhile, buying on eBay is still a huge pain, with no integration between eBay and its own subsidiary.
I /hate/ going with hires who are "good enough." The nightmare employee is someone who is not quite bad enough to get fired.
Like Bezos has an arsenal of nasty questions up his sleeve and BillG actually knows what the f he's talking about.
You may be wondering why your comment got down-voted. It's not that we're a community of jerks, I promise. People just really prize a high signal-to-noise ratio here, and while we appreciate that you enjoyed the link, a better way to express that without adding noise is to up-vote the comment.
In general, you should post comments here only when the comment will provide value to someone else. That's largely the rubric by which it will be judged.