I am not saying they should take over the role of managing thousands of people. But you need highly visible technical roles higher up in the food
chain, to drive technical decisions, who don't make sense on a financial excel sheet.
Let me give some concrete examples:
- Decisions like having the 3 availability zones, at a minimum, and with no exceptions,
for every Region, come up of minds like James Hamilton. They are driven first from an
ambition of technical quality, then you just tell the MBA's how much it will cost...
If you run it via an MBA they will just see it as a nice to have. And that is why for GCP or Azure
those are not always there.
- Decisions like the development of the Nitro System are again comming from
a quality ambition. Then again...you just tell the MBA's how much it will cost.
Did you notice since 2023 Amazon made over 30,000 layoffs including this year
by the hundreds within AWS? Technical roles who can find jobs at Netflix, Google
or OpenAI or Microsoft or others look...And make their conclusions...And yes many
of those are also doing layoffs
Wall Street is currently full of praise for the stunning balance sheet performance of Amazon, but Wall Street MBA's never see more than
the next quarter.
Now go listen to the available recording of Amazon last Q1 earnings call,
and amaze yourself with the softball questions, almost like a
battle of flowers, that earnings calls transformed themselves
into nowadays.
For example you will not hear the following critical questions, and for which there are no answers in the earnings release document, from any of the analysts in the call:
- How much of the net income growth can be attributed to
cost-cutting measures versus new business growth?
- What are the primary factors contributing to the much lower profitability
of the International segment compared to North America?
- What is Amazon's strategy for addressing the increasing competition
in the cloud computing market, particularly from companies
like Microsoft and Google?