As a recent MBA grad of one of the schools listed in the article I would like to note a few things:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Third, this is good news for tech. See the HBS Indicator for more on why: <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/harvardmba_indicator.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/harvardmba_indicator.asp</a> 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.<p>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.<p>*edited typo in last paragraph
Have a look here at their MBA landing page.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.jobs/team/university-mba-graduate" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.jobs/team/university-mba-graduate</a><p>I know that some people love to hate on MBA's but a couple of things:<p>- 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.<p>- Jeff Bezos worked for a well known hedge fund before amazon, he's no stranger to having MBA's around.<p>- 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:)<p>Amazon is also not alone in vacuuming up new MBA grads.<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-amazon-hiring-mbas-2017-4?op=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-amazon-hiring-mb...</a><p>Whether you want to admit it or not, MBA's provide a lot of value to larger organizations, tech or not.<p>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.
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.
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).<p>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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.<p>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 <i>bps</i> means.
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).<p>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.
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.
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.