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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
by saosebastiao 9y ago
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.
- base698 9y agoPartly as a joke, I've started wanting to ask the question, "Will I be reporting to an MBA?"
- thrownawayaway 9y agoToo much levels 5 and 6, not enough levels 7 and 8 actually. So you get a bunch of 6s who start to think they're 10s.
- francisofascii 9y agoIs Amazon the type of place where you must learn to speak MBAese? (a term I first heard from Spolsky on a Stack Exchange podcast.)
- johngalt 9y agoTop heavy teams also mean that your few 'doers' spend more time defending themselves and their schedule.
- tdb7893 9y agoI've had a similar problem where sometimes it seems like my company has too many "software architects".