The fundamental downside destroying Amazon

Amazon's strength in how we do business with our customers does not translate into how we treat our employees. It's hard to believe this big of a company can be held together by duct tape, but it's simply the truth. Practically everything is a hack or workaround. You need to struggle to get things done since everyone else is focused only on their own career advancement projects. That's true across the company. 

The fundamental downside destroying Amazon is that managment is both arrogant and incompetent. Amazon is a technology company but we do not have technologists managing people. Even at the lowest levels, we bring in people who don't know anything about technology to manage engineers. In terms of the middle managers, we seem to hire a lot of ineffective and incompetent brown-nosers who only want to climb the management ladder at any cost. At senior levels, we usually have MBAs making technology decisions. Worse, these managers are really arrogant and don't respect or value employees. They don't treat them well and have built an HR department who sees its job as keeping employees in line rather than keeping them happy and productive. If they fall out of line, even to do the right thing, they're gone in a heartbeat.