Beyond the treadmill desk

Aashay Doshi, 27, wants to work for a tech company, even though he’s only a firstyear master’s in business administration student at CMU. After working in management consulting for three years, he put his energy into his family’s agriculture start-up in Mumbai, India, which helps farmers produce and export organic fruits and vegetables.

This summer, Mr. Doshi will intern at home decor eretailer Wayfair in Boston.

He decided to work for one of the smaller guys — Wayfair has about 6,300 employees listed on LinkedIn compared to Amazon’s almost 184,000 — because he had preconceived notions about the big tech firms’ ethos from hearing friends’ experiences.

Beyond the treadmill desks, food canteens and quirky conference rooms, Google is seen as flexible and promoting a collaborative environment, Mr. Doshi said. Amazon is innovative and disruptive.

In his opinion, Apple feels “secretive;” Microsoft oozes a “technical vibe” with less creativity; IBM has an “old school reputation;” and it’s tough times for Uber, where socially conscious millennials “have a pretty negative outlook” on its culture and practices.

Audrey Russo, president and CEO of Pittsburgh Technology Council, said it’s impractical to take a broad brush approach to understanding a corporate culture, challenging the notion that a singular, definitive truism could describe a company.

Google’s Bakery Square location, for example, might feel worlds away from the headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Although a CEO might set an overall organizational tone, leadership at a satellite office might create a different flavor in the workplace.

That trend is a replication of what she saw working in corporate America in the early 2000s.

“When I worked at Alcoa ... if you went from a plant in New York to a plant in Arkansas, the processes that were in place and the methodologies and benefits were the same, but their presence in the local community was different.”

Nandini Radhakrishnan, an undergraduate at Tepper, said when she’s looking at potential workplaces, she’s eyeing that flexibility to move between offices.

Misna Sameer, who earned her master’s degree in chemical engineering at CMU in 2016, now works as a software engineer for Uber in the Strip District. She liked that she was interviewed for a specific team at a specific location from the get-go. Most companies, she said, will assign workers to a group after they’re hired.

Calling all business grads

Technology — not financing or banking — companies are the No. 1 destination for MBA students at Tepper, said Mr. Rakas, and Amazon has the biggest craving.

It hired 15 percent of the business school’s class in 2017. Microsoft and PwC, a Big Four accounting firm, followed closely behind.

By volume, the Seattle ecommerce behemoth has been a top employer at Tepper for half a decade — requiring at least as much space during recruitment seasons as PwC, a legacy employer.

For 20 years, Tepper has been taking MBA students to visit companies at which they may want to work. About three-quarters of Tepper’s 200-member MBA class goes on a trek, annually.

A few years ago, barely a dozen were interested in the Seattle trip, with the rest opting for New York, San Francisco or Boston. Now, Mr. Rakas has to cap the Seattle trip at 50 students because they all want to visit Amazon.

He posits that the company is attractive to students because it takes on interesting projects that upend whole industries.

In total, Amazon hired more than 1,000 MBA graduates Steve Rakas, Carnegie Mellon University from top universities in a one-year period, Miriam Park, the company’s director of university programs, told The Wall Street Journal. Amazon did not return the Post-Gazette’s requests for comment.

Many of those hires go on to be product managers, a role that routinely pays out over $120,000 per year, according to job review site Glassdoor.com. Those employees define what products could or should be produced, and work with other teams to implement them.

Data from LinkedIn shows that of 184,405 Amazon workers on the career networking platform, 2,866 are in product management roles, a 25 percent increase year-over-year. There are 531 job listings for Amazon product managers on the website.

About a year ago, CMU announced a new graduate program in product management. The first group began in January.

Tech tug of war

If Amazon brought HQ2 to Pittsburgh, it probably wouldn’t change the number of tech students Amazon hires, said McKenna Houston, associate director for employer relations at CMU.

In part, that’s because it’s already hiring a lot. Pandemonium breaks out at the School of Computer Science as frequently as at the business school.

“We definitely fill up rooms and there are some days a week where if you’re an employer and you come to campus, you may not be able to find an interview room,” Mr. Houston said.

If anything, HQ2 would streamline the recruiting process, eliminating travel, he said. Yet Amazon still has to share talent with other tech firms.

A CMU survey of 2017 computer science undergraduates shows that of 145 who completed their program, eight went to Amazon; 18 took jobs at Facebook offices; 32 went to Google, including two who stayed in Pittsburgh; 11 joined Microsoft ; and two went to Uber’s Strip District office.

Kevin Collins, career consultant for undergraduate and Ph.D. students at the School of Computer Science, said Amazon is attracted to the university for its graduate programs, which offer specializations like humancomputer interaction and language technologies, both central to the company’s Alexa voice technology.

Graduates at the master’s level mostly moved to the West Coast. Of 22 students, one went to Amazon in Seattle to work as a software development engineer and one moved to Los Angeles to work on software development for Snapchat.

Of 68 Ph.D. students in computer science disciplines last year, two grads each went to Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and eight took jobs at Google.

Overall, fewer University of Pittsburgh students take jobs at Amazon. At least a dozen went to the e-retailer between 2013 and 2016, according to an internal survey of alumni, but that’s not a comprehensive picture, said university spokesman Kevin Zwick.

He noted Amazon seeks students with expertise in logistics and business management to help run the company’s distribution and fulfillment network. The company also looks to Pitt’s computer science department for hires in cloud services and software development.

Amazon’s office in the SouthSide Works, where employees focus on machine translation and the Alexa voice assistant, is adding positions. The company announced in February that it wants to add 125 new hires there. That location opened in January 2017 with about 50 employees.

“Part of Pittsburgh’s pitch for HQ2 is certainly the pipeline in education that it has been providing to Amazon,” Mr. Rakas said.