Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect it is a comparatively new phenomenon in the workplace which is in part attributable to the recent surge (5-10 years) in knowledge work.

When I worked in bigco as an analyst, the director and even managers were from a different era. The better ones knew excel to some extent but had no idea how to do sql or even excel automation which was a large part of what the analysts were required to do. Part of this is a rapid almost stepwise change in the work that is done, part of it is due to tech companies recruiting from a diverse set of industries.

In other industries like law, finance and accounting, most people start at the bottom and slowly work upwards so the skillset is more of a continuum up the hierarchy so it is feasible that your bosses can still do your job.

It used to be the same in other industries but that is fast changing. For instance, the top level accountants will have been studying at a time where bookkeeping was literally done in paper books...

Another phenomenon is the development of management as a science. People can end up in positions of oversight where they have a deficient understanding of the tasks people below them are performing.

Study of management and processes is not without merit, and the rants against MBAs can be one dimensional by not recognizing the benefits. But if that was all that it took, then the economy wouldn't "waste" medical doctors or highly skilled engineers in administrative functions.

In my experience who ever makes this argument is incapable of coding and hence went to management. Some are really nice people but still they can be misled due to their I capability to understand he nature of work.

I think that is true, although people have been doing MBAs for a much longer time than the tech boom has been around for: e.g. doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s.

Though MBAs have certainly been growing in popularity over the past few years.

I think that longevity is why people can feel so bitter about it. It has become strongly embedded in a lot of corporate cultures where management can find itself in a homogeneous bubble. This can serve to limit mobility of non-management level workers who could excel if provided the opportunity to take on managerial functions, which means that is lost economic potential.

It's not constant across the board, as there are plenty of IT companies that seem to be doing a decent job at promoting engineers. But then I read a lot of people here talking about "up or out" views of engineers who are above a certain age. It's complicated.

> doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s.

That makes sense to me actually, since you need to have a high level understanding of how businesses work and what stuff the C-suite needs to be doing in order to understand how to value a business.

The C-suite might be the one place where the "generic management skills" might actually be really useful. But middle management and day to day supervisory functions? You can't manage what you don't know, and if you don't understand the processes of the people you're managing you're blind.

It seems like MBA schools recognize this to some extent - my brother got an MBA with a focus on software project management. They even had to learn to do some coding and worked on a couple software projects as a team in order to apply what they were learning.

In my personal take on all this, it is those people who have wrecked this entire country. They bear incredible blame for many massive failures that cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. It is that level of a tragedy. But somewhere, some few people pocketed billions of dollars.

If management was a science, 98% of the managers would not be able to understand it.

I would be willing to be those people still knew how to do the job, just without Excel. They fundamentally understand the reason for "analyzing" things and the output generated by that.

It's when you put a recent MBA grad with 0 domain knowledge as the manager of these people where problems start.

And again, with the accountants. The crusty 60 year old accountant will still be able to read a report generated by a fresh college grad. He could even open the books and spot problems. Issues arise when you put someone who isn't an Accountant in charge of the other accountants.

But when your boss has never even made a model, let alone tried to fish data out of a database, then the kind of work he can imagine, his idea for time duration for work are all off.

More importantly, what he values in the team (for when it comes to promotions) is also likely to be off. And hence, you can end up in a situation where you don't get promoted despite being very good at your job.

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