It is easy to undervalue marketing, sales, financial and other non-technical skills. There are definitely terrible MBAs, but also amazing ones.
The reality is that people aren't one-dimensional. If you have overly simple rules: no MBAs, must have University degree, must have Ivy league, Uber people are unethical etc, you make worse decisions.
Nope.
This is what usually happens to some of the engineering guys I went to university with who stay at companies and do not specialize in anything engineering but want to progress in management.
Sundar Pichai went to Wharton for his MBA before joining Google. He is also ex-McKinsey. So, by HN standards, he's the absolute worst, right?
Google's leadership ranks are filled with MBAs, including tons of VPs that aren't household names but are nonetheless very influential here.
MBA programs are one of the primary ways we recruit product managers (it's how I became a Google PM, full disclosure). Sales, strategy, ops are also full of MBAs.
The next phase of this monthly argument on HN will be, then: "Well, that's what's wrong with Google then, it's all crap after they started hiring MBAs!" which is also nonsense, because lots of the senior people w/ MBAs were hired a decade ago or more.
IMO, anyone who hires purely based on a degree - whether it be a PhD, MBA, CS or whatever, is probably lazy and bad at hiring. If MBAs ruined a company, the people to blame should be the people who hired those individuals who happened to have MBAs and allowed them to ruin the company.
Granted, MBA programs do attract certain types of personalities - there were plenty of jerks when I started my MBA almost a quarter of a century ago (wow, i'm getting old), but there are also plenty of people with MBAs who aren't stereotypical money-grubbing, buzzword-spewing drones either.
To be fair, "a decade ago, give or take" may fit perfectly with some people's view of when Google (and with it, the rest of the Web) become crap.