Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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Sigh, looks like this one's going to be the weekly HN MBA Hate Thread™. In defense of the degree:

Has it ever occurred to you guys that maybe some (many?) of these people were hackers prior to getting their MBA, and are very competent? Quite a few of my classmates had engineering (including software) backgrounds, and even the ones who had engineering degrees but didn't actually code were still clued in. Why this blanket dismissal of anyone with the degree?

This kind of generalization, "All X are bad/dumb/incompetent" would be shunned here and down voted to oblivion if X were "women", "men", "offshore developers", "no college degree", "interns", etc. But somehow "MBA" is totally OK. Bash away!

Because of this bizarre stigma in Silicon Valley (by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus), I tend to not even mention mine unless asked. When it comes up and I mention that I did the MBA thing a decade ago, I get reactions from my software colleagues ranging from "Wait, but you seem to know your shit!" to "Why would you do such a thing??" There are competent MBAs and there are shitty ones. Why can't this be acknowledged? Such a strange little quirk of our bubble out here...

> by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus

Maybe that's why they will never come up with the next Apple/Google/SpaceX/etc.

Every single MBA I have met, without exception, has been extremely good at talking and making presentations. Ask them to do real work, and they will find a million excuses.

Another thing I have noticed, is the kind of people attracted to doing an MBA. They have seen all of Steve Jobs' talks/speeches, talk incessantly about Brand Building and strategy. Ask them to dial for dollars and you get radio silence.

What qualifies as "real work"? A competent decision maker/consensus reacher is, ime, more valuable than an extra engineer in any software project of a non trivial size. Not every product decision can be made based on logical merits. I don't care what someone's background is if they help maintain organizational coherency.

Organizational coherency?

I have a MBA, but I'm also the lead developer (and project manager) of my project. I rather be coding instead of being in front of people and giving presentations, but I do those things to ensure my project is successful (and that it grows). And I think most of business books and ideas are recycled non-sense.

Maybe we'll meet in the future, but not all developers with MBA's are that bad...

I'm a developer who is interested in getting an MBA. One thing I've learned is that like any degree, an MBA from one school is not equal to an MBA from another.

Finding an online MBA offering that is decent quality is next to impossible or the price far exceeds what most people are willing to pay. I've tried some courses from MIT & Wharton online. Their content is great & possibly well worth the price if you are able to relocate & can afford the cost. I would imagine a few of the other top schools are worth it as well. After that, I would seriously question the value from most any other MBA.

On a side note, many people with an MBA often say the most valuable thing they received was a "network".

SpaceX? Elon Musk studied Business and Physics at Wharton/Penn and recommends that any founder should have some MBA style business training.

Late reply, but business training and MBA are 2 separate things.

Elon has categorically stated that MBAs are a bad idea : http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201311/profiles.cfm

Wharton is an elite school for Business. Very few schools match their education in business. Had Elon went to a random state school that isn't a top 5 business school, he might not be saying that.

When someone says "MBAs are bad/dumb/incompentent" that's not actually what they mean, it's just a shortcut for not being able to adequately explain themselves. It's tough to give words to all the little nuances that form this kind of opinion.

At a high level, when a company is bringing in the MBAs, it means they have found their gold mine and the MBAs are being brought in to mine every little cent from it. When this happens, the development priorities change. Your features get chopped up into buckets that the business charges clients more for. A simple, dinky little feature that is probably two lines of code gets walled off from those users so we can charge these users 10x more. We sit there, as developers, saying to ourselves, "wtf, why would they do that? It doesn't cost the company anything extra to run two lines of javascript...". On and on this goes until you reach the point that you stop developing entirely because your clients can't be squeezed for cash any more.

I've found that there is a certain type of engineer who falls prey to their own arrogance. They are good at the job so they don't see the value in having someone else come in to tell them what they should be doing. As far as they see it an MBA isn't doing anything special that they couldn't do themselves. You see the same thing with developers who don't see the point in UX people. Being good enough (which is not the same as being good) at something often makes people believe that something is easier than it actually is.

In some respects they're right. If you are a team lead, you could probably do most of what an MBA does. If you have finished an undergrad CS degree you can definitely finish Business School. It's just that this point completely neglects the fact that if you could do all the management tasks AND develop at the same time, your company probably wouldn't be paying a MBA an exorbitant amount of money to do the management work. Yeah a lot of times it seems like management just moves from pointless meeting to pointless meeting especially as an engineer sitting in on them, but that flow of information between stakeholders is incredibly important. It's absolutely inefficient, but unfortunately there's often not a better way. Like 90% of management responsibilities are just coordinating and communicating.

Look at average earnings of an MBA 10 years out vs average earnings of a CS grad 10 years out and tell me which one is more useful for maximizing one's career options.

I think if you compare across all MBA programs in the US and all CS programs, and account for debt, you'll find that the average CS program has a better return. This is because even shitty MBAs cost a fortune and don't necessarily teach a lot of useful skills, whereas even a shitty CS degree teaches you to program enough to be employable.

Now if you compare a Harvard or Wharton MBA to say a Stanford or MIT CS degree, then you'll probably find that the MBA outperforms by miles. But I think that's because those programs sell a deep network of rich and powerful people. Harvard MBA go off to run large companies, and Stanford PHDs go run research projects. I'm generalizing, but at the top end they're using very different optimization functions.

>whereas even a shitty CS degree teaches you to program enough to be employable

I met someone with a CS degree from Stanford who couldn't do a basic HTTP request in their main programming language (with access to Google / documentation), nor implement and reverse a linked list. These seem like really basic things that anyone with a CS degree should be able to do...

I think you should rephrase your statement to "even a shitty CS degree will convince companies that you are employable".

Eh, some languages make HTTP really annoying, and if you never work with that it could be a slog. But, this is anecdata. I guess I could clarify; mediocre to poor CS programs serve as a strong employability signal than an equivalent MBA often for less than 1/4 the price, and programming offers a number of good opportunities to rub digital elbows with well known/connected programmers. No such opportunity exists for MBAs insofar as I am aware.

I guess my thesis is that if you can't go top 10, don't get an MBA unless you company pays for it.

Maybe they hadn’t worked in that area recently. If you work on a large software application your focus might be very narrow.

It’s like saying you don’t know what 13 times 14 is off the top of your head so you aren’t good at maths.

It's more like saying you can't figure out what 13 times 14 is with access to a pen (or pencil) and paper.

I think a lot of the disdain for MBAs comes from the fact that while most positions have had stagnant or declining wages for the last few decades, upper level management has seen gains that far surpass inflation even though their job is fundamentally no different than in the 70's. Management's job is important, sure, but is it significantly more important than the grunts who provide the actual value to the company?

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