M.B.A. Applications Decline at Harvard, Wharton, Other Elite Schools
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I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were.
For sure learning on your own, doing things, building product, is better than structured curriculum. But there's something to be said for being exposed to a broad set of business information. When heads down writing code and building businesses, it's hard to step out and learn this disparate knowledge unless you're forced to by wanting to graduate. Maybe you're more disciplined than I, but in my free time I wouldn't dabble in accounting for instance, just wasn't interested. The forcing function is surprisingly helpful.
I'm not claiming it's for everyone, but I got a ton out of my MBA and would recommend. My situation was moving from engineering to product, had full time PM job, trying to start a side business, which now has had significant growth that I attribute a lot to my learnings from the MBA.
Some students in our department were there for an MS in Statistics, others for a dual MS and MBA program. The single greatest indicator of whether or not an MBA was useless was whether the person was actively or passively choosing to get an MBA. About 70% of students were passively choosing to get a graduate degree. Either they had no idea what to do after their bachelors, they realized really quickly after their bachelors that what they thought was "adulthood" in college was not real and decided to run back to it, or they were following the trope of "bachelors -> 2-3 years in industry -> MBA -> ??? -> profit" with no idea of what "???" was except that they'd put in their 2-3 years already. For all of these students, they were passively choosing to get an MBA either to fill a checkbox or to avoid the alternative.
Then there were about 30% of students that actively chose to pursue an MBA. These students almost all had actual, real-world experience and actively chose to get an MBA because of specific needs or circumstances they had. In some cases it was to make a strategic career shift, in some cases it was to better orient themselves after making a career shift, in some cases it was to get over a ceiling in their industry where it was required to keep growing. But in all cases, if you asked them why they got an MBA, they could tell you without hesitation explicitly what prompted that decision, and the value they expected to derive from completing their MBA program (and why the MBA program was the right avenue for getting that value).
MBAs aren't useless. But a very sizable percentage of people graduate with them are useless[1], and would be equally as useless with or without the MBA. And the same holds true for most advanced degrees, from what I've seen.
[1] From the perspective of "hire a bunch of MBAs to solve problems". An incompetent worker without credentials is just as incompetent with credentials. And success in receiving an MBA from an academic environment does not denote success potential in applying the MBA in a business environment.
Coming from the UK my assumption was that MBA degrees were only open to those with some type of actual experience. That is based on my own research around 2002 where I found that Master's in Finance, Management, etc. were the only options for someone with limited real-world experience.
Is this a case where the entry requirements have shifted, or is this a regional thing? I went down the Master's path, but found an opportunity to come to the US on an H1B so I dropped out. I found what I've learned to be incredibly useful, but given how far I made it through I can't justify an MBA for reasons other than the credential or networking.
But a more globally-applicable path is sideloading into an MBA. Many institutions offer "dual degree programs", where you get an MS in Finance or Management or what have you. And because the requirements overlap so heavily with an MBA, for an additional semester or two of classes you can get an MBA as well. So you get in for just the MS, then after you start you switch to the dual degree track. By that point you're already past the general qualifications, already within the graduate school, and already a student. It's mostly an administrative change internally, and as long as your faculty like you it's pretty easy for them to push through.
I suspect those two reasons constitute a sizable portion -- maybe even a majority -- of a typical MBA's value proposition. At the elite schools, the networking component alone might justify the costs.
My two best performing and best paid employees on that team were exact opposites - one had just finished a masters in math and the other had an incomplete bachelors. But both were able to articulate why they had made the choices they made and demonstrated the ability to make deliberate, pragmatic, and calculated decisions. Which is an invaluable skill to have on your team.
[1] I'm a terrible academic. I focused more on working and making money while in school, and gave the bare minimum amount of attention to my classes to get by. So I do truly have appreciation for people that can dedicate themselves to school enough to achieve an advanced degree. But that appreciation is separate from them being able to derive work value from that degree.
Your caveat at the end is also pretty key. If you spend 2-3 years barely scraping by with mediocre results in consulting and don't get promoted, and expect to do the post-MBA pivot, you'll have issues (or you have family connections and it's all moot anyway).
But I was more speaking to people who go and get a random entry-level industry job after their bachelors, spend 2-3 years putting their time in, crawl back to school for an MBA, and expect the six figure job offers to just roll in. That's surprisingly common (not just for MBA, but for many graduate programs).
I went to graduate school to get an MBA from a decently, regionally respected program after one year working full time. I went the part time MBA route. I dropped out because of $reasons after almost finishing.
What I learned from my MBA didn’t have any immediate rewards during the early parts of my career as a software developer, but it really started helping a lot for more senior architect roles - “architect” by title or responsibility - and helped me talk to CxOs and punch above my titles.
I never put anything about graduate school on my resume.
The first time I thought about going back and either getting an MBA or MS in Comp. Sci, I realized that getting either wouldn’t get me an appreciable bump in salary over just self study in technology and aggressively job hopping in my local market.
In two years when things settle down and my youngest is in college and I could realistically think about doing it, it still wouldn’t make much financial sense. I’ll have the skillset, the resume, and the certifications along with my business knowledge to make more as an overpriced “implementation consultant” than I could with an MBA. Especially since I am not willing to move to any of the financial centers and I would basically have to slowly work my way up.
Most development managers are making much less than consultants in my market. Heck when I was a Dev lead, I was making less than ordinary software developer contractors that I hired.
I have an undergrad in Computer Engineer, grad in EE from a big state university.
My employer is willing to pay for another Masters (nice perk...). I have 10 years working experience and work in Atlanta now - so I can do the Georgia Tech Executive MBA, or, their online Computer Science degree.
Assuming I have time (have a 2nd baby on the way so debatable)...and it's free. Is one more worthwhile than the other. And although the G. Tech online degree is available for free, the pressure of deadlines would actually ensure I complete the courses and not just watch a few hours and stop...like I've done already.
It depends on what you want to do and whether you want to stay in Atlanta.
From what I can tell from talking to recruiters, looking at salary surveys, and friends who are also in their 40s who have been aggressive about their careers longer than I have and eschew management, the ceiling for individual contributors and low level architects/dev leads (statistical ceiling without going way out on the bell curve) is around $150-$160K total comp and that's pushing well into the 4th quintile.
You can gradually get over that hump by being an "implementation consultant" for a consulting company, but still you may be looking at around a top end of $180K - $200K. It also may require a fair amount of travel.
I'm not sure which would open more doors or what doors you are trying to travel through. Personally, I have no desire to get into management and want to stay hands on. More money is always nice, but not strictly necessary for me. The cost of living in the 'burbs in Atlanta is so low compared to what you can make as developer with 10 years of experience, it's not really worth the extra headache for me to take on more responsibilities right now.
If a company was willing to pay for my education, I would definitely go the Executive MBA route. It is so easy to teach yourself almost anything in computer science once you have the foundation and I don't think you get much "credit" for getting academic credentials in computer science as you would get for business.
Besides, the online computer science degree from GA Tech is cheap - $7000. The EMBA is $80K. A $7K reimbursement is nothing.
However, want to really double-down on the technical path (or simply want to learn more technically and credential up at the same time), then by all means go for the free GT OMSCS, although with a graduate EE degree I have to say that it feels a little redundant. Perhaps you have a burning or specific research topic you'd like to deep-dive through one or more independent study modules in the OMSCS program, in which case that answers the "purpose" question.
Would your company sponsor a graduate degree outside of GA? If so, you could also potentially consider a higher ranked program and fly in, although your partner will probably veto that idea due to your second incoming child. My point here is that this may open up other options you didn't consider, depending on your financial situation and your real purpose for going back to school.
I think that any part-time program is harder when you have a newborn. Depending on the timing of your second child, and job stability, you may also want to consider whether you should postpone the next graduate degree for a year when your second is most likely to be sleeping through the night(s) again.
The draw of the G. Tech OMSCS is it's more self paced. I can take 1 class per semester while the other traditional I believe would be 2+ classes per semester.
My current position is more management/team lead, and being in a 'large company' my tech exposure hasn't been competitive (case in point...free grad degree, even though I have on already). I've solved a lot of business problems using older tech. The OMSCS would give me the exposure, plus the pressure to actually finish lectures and projects.
My Masters in EE was actually more hardware oriented. Circuits, networking, DSP, etc... I stumbled into web & software dev. I'd do the OMSCS courses in AI, Security & Data Science - I have an interest in those, anyways.
Good point on postponing. I won't start till Fall 2019 - but I think the G. Tech executive MBA I can start in the Spring if I get all my paperwork together, but that would be suicide haha.
At some point in the future if my life allows for it, I would do the OMSCS degree just for the hell of it and it’s only $7K.
Edit: A degree in STEM serves basically two purposes - education and credentials. You already have good credentials and you could teach yourself anything you want in CS.
Even more of a reason to go the eMBA route.
I think an MBA is more useful over a master in CS because many MBA's have great stats programs. In most CS programs you'd have to use up precious elective spots to take those. Also, business intelligence is a huge part of many ds roles. And if you really wanted to take that Machine Learning course in CS, just take it as an elective in your MBA.
I'd love to hear what others have to say on the topic
BI is more related to analytics than DS (broadly defined, DS deals with predictive, while BI deals with descriptive), and typically falls under the purview of data analysts. It also isn't really a prerequisite for DS work. Also, BI is a skill that is easily acquired in industry rather than in school.
I don't know if an MBA is necessarily more useful than a MSCS if you want to become a data scientist. On the hiring end, quantitative training is strongly preferred for true DS positions over qualitative. Given a pool of people with quantitative degrees vs MBAs, it is very likely the former will have an advantage.
The only exception is if the position isn't truly a DS one; many people advertise data analyst under a DS title to get a broader pool of candidates. It's common practice these days.
I have a sibling working towards a business degree (concentration in statistics and DS) and looking to work as a SWE for a few years before going to grad school and working as a DS after getting a degree.
Would a stats focused MBA be more of a fit in your opinion vs a MS in CS?
The part I find unsatisfactory about MBA training is that it seems to be two degrees fused at the hip. Some people pursue one because they want to work in finance, whether as traders or analysts or some sort of deal-makers. Others pursue one because they want to be managers or executives in industry, running companies that are responsible for a wide variety of products or services. It seem like these two tracks should be disentangled.
Sort of the same problem as being ready to program anything, without any particular domain knowledge.
I think software development is less guilty of this, because the usual refrain is "if they're good, they can learn the specific stuff on the job." So the industry (generalizing here) might not always hire for expertise, but it does clearly value having it long term.
On the other hand, MBA's were invented with the idea of "general management" as a career. Sometimes it works, often it doesn't. Even in the elite business schools I've spent time around, I don't often see a culture of valuing expertise. The MBA's I've met who did have domain/discipline expertise either already had it going into their MBA program, or specifically sought out optional classes for it.
All of that said, if you pay attention, MBA usually have a lot to offer in teaching soft skills. I've seen Harvard Business School's curriculum, and I genuinely believe that classes to teach communication and negotiation should be undergraduate core requirements rather than attached to an expensive secondary degree. I wouldn't have paid HBS's asking rate for that kind of training, but if I had that in undergrad, I would have been much more effective coming out of college.
I think this discounts how similar most of the code written at different companies is, the nuances determined by business rules that are established elsewhere in the org chart.
On the topic of business rules though: I don't think it's just business rules. As engineers, we're much better at our jobs when we can internalize the customer mindset, and that takes time. I recently switched industries, and my ability to make architectural decisions is noticeably weaker because I don't have the long view of my problem domain yet. Some PM's like to think that they have that all covered (in my experience, that happens about 50-75% of the time), but even technical PM's don't spend that much time thinking about the architecture, so in my experience it still falls on the engineer to spend some time thinking about the what/why and not just the how.
I think that applies to MBA's too. Business often look pretty similar, but technical and industry expertise makes all the difference.
It's generally hard to absorb the full value of classes like these in undergrad without having any real life experience so to speak. That's why the top MBAs require applicants to have at least 3+ years of a solid career to help them achieve the full value of the courses they will take
Like most degree programs, there's a core set of business classes and a variety of electives allowing you to specialize[1].
[1] Example: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/programs/mba/academic-experienc...
tl;dr if you are confident an MBA can create a step increase in annual comp of even $10k, the cost is more than covered over the remainder of your career.
After staying at one job for way too long 10 years ago, I’ve hopped jobs 4 times, pursuing that strategy (and learning about modern architecture) and have seen jumps of $7K, $10K, $25K, and $20K. Unless the market sours, I should be able to put together a resume and skillset to get another $25K bump as a consultant within the next 3 years.
This isn’t in Silicon Valley, NY, or DC.
I can’t see an MBA helping.
I do feel it’s nice to have that base business, accounting, finance, general management knowledge as a foundation to use to understand things, but is it $150k + $opportunity cost of 2 years worth of education? Not sure...
Then again, as someone above pointed out, I knew why I was getting an MBA. I can teach myself tech, but some of the business aspects are a pain to teach myself so I paid someone else to teach me those.
I tend to think personally that law and MBA grad degrees do generally tilt toward benefiting top schools but I'd never suggest that was an ironclad rule.
For software development, from personal experience of going to an unknown state school in the mid 90s, I was just as competitive with people coming from well known schools within three or four years. It probably would have helped with me landing that first job.
In my current job, to the degree my educational pedigree made any difference at all, it was my undergrad because that's where my hiring manager went. However, I'm sure there are many cases where business school networks associated with top schools can be important.
I did learn a lot that helped me years later.
To add to that value, if you become a team lead and have management responsibilities or have to manage budgets, it becomes even more helpful.
There are plenty of executive MBA and part time MBA programs from reputable schools (not just for profit and online schools) that would allow you to work and go to school. There are some that only meet on weekends.
In many schools there is no external difference between full time and part time (evening) MBA programs. You walk out the door of both programs with the exact same degree. Nobody outside the program will ever know which path you took to get the degree.
Will they not notice the overlap between a job and the programme?
The one person I know that got an EMBA from a decent respected school is a manager at a FAANG. Total comp is somewhat higher than mine, but he is also on the west coast where the cost of living negates much of the difference and if I went into consultancy, it would negate all of the difference.
These roles are rightly challenged by many on HN since they aren't "true" technical architecture roles, for example. Even so, they do exist to support the businesses that create them until there is rationalisation during a recession when many of these roles are jettisoned.
By all general measures, company sponsorship in any significant manner is shrinking[1]. I believe the US employer education assistance tax credit is limited to around $5,250[2] per individual per year. Companies that will foot the entire bill for an executive MBA program seem to be few and far between.
[1] https://poetsandquantsforexecs.com/2014/07/22/how-to-get-an-...
[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-benefits-for-education-info...
10k/year is far more than the value of the median MBA. Especially, when you adjust the numbers for inflation and expected raises.
No degree guarantees you a job, there's always work and ambition and a lot of luck and timing that factor into anyone's career success.
But yes, if you plan to go to law school solely because you want to make money, it's not worth it unless you go to a top school or graduate at the literal top of your class.
Without the experience, it’s a different perspective on the program.
EDIT: That was the Global Executive MBA program at Duke. Citation in comment.
Get your MBA too early, you come without practical perspectives.
Get it too late (once you reach senior management or about a decade of managerial experience), and you don't really need it anymore. Your real-life experiences have already exceeded what an MBA has to offer.
In most places, acquiring an MBA doesn't automatically lead to a pay increase or promotion. You still have to work for those. That said, an MBA may break some glass ceilings.
Is this generally true? Just curious. So as a person in a senior management position, if I read a good selection of books or watch a bunch of videos, would that make me on part with an MBA education?
This was advice I received from folks in senior management.
As with everything else in life, it depends.
https://www.mbamission.com/blog/2010/10/21/mbamission%E2%80%...
EDIT: That is for their Global Executive MBA program. Cited in the last paragraph. Apologies for the confusion.
Maybe my impression is wrong though.
Outside of your specific job, one item I fall back on constantly is financial analysis. For example, you can say Tesla is a great company, if you learn how to read a cash flow statement and net income report you would see otherwise.
If I'm running a business, why do I need to be able to read financial reports at all? Especially for some other random company. If I need to make a financial report, couldn't I use an online generator, template, accounting software, or hire someone to do it? Looking online there seem to be many services for less than a few thousand dollars for financial reporting.
If I have a product wouldn't I be able to take time to research applications for it thoroughly rather than relying industries that I remembered from some course.
As far as measuring clients worth, do I need a course on that really or do I just need to be aware that there are clients that will waste our time and try to get practical evidence that won't be the case.
Can I not get quite a bit of useful knowledge by reading and carefully digesting some key books like The Mom Test?
When you say think like a marketer, so far every article that comes up when I google that is listing things that any used car salesman would apply.
Just based on what you said it sort of makes MBA degrees seem like a waste of time to me.
Just as a small example, why do you need to read financial report at all? Because that is the language of investors and managers. Why read financial reports for some random company? Benchmarking, so you can tell investors and stakeholders "this is how well we are doing vs comparable companies." A template generator won't help you with this kind of analysis, and those services you mention won't help you if you can't really understand them.
I'm not saying you need an MBA to be a good business person, and I felt like my BBA (which I'm told is mostly the same material as an MBA, at least at my school) only confirmed that my instincts and self-learning after 8 years in the workforce was pretty good...but man, those little bits I didn't know and hadn't thought to learn (especially around finance and proper marketing) were the ones that have ended up mattering the most.
I think everything you said makes me appreciate my MBA more and how I can truly understand the finer points of running my successful business.
(And I like your comment about learning Excel in 7th grade...truly the key to a successful business is knowing Excel)
It isn't just "how to read financial reports" but learning how companies can game those financial reports. It is learning that the most important stuff you'll get out a financial report isn't the top level balance sheet but in all the footnotes where they describe how they derived some top level figure.
Accounting is way, way more than simply counting numbers. It is every bit as much of an art as it is a science. For example, learning all the different ways to recognize revenue and, more important, how the particular revenue recognition strategy you use can incentivize behavior--both good and bad.... you probably aren't gonna get that out of a book. You need to be made aware of it.
That is the value of a good MBA program. Sure you can "learn it all out of a book", but not in a holistic way.
But yes, you can learn all of this from books & the Internet, you don't need an MBA for it.
Excel is easy. Knowing what to put into excel is not at all easy. And yeah you can get a template but if you don't know how that template is created or why the creator did what they did you are gonna set your business up for failure. Accounting is not just math but an art.
One of the major intangible benefits of a business education I’ve found was simply the immersion in the language (written and verbal) of business. I can sit down with a CEO or other non-technical stakeholder and discuss his/her business without sounding like an idiot. Helps in an enormpus number of situations.
Sure you want a certificate to do official accounting, but for making business decisions I don't see why the MBA is helpful.
One other non-obvious aspect of school I wished I had focused on more at the time was literature and writing. Communicating in a clear and concise manner becomes increasingly important the more senior you become.
It is valuable.
The opportunity cost (time, benefit, other opportunities) for people in tech is still too high. There becomes a time when it is worth it. The Executive MBA may be up people's alley, but even then the network itself is the most important.
For me, I ended up finding a cofounder who was a generation older than me, all of their connections have already done this stuff or floated to the top of the organizations they represent.
An MBA is not in the cards for me.
It obviously depend on the case but, in general, the main advantage of a case study comes from making the learning experience more interactive and involving than the experience of solving a mere, abstract, exercise. It raises the interest like "based on a true story" does in movies.
You learn from a case, but you learn what the case author decided you should learn from it.
A real experience is a lot better. There are ton of pieces of data and things going on at once. Most of them are less relevant. Some situations look not very relevant but they are actually "the difference that make the difference." In a case for the sake of time, the author needs to focus only some aspects and write a plot around them.
(I don't have much experience with MBAs. So I'm always curious about the benefits.)
I worked at a company that regularly hired recent MBA graduates, and maybe it was just the school, but I saw little value added to these kids. They got manager type tasks, but showed no skills related to management. Their life experience was so limited that I had to explain it to them that you have to schedule people far ahead of time in order to give them time to schedule their lives, and that you had to schedule them like humans because ... they can't work for 24 straight hours because it would take 5 minutes more to look at the spreadsheet and figure out a more optimal schedule.
Beyond internal stuff, even communicating with customer's took hand holding and teaching basic life lessons.
I often questioned how the candidates I worked with ever got into an MBA program (I'm guessing it was just open). I wouldn't trust some of them to work at a menial job without a great deal of supervision, let alone make decisions for a business / other people.
IMO an MBA just doesn't make sense without significant / proven business life experience for most people.
It really was the FedEx commercial IRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA
Obviously there are people with MBAs with FAR more skills, but with other folks like I experienced I wonder if it has watered down the market for MBAs.
At what point in their careers did they go get an MBA? My fiancée went to Kellogg and it was a rarity to see anyone there who didn't already have 5+ years of work experience. It was sort of an unspoken (but kind of spoken, since the M7 all highly suggest it) rule.
The lady leading the session to sell me a $150,000+ degree which requires me to leave my (extremely successful and promising career) for two years (and screw up my family life while doing it), started talking about how if people in the room got a bad grade in a certain area for their undergraduate degree - they might have to go back and fix it before they apply.
Did I mention I have to pay the costs of this program 100% myself since most employers (and mine) won't cover it anymore?
Once I heard that, I was done. Not only do I have to take three months to study for a stupid GMAT or GRE or whatever, I am also being held accountable for a grade I got over 12 years ago.
In that 12 years, I quit my business career ,taught myself software engineering, built multiple applications used by millions of people every month before resuming my career as a manager of technical evangelist teams.
The idea that I need to go get an MBA, take a GMAT, submit to covering for a bad grade 15 years ago after achieving a very high degree of proficiency in Objective-C and doing the things I have done since was so laughable it ended the desire for me to ever get an MBA.
Maybe if they paid me I might consider it. I just dont get it. It is something I might do if I got rich in cryptocurrency and needed a hobby to pass the time, thats about it.
Dont get me wrong, people (some) with MBAs I have met are often quite smart. But it seemed like an awful lot of time, stress and money and administrative nonsense for what the result is.
Did this degree force fulltime?
One of my defining decisions was taking leave and eventually dropping out of a top executive mba program a third of the way in, before I had to take a six figure loan to pay the rest. If I am to be brutally honest with myself, the decision not to finish wasn't entirely my own, but I could have finished.
The shit really hit the fan in my life and this forced me to take stock. Had I not been forced, I probably would have continued down the mba path and career change. Losing my father after two very sick years, being laid off by a business in collapse, having a six figure student loan application on my desk, and other crucial "etc" pushed me to reevaluate my life decisions.
Here are some important lessons learned:
An MBA from a reputable program was leading me into debt servitude and constraints that would shape my career. Debt constraints are major life constraints.
Changing careers to do something that was more meaningful can lead to many new opportunities. I left prime brokerage in financial services and was planning to transition into healthcare, hospital cfo type of work. Helping create novel solutions to rising costs of healthcare was a mission I could align myself with. Helping protect investment bank lending to hedge funds through margin financing paid well but served no higher purpose. Healthcare doesn't have a monopoly on purpose, though, and many who work in healthcare do so just to collect a paycheck. I realized I could achieve my goal elsewhere and with fewer bureaucratic constraints, but at a cost-- as an entrepreneur!
Entrepreneurship has been everything I expected it to be. I had to become the technical expert I needed as a partner. It's been a long, grueling experience. I am so fortunate to have taken it.
A couple of my classmates went on and got full 2-year MBAs from very prestigious US institutions.
The verdict, both from those who went on to do something technical, and those who went on to other things, is that Engineering is harder. It may not pay as well, and it's harder, but it's probably more fun if you find the right job. My friend who is a PE partner wondered what he missed out on, since a girl he knew from Engineering went and joined SpaceX very early on. There were a few stories about people who got into F1 as well.
The other part is that you don't actually learn a great deal about business in business school. You won't learn how to make decisions in a strategy class. You won't learn how to invest in a finance class. You might learn some things about the history of thought in the field, eg Taylorism. But generally it is not what it says on the tin.
By contrast I built a working radio in my first term as well as a bridge that an adult could stand on.
A really big issue, which to their credit they pointed out at business school, is that it might be better for managers to have domain knowledge in what they manage, rather than just be general management "specialists". I happen to fall into this more Teutonic camp.
Also, note that very few people that I know report taking an MBA to learn anything. They generally are as cynical as they ought to be about it (!) and did it in order to have better job prospects. It's worked out very nicely for them.
The light got shined on this type of program, these credential-seeking roaches scattered, and now they’ll go ruin some other perfectly reasonable academic discipline, most probably data science.
I don’t blame the roaches. I guess I blame idiots who buy knowledge products based on credential, and thus either employ these credential roaches at high wages, or else generate the demand that makes it profitable for other consulting / white-shoe sorts of businesses to employ the roaches.
You might as well criticize human nature.
99% of people pick the best path they can see towards an easier life that gives them the most suitable work/money trade-off they are able to tolerate. If MBA grads aren't good at what they do, that's the fault of MBA programs. MBA grads just want to get credentials and training and make money, just like almost every person in the world. I tend to shy away from personal statements, but your use of "roaches" makes me think that some of what you say bleeds from personal wounds.
You seem surprised someone would criticize a bad manifestation of human nature. That puzzles me, given that it’s so historically effective.
Somehow you feel that because I used an analogy of roaches scattering to describe when rent-seeking people looking to secure rents with credential are forced to flee one source (MBA programs) for some other that this makes your interpretation compatible with what I wrote, but I don’t see why. You questioning “why I blame [MBA grads]” seems just as incompatible with what I wrote as before.
But the comparison of human beings to cockroaches is very troubling to me; it sounds much harsher than I hope you intend.
The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive.
I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved.
I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.
This problem is so severe that I would argue that it's tearing Western civilization apart. So-called "fake news" is a problem that only exists because real news is expensive to create and needs be heavily subsidized to exist whereas fake news is cheap to make but heavily subsidized by bad actors. This is perhaps the single most important problem in media today. If you can solve the business problem behind content creation you'll be an absolute hero; but I really doubt that shaming people for reading pirated articles is going to do it.
Looking at that page does not attack or rob anyone. The use of that word is simply perpetuation of Hollywood propaganda.
It's not robbing someone but it is removing some potential revenue. And, so I don't come across as hypocrite, I also circumvent the vast majority of subscriptions, but I realize I am denying some miniscule revenue and over time, all added up, could be something.
So the problem is _both_ friction and circumvention in the least, as well as overcharging. Would I pay for Cable? No. Would I pay for Netflix? Why not. They offer a good product at a very reasonable price with little friction and I would not try circumvention, because there is no reason.
Dozens of studies about music have proven this theory false. In fact music “piracy” likely has increased their revenue because they spread music. Intuitively you can see why labels have gave in to free as supported YouTube models as opposed to locking them down; they wouldn’t have done this had CD sale revenue was higher, but in aggregate having people’s attention is worth more. Similarly, I can for sure let you know that I would not pay for WSJ if I couldn’t read their articles under any capacity. For me not to be able to read it just decreases their network and thus their value in other ways. And now that I’m more familiar with them I might pay one day.
Music has evolved into paid services or ad supported services. News content so far has failed with the ad supported model and unless they create some cartel (a spotify for news, let's say) they have little alternative beside the direct subscription model.
I don't get that - it seems pretty obvious you could arm a crew and fend off some assholes with AK47s (you have the high ground, lots of corridors, time to prepare and can afford some .50's on the deck) - but then again, I'm so American I am practically a Bald Eagle.
I don’t make up excuses about friction and arbitrary value and then feel justified about taking it without paying.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft. Playing word games like “piracy” or “stealing” doesn’t strengthen your case, rather it exposes a central weakness. If what you’re claiming is so terrible, why do you have to pretend that it’s actually something else? This is an old game that was started in the 80’s by industry groups, and its sad to see it internalized by people on HN who should know better.
If you want to argue the merits or downsides of copyright infringement, do so, but don’t move the goalposts to unrelated crimes.
There will be thousands of small abuses of power that go unnoticed without a watchdog.
A couple of my favorite excuses I've seen in this and other discussions:
• The article's not providing enough value to be worth paying for
• There's not a frictionless way to pay
• They want me to take it because I might share it
• They can't control what I do with an HTTP request
To me it's pretty clear: I don't feel right about taking something I know someone is trying to charge for. I'll subscribe or I won't read it.
MBA applications go down as the economy performs. The opportunity cost is higher when there are well paying jobs readily available and promotions to be had without needing to go back school.
During a recession, MBA applications should go up as work is not as readily available. People also want to retrain their skills to make themselves more marketable to employers, as anyone else would do by going to vocational schools during hard times.
There is a time and a place for such shenanigans but the techies of folklore saw it happen in a lot of bad places in a lot of bad ways.
Some of the rest of the disdain for MBAs is that a lot of such courses are aimed at the general public; if you are the type that had a computer science degree in your past, you will find the course to be slow and the coursework to be trivial, and you'll probably quite correctly feel you'd be better off on at least the most direct level (ignoring "networking", etc.) studying it yourself. But I kept my qualification to the speed of the course and the homework carefully; the ideas inside can still be useful and valuable, it's just they'll come at a rather slow pace compared to what you may be used to and wrapped in a lot of BS (to you) coursework.
They think they are smarter. Also there's a shocking amount of nerds vs jocks BS that still goes on well into adulthood.
Some people never get over high school.
Ask someone who has built a cleaning business, or runs a restaurant, or who works as a roofing contractor, whether business is easy.
For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree.
Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.
This I found to be a glib generalization. What is so intrinsic about business knowledge that cannot be learned through studying and experience? Say compared to learning how compilers work and building one?
I could say the same thing about business people - they have no idea how to write a compiler.
I’m simply alluding to your statement that refers to “smart people” and their lack of business knowledge.
For what it's worth, I was one of those people. I didn't go for my undergrad until 8 years into my adult life (I'm a veteran), but I had done extensive reading about business to the point that most of my BBA (which I was taking as a bonus alongside CS) felt like review. Except for finance. I knew the basics, but even undergrad courses revealed that my knowledge was very shallow. I think it's just something that people don't expect to have that much complexity. I wouldn't have thought to learn it if I hadn't been forced to take it in school, but I took as many finance courses as I could once I realized the knowledge deficit.
Is finance hard? The sophisticated stuff can be, but generally in comparison to engineering it's not. But nonetheless, nearly none of the computer scientists in my class or in my professional circles have bothered to learn...probably because they're more interested in compilers ;)
Can you defend this statement? I don't think I am misunderstanding what he is trying to say. This statement makes no sense to me.
"I very quickly realized that" <- Implying a prior assumption that was proven false
"very smart people" <- The set of very smart people OP has met, which hinges on perspective
"often" <- The key phrase here, implying that it is generally (but not always) true
"have very little knowledge of finance and business." <- The assumption at hand
I'm assuming OP thinks of STEM people as the definition of "very smart," based on his description of his degree, and his feelings about coding. OP may have assumed that since his knowledge is comparatively trivial for STEM people to learn, the knowledge might be widespread among what he thinks of as smart people, and was surprised when this valuable knowledge wasn't. In my experience, the average kind of person I'm assuming OP would consider "very smart" is either averse to business, or didn't bother learning business because it took time away from the hard problems they were more interested in, even though they easily could have.
More generally, the total set of obviously and profoundly smart people is bound to be (much) bigger than the set of obviously and profoundly intelligent people with knowledge of finance. Are there smart business people? Absolutely. But it's probably a small percentage when compared with the total set of Very Smart People. Also, at least in my school, the smartest people tend to go into harder disciplines, so that may further dilute the numbers of finance knowledge among the pool of Very Smart People.
So, there are multiple ways OP's statement can be true without being specifically about the capacity of intelligent people to learn finance through study or experience.
For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems).
The network is harder to replicate, but again not impossible. Someone who feels motivated to figure it out can do so.
> For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems).
That's a common cliché, but it's only partly true. There are problems that only occur at large scale (complex mergers, fancy legal structures, sophisticated financing). But the fundamental problems are all the same at every size. You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory.
These are universal problems of business.
A whale has problems that a dolphin does not. But they both breathe, both pump blood, both eat and digest and move of their own volition.
I feel there's often value in humbling yourself before another profession and seeing what you can learn.
Half these things take under a few days to learn sufficiently for any business with ARR under ~$1M. And you can anyway hire people to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge for basically peanuts.
And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers - if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead.
All this depends on your goals. I want to make that very clear. There is almost no value to an MBA for someone intending to build something from the ground up. There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.
And publishers used to sell "TEACH YOURSELF C++ IN 21 DAYS". Doesn't make it so.
> And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers
There are courses about exactly and entirely this.
> if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead.
A lot of business professors are independently wealthy from side businesses. Karl Ulrich springs to mind as a serial entrepreneur, teaching at Wharton.
> There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.
This is true for some MBAs or, rather, some course designs. But there's no law that professors at business schools can't study, themselves experience and teach entrepreneurship. Because they do. The faculty at Wharton or Stanford have honest-to-goodness entrepreneurs because they want to be there.
It's one thing to say that teaching is an imperfect substitute for doing. It's another thing to say that there's some mystical essence that business schools are somehow magically blind to and stoically opposed to learning about, studying, experimenting with and teaching.
You saying a combination of 2 books would exceed a entire MBA curriculum is the true "pure hoohah" here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768
Pasting it here:
I went for it mostly to switch industries and geographies, as well as for the "learning" part, which I just find fun.
It worked really well for me, but I had clear expected outcomes. The marginal value of an MBA degree is diminishing as the knowledge is easily available anywhere, but there are a few things which still count:
- Network: unlike an usual MSc or PhD, an MBA class has 100's of people, and you spend a lot of time with them, building a very solid network
- Switching functions or industry: it gives you a very good starting point. If you're an engineer, it will be hard to switch straight into marketing, PM, finance, etc. Doing an MBA, plus a summer internship in your target function will make a huge difference.
- Switching geographies: the job marketplace for new MBA grads is global (visa issues in some countries aside), and salaries are usually similar globally, so it's a nice opportunity to chose where you to live moving forward
- You're being sponsored: just do it, seriously, don't even think about it
On the learning side, even if you can find all the stuff online, it makes a huge difference to discuss implications face to face with some brilliant professors. Here's the top stuff I learned:
* How to constantly assess your own decision biases and compensate for it
* Lot's of game theory and strategy applied to real world
* Negotiations
* You're not gonna beat the market, so don't even bother
* How power is created and traded inside organizations
Why should you get one? Because a lot of that knowledge and skills you don't learn just by reading a book. It takes a lot of experience, experience sharing, cases, games and so on.
Sadly, the enormous majority of engineers and product managers I meet are completely ignorant of basic product economics, business and finance basics, competitive strategy, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they don't consider themselves to be ignorant on those subjects, quite the opposite).
One could the same the same about MBAs. A lot of them are quite ignorant about engineering and scientific basics. But, we don't ask managers to get engineering and PhD degrees. So may be, we need value different areas of expertise and learn to work together. I hope an MBA degree teaches some aspects of it.
Yes, they are, but you don't see a lot of MBAs sitting by a coder's desk and saying that they're choosing the wrong name for a function.
[Edit: added quoted text]
Then again, I shouldn't complain. People like that mean there's always lots of work available for people like me.
So basically, you are implying that MBAs are aware of their boundaries but scientists and engineers aren't? I think a little of introspection might be in order here.
> you are implying that MBAs are aware of their boundaries but scientists and engineers aren't?
No, a lot of them just don't care about those subjects.
But engineers clearly aren't aware of their boundaries. The running joke in my group of engineering classmates is "Because who really understands about [insert non-engineering subject here] is computer engineers...]".
It isn't a coincidence that nobody else uses "I can't see why..." or "I don't understand why..." as an argument, as if the fact that you can't see or understand implied that it must not be true.
Just take a look at the hacker news feed at any day...
So an MBA might promise a new feature to a client without really knowing if it can be delivered in that timeframe or even if it is technically possible.
Most managers don't have a lot of deep technical understanding of the products that are part of their business, even if they have a very good understanding of the business.
Most engineers don't have a lot of understanding of the business their product is a part of, even if they have a deep technical understanding of the product.
That's why you don't ask engineers for business decisions, or business managers for technical decisions.
Role specialization exists for a reason.
> So an MBA might promise a new feature to a client without really knowing if it can be delivered in that timeframe or even if it is technically possible.
That doesn't have anything to do with MBA, or even the job. I've seen pretty much every single profession, from a cleaner, to a car mechanic, to a doctor, do exactly the same.
Beyond that, if that is happening in your organization, it is a sign of bad managers, and bad processes.
Mind elaborating more on this? Books, or key words to search for?
I think I'm running into this issue. I see a lot of decisions made in business that seems pretty counter intuitive if the decision makers were profit maximizing individuals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768
> if the decision makers were profit maximizing individuals
This might be a different problem, because "profit" (or utility, which would be a better word) is not a straightforward measure. A firm is a very complex organism, so it isn't trivial to account for 1st, 2nd, 3rd order impacts of any actions. Often enough, the "best" decision might seem counter-intuitive, or just terrible.
The best thing about an MBA is that you will learn about a variety of disciplines: finance and accounting, marketing, information technology, statistics, operations, economics, public relations, business strategy. You won't become expert in any of those fields but at a good school you will get to know classmates that are experts in each field. An MBA is a great opportunity to switch direction in your career.
The bad thing about an MBA is it takes two years of your life and can be expensive. If you are an attractive candidate tuition is negotiable, so I think the time spent on it is the biggest problem. There is no bar exam for MBAs so be wary of second tier schools or "Executive" (night school) MBAs. They just mean less. No one cares about whether you have an MBA once you are five years into your career, but a very top school always looks good.
Bottom line: the degree got too popular, got less valuable as the structure of business has changed since it was conceived, and it makes sense for fewer people to pursue it. Supply and demand, as the taught me :)
What did Apple look like when Jobs left? What happened to Oracle when all the engineers left? What happened to Star Wars when it was bought by Disney?
MBAs find the good value in a company and chop it up and charge you more.
Anyone who is going to critisize this, I would just say; don’t miss the forest for the trees! You’re going to say all this stuff about how MBAs write board reports and do financials, blah blah blah. Yes, I know they do this. The end result of these things is what I described above.
Presumably that's enough to motivate anyone.
https://poetsandquants.com/2018/09/29/whos-hardest-hit-in-th...
I think my MBA taught me how to view the business at a systems level. When you consider the various financial and performance metrics that managers look at, a business is just another engineering problem.
w/o the MBA, I'm not sure when I would've learned that way of thinking.
You'll be exposed mainly to those in industry.
An MBA is a generalized exposure to the business world, it gives you a basis in things like Finance, Economics, Accounting, Marketing, Economics, Ops etc. and then it delves into specific subjects as needed.
If you don't have a background in any of this, it can be enlightening, to say the least. As an Engineer, learning core Financial/Econ concepts was basically like learning to speak English - it made me embarrassed at how 'illiterate' I was beforehand. Basically, reading the Financial Times goes from 'Chinese' to 'something you can understand'.
I'd argue that it's very useful for people to have a broad understanding of these issues as they have increasing levels or responsibility in business. That said, you don't need it, and it can be in many ways limiting for an early entrepreneur because I feel it can get rather academic. It's in a way an 'intellectualization' of business, when in reality, business is about 'doing'.
So consulting firms need people who have this breadth of knowledge, moreover, it helps considerably with their reputation. They have very established intakes, career progress etc.. Same can be said in the banking world: you come in, you do this for 2 years, you do your MBA, that gets you into this role, which you do for another 1.5, then you move onto this - etc. This amount of structure is vastly unlike startups. Again, it's arguably unnecessary, but it's baked into the career development cycle.
Some very large organizations have those 'required steps' as well - because they have predictability in terms of ops, they sometimes put 'MBA' as a soft or hard requirement for certain things.
It's an enlightening experience, and if you go to one of the better schools you meeting exceptional people including other students and profs. At the lesser schools - not so much. And the 'top schools' have guaranteed access to the best brands on earth. If you get an MBA from a top 15 globally, you can pretty much get an interview at a FANG.
The benefit for those on an 'MBA specific career path' is measurable, which is about 1/2 of them, but for the other 1/2 it's more intangible.
In terms of reputation, either you go to a 'top school' or the name recognition is not worth it, so you have to look at it differently.
There are a lot of mediocre MBA's, just like there are a lot of mediocre software developers and UI designers. And an MBA is not a specific professional designation either - so I often feel there is undue slack.
That said - there are too many of them out there, a lot of mid and low tier schools saw it as a cash cow and just sold expensive programs to whomever.
Engineers (I am one) can be odd, and sometimes I think they are afraid and or devalue things they don't understand - particularly finance and marketing. Which is funny because the world of finance can be as nerdy as Engineering and it's very powerful stuff. I think most Engineers would love finance and Econ once they got going it it. Marketing is more intangible, but I've developed huge respect for those folks as well.
The thing about startups is that they almost favour people with their nose to the grind, creating raw outcomes, even those who might be a little economically illiterate: witness the legions of founders who have no clue when it comes to shares, equity, financing instruments etc..
You have to very careful getting an MBA outside of finance or consulting. If you're company sponsors or has a requirement and it's obvious for your career path - then that's an option. If you did a really soft undergrad like 'English' and are having difficulty breaking into business and you know what you want to do - that's an option. But the worst thing that someone can do is just expect that they go there and it's a panacea and a magic entry point to business.
It's one of the degrees that really is 'what you decide to make of it'. It's not like JD or Med School where there's in some ways a set system of outcomes.
I would add here that if you intend to break into or continue on in the consumer packaged goods field (e.g. traditional brand manager career trajectory at P&G, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate, Pepsi/Coke, L'Oréal, Nestlé, etc.[1]) then an MBA is still basically mandatory for career growth.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/260963/leading-fmcg-comp...
Nothing about MBAs.
Here's a comparable list: https://consumergoods.com/top-100-consumer-goods-companies-2...
Is about the network. I tried to pursue an EMBA, they advertised everywhere that the alumni are in every big company and because of the closed group communication, was really really easy to reach any CXO because of the school.
Otherwise, yes, I declined because of the huge time invest - money wasn't an issue, like being for a month in HK or in Buenos Aires with my class. Interesting, but not really helping.
I also sense, though I don't have specific data, that a lot of jobs that traditionally required an MBA because reasons, no longer do so. It may still be valued but perhaps not to the point of being effectively required.
I don't think this applies to most MBA subjects, as least as much as it does the others. It's a highly applied and contemporary discipline, perhaps one of the least theoretical.
My best Finance prof, for example, who taught us Private Equity / VC, had personal relationships with so many of the best funds. He spends a lot of time in the field, staying in tune with trends in the industry. He was able to bring in really bright minds from the field, and it always made for the most engaging material.
Even advanced corporate finance with all the cases like Volkswagen and their amazing currency trading activities ... it's all very much the real world material.
It could be argued the real value is learning how to speak to and think like other MBA'ers (whether logical or not). And group projects are good for developing social skills for those who lack them. Hobnobbing has value in the real world.
In short, it's more of a club than a discipline. But, it wasn't for me. Your mileage may vary; and I'll admit I bailed before taking some of the courses.
There are exceptions of course, but in my experience the MBAs want to network to bring in others from their school/program to form a management cabal. It's really bad news. We should also remember that if startups weren't a high status thing to work on these days, all those MBAs would be working for big companies and would have no interest in startups.
What you don't get w/the Personal MBA is the support of your professors, other students, and most importantly the network and recognition ...
MBA is really something one should do if they're passionate about people, relationships - e.g. what any solid business is made of.... more so than about just the knowledge or what school they go to.
If you’re working and getting good opportunities and comp, why not keep going? It’s not like you can’t go get an MBA later.
Still there are going to be people who will send their kids to expensive schools but the value is going to diminish over time I think.
Is it the same at other places?
I found 2 classes useful-
>Lean Principles- changed my life, I started using Industrial Engineering at home and sharing my findings with the internet. It has been very popular.
>Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is.
Everything else was basically useless. Had a few crazies as professors in my business classes. Engineering classes were not bad, but not helpful.
So 2/10 classes were useful? But incredibly useful.
This was exactly why I chose to do a BBA alongside my CS degree. If I was gonna make something, I wanted to make sure it would have some impact on the real world. I tell people: CS is a tool for solving problems, but business is a tool for finding them.
I would say that knowing exactly what one wants from an MBA program, financial situation and risk tolerance, will usually tip the scales in favour of a part-time MBA.
Here's a question, what business runs without information systems? Do modern MBAs require understanding of computing basics as they do accounting?
> World-wide, the number of M.B.A. applications was flat from 2017, partly because of an increase in students looking to pursue their degrees in Europe and Asia, according to the GMAC survey. Applications surged 8% to schools in Canada and 9% to schools in East and South Asia.
Canada surging by 8% is not because schools in Canada are suddenly better than US counterparts. It is because of US policy and rhetoric under Trump.
The relative loss of talent wanting to work here will hurt us. Consider that the CEOs of Google and Microsoft are all foreign born holders of MBAs.
Edit: removed Elon Musk from MBA list. He studied business as part of his undergrad from Wharton.
But yes, Google and Microsoft hired MBAs as CEOs when they ceased to innovate at the same rate as before and started to be just ordinary companies defending a monopoly.
I'm fairly certain this is false. He has an undergraduate degree from Wharton and has expressed multiple times how he prefers to avoid hiring MBAs.
(yes, I know I'm nitpicking)
My interesting journey after getting an MBA:
-Received my MBA 2007, just a year before the full blown financial crisis. I needed an MBA to transition out adverting/marketing.
-2009-2011 Couldn't find a job. My MBA was in Finance. Taught myself to program financial algorithms. (php/MySql)
-2012 Became a coder, programmer, software developer. Made good money programming other people's dumb ideas. No risk, no suits and ties and very few meetings.
-2018 Not going to become the CTO at Google or Facebook. Being a Code Monkey is "meh", but I have to work on my own projects at night to be intellectually challenged. Now looking for a job where I can implement programming knowledge while at the same time work more with the business side. There always seems to be a certain lack of communication between the software side and the business side.
See my profile if you want to discuss.