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]
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.
Then again, I shouldn't complain. People like that mean there's always lots of work available for people like me.
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...