As an MBA, I really take issue with this cynicism of MBA programs. It's not like we're cold greedy bastards. Stop generalizing. People can make great and terrible decisions, regardless of grad school degree choice.
Was that person an MBA graduate or not?
The point is someone signed off on that. And in a business, it's usually someone with an MBA.
I can't imagine a business of that popularity having someone making business decisions without an MBA under their belt.
Backlash from customers and workers is virtually guaranteed to hurt long-term profits.
Generally speaking, how are MBA's taught to avoid making this very mistake?
The mechanism for enforcement is ABET accreditation. When I was at Cal Poly SLO, our CS program was up for re-accreditation, and yes, we were required to take an ethics course, mostly due to remarks from prior accreditation reviews.
Edit:
> I am not able to find more than a handful of CS degree programs with ethics prerequisites
ABET accreditation allows for ethics to be covered as part of other courses in the curriculum. IIRC, it requires at least 4 units worth coursework to focus on ethics. Schools are allowed to cover this as part of a software engineering capstone series, for example.
The general point is that it started with a altogether too common dig at MBAs. I think those are usually unwarranted without any further examination. But I also found some studies that indicate leadership in a corporation is neutral to positive on corporate social responsibility (didn't share it earlier, but here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25782028).
The ABET model curricula is admirable, but the ethics requirement is not overly stringent. And there are very prominent CS/CE programs that are not accredited (http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx, I won't name names, but they are top 10 schools, easily).
It would be great if every damn high school student had to take semester of secular ethics, let alone MBAs or Engineers. I could easily see any degree having a 1 or 2 credit hour course in profession specific ethics.
But to the original point, I just don't like people getting high and mighty over people with MBA degrees for no good reason (I don't have an MBA).
ps - and to bring it all the way back around, there were many, many people involved in this. UX design, backend development, PM, project management, testing... it's just lazy scapegoating to pin this on a hypothetical MBA pulling all the strings.
However, I do disagree slightly with your point regarding the many people involved in this. While it's true that it takes several types of skills to build a product like Instacart, most companies don't give their engineers/designers the ability to push back against features that they're not comfortable building. You're paid to execute on a vision that's dictated higher up the food chain. That doesn't mean it's coming from an MBA per se, but just because an engineer wrote the code doesn't mean that they're culpable here, especially given our aversion to pushing back and whistle-blowing in corporate culture.
Speaking out against corrupt/unethical leadership can very easily cost you not just your job, but your career as well. This is one area I would love to see improvement in.
MBA's should have a stronger ethics focus, they are in places of influence in power that many don't attain.
Speaking for myself, though, that wasn't a course I felt I needed to take. But every professor certainly expects you to approach problems from an ethical perspective, just like in any other degree...
My guess is that this isn't really an ethical issue with Instacart, which I view as a very well run company.
More likely, the model is a fairly cleverly designed tip jar that accepts tips and then brings up the average wage so that workers have a higher guaranteed minimum, in exchange for some tips not going directly toward their own pay.
This is a clever system, which likely derived from the optional "service fee" which Instacart used to incorporate, which was used to fund additional employee benefits.
The problem is that when you call it a "tip" then people expect it to work a specific way and so the underlying clever idea is lost and the company appears to have done something shady.
Look at the history of Instacart's explorations of a service fee and you'll see that what's going on. I think Instacart deserves credit for trying to find a better solution to this problem than what had existed before, though I think a smarter way to do it would be to let customers optionally contribute to the "bonus till" that is paid out companywide to customer-facing staff who have the best star ratings.
If Instacart chooses to adopt a system that isn't universally understood and transparent to both shoppers and customers, the onus is on them to make sure that users of the app understand what's going on. If they fail to do so, they should be held responsible for it.
Seeing as how thousands of shoppers have organized and signed petitions about this "feature", a clear misunderstanding on the part of shoppers and customers exists here, which demands an explanation as to why Instacart would implement such a confusing, opaque tipping system in the first place.
How does that sound like a well-run company to you?
I can't agree with that. A well run company doesn't steal $4 from a $5 tip originally given to some poor person making minimum wage.
That doesn't make any sense. If the minimum wage is $1000. There are 10 workers and this month there is $1000 in the tip pool. Then the company won't pay out $1100. The company still takes the $1000.
If what you said was true then they wouldn't deduct from the wage. They would deduct from the tip and say that it's added to a tip pool.