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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

It never made sense to me that one could specialize in business. Every business is radically different from one another, even from competitors.

Seems like it would be better to combine a few basic business courses with an advanced degree in a technical subject. Going deep into “business” seems to divorce a person from the reality of any particular company. It gets to the point where they’re in danger of disrupting a company’s successful strategy because it contradicts their business class theory. And then the elves leave middle earth [1].

[1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

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The people I see with MBAs obtained them because they were more or less told to. If you want to advance you need to do this. When I was mentoring an intern we had an event with the CIO. All his top VPs were there and he had them state their masters degrees. The executives value the commitment to get a masters as much as they value the degree itself. Some times they don’t even care much about the education, we gave you a challenge and you completed it.

I’ve seen similar situations where managers were told to teach an EE, SE, or even business classes at a local college at night.

There are a whole set of disciplines which are effectively systems-management knowledge or training (or to use older terms: science and arts or technology). Business administration, government administration, clerical studies (in the sense of religion), military science. These are domains of large, complex, and idiosyncratic systems -- both amongst disciplines and within them -- in which there are both general and specific sets of knowledge.

There are elements of business administration which are fairly generalised, and those which are specific to given organisations. Keep in mind that in business management as with technology, there's an advantage for large incumbents (think, early 20th century, railroads, chemical industry (especially DuPont), oil, steelmaking, automobile manufacturing, and a few major retail ventures) of stamping a business school with your own process, methods, and models, such that graduates are prepared to enter your own rather than competitors' workforces. An early form of the mindshare battle.

Could the same be said about computer science or most engineering degrees? You walk out of your CS program ready to be a frontend web developer or a device driver developer? I think all degrees are pretty general and then you specialize in the job.

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