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Comment by asperous | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer who got an MBA, I can tell you that in my cohort there were absolutely extremely smart super stars who put the time into everything they do and have the talent to make good decisions and have the empathy to be good managers. There were also people who tried their best but their judgement was clearly lacking.

My cohort has Civil Engineers, Materials engineers, Physicians, Finance, Accountants.. and also art students and communication students.

All this to say you can't generalize a whole degree.

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It’s not about being smart or not smart as a person. It’s whether earning the mba and then applying what you learned to a domain that you don’t understand is a good idea. I think folks are starting to realize that it’s a terrible idea and we should stop doing it.

The current hacker news meme is that bad management of any kind is due to MBAs, where in reality a bad manager is a bad manager and an MBA has nothing to do with it.

I don't agree - the current meme is that people who have MBAs wave them in the air as proof that their decisions are infallible... There are a lot of smart people with MBAs out there, but their intelligence and experience isn't solely owed to acquiring an MBA.

MBA culture introduced us to the meme of "management is a generic function" meaning accountants with an MBA degree could manage engineers, software developers, doctors or teachers using the same tools (e.g. performance metrics).

Yeah the degree never tries to cover the specifics of every industry and job. It doesn't even specialize in people management (MIM is that degree). MBA tries to help build the mindset to begin your learning off of (assuming you have an openness to learn). CS is similar (CS graduates are not advanced programmers). Of course it's nothing special, you could self teach that like most degrees.

MBA teaches bad management.

MBA is a set of methodologies that are hilariously unfit for purpose unless your business is about making widgets in large volume.

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