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Comment by N1H1L | Hacker News Reader

When the MBA guys and Wall Street starts drinking their own cool-aid and believes that finance is what creates money - you have a problem.

Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica once wrote that a junior engineer now at Boeing has no viable path for promotion towards the C-suite. The middle rank engineering teams have all been divested and the only way to rise up the ranks is to actually leave Boeing, work at a different company, rise up the ranks there and come back a decade later.

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I grew up in Wichita and knew a few aerospace engineers as friends when I was still a teenager. The revolving door between the big companies is well known and has been going since the 90s at least. They told me pretty clearly that you wanted to be jumping companies every couple of years because the poaching offers were always way better for advancement than demonstrating loyalty.

As I've said a thousand times: the sorts of MBA types you are describing here are the US equivalent to Soviet "apparatchiks."

This is the best kept secret in corporate America. The McKinsey and private equity crowds like to think of themselves as these innovative and wild capitalist cowboys, when really they're just a bunch of Soviet rent-seekers with better haircuts.

To add to the metaphor - for many behind the curtain - the soviet aparatchiks came imposed from a foreign country - Russia.

The only difference is that you're less likely to be sent to Gulag, or worse.

US apparatchiks come from a foreign country of sorts too: coastal elite cities and coastal top-ten universities. That world is as far from most of America as Moscow was from Ukraine.

Just because you're a good engineer doesn't immediately make you a good executive.

Of course not, but if none of your execs have any engineering chops then you're setting up for a world of pain.

When C-level people in an aircraft company start to lack engineering background en masse, we see what happens :( Boeing was once great.

Steve Jobs had a great explanation for this phenomena. Companies with monopoly power do not require or benefit from product development in any form on most reasonable investment horizons. In practice they can only benefit from increasing their market via marketing, or increasing profits by financial engineering. Eventually the promotion process of the company will leave you with Sales, Marketing, and Finance folks running the show.

Do you have a source for this? I’d love to read more about it.

This is the clip, but the whole interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

AMD is what happens when you have someone who is both.

No, but in an industry as technical as semiconductors, I'd like to see the evidence that default-hire-MBA is ever better than default-hire-PhD.

AMD and TSMC both have always had technical leaders. Intel had a series of legendary technical CEOs during their most formidable years.

The first non-technical-PhD CEO they had was Otellini, but he had been there for 30 years before becoming CEO.

There will only be a discussion if you define what "good" means first.

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