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Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

Like Boeing there are too many MBAs and not enough engineers in charge!

I see this type of comment thrown around a bit, but a quick pass of the senior management suggests otherwise. https://newsroom.ibm.com/executive-bios? Not a whole lot of MBAs and a decent amount of engineers.

Ask those managers when the last time they wrote a line of production code was :)

Even the most technical CEOs like Bill Gates stopped writing code pretty early in their careers

When's the last time Tim Cook or Satya Nadella wrote a line of code?

Something about cherrypicking outliers compared to the droves of managers who haven't written code in 20 years and have been converted to the dogma of management

If you loosen your sense of "MBA"...

- Rometty (Chair): Technical degrees, held technical positions for first 10yrs at IBM, then in sales for the 90s, two decades working primarily with finance customers and she worked the PWC acquisition.

- Krishna (CEO): EE, Idea guy.

- Whitehurst (Pres): MBA

- Boville (SVP Cloud): Business degrees (UK)

- Browdy (SVP Legal): IP attorney

- Foster (SVP Services): Art degree, Accenture guy

- Gherson (SVP): Management degrees

- Gil (Dir IBM Research): EE/CS

- Kavanaugh (CFO): MBA

- Got bored

One trait is pretty dominant: decades at IBM

The loosening lens is a bit of strawman argument. I would hope someone at the level has experience with the business side of things... Pichai and Nadella weren't tapped to run their business straight after shipping a release.

Also, Howard joined in May (which is an important one...because this press release is about Cloud not about HR/patents.)

You don't need MBA to have MBA mindset. A lot of computer science grads use their degree to get foot in the door and then move into management positions.

At IBM, to do anything you need to get permissions from 5 different semi-tech approvers. They have not done any real work in a while but read a few blog posts and come up with their own policies that contradicts each other. It is a pita to want to produce high quality code.

And that is just middle management. All those people higher up can define tech words but hardly anyone can actually explain the definition of those tech terms.

Ironically Whitehurst came from Red Hat.

Whitehurst has a Computer Science degree (BS) and was using Linux on his personal computers in the 1990s and early 2000s, I think it's unfair to drop him in the MBA bucket.

Yeah! Why differentiate in quality, when we can blame all holders of a type of degree?!

It's perfectly fair. If they had hired all chefs into upper management, one could say "too many chefs and not enough engineers!", regardless of the quality of the chefs.

Only if you think "Master of Business Administration" and "Chef" convey equal amounts of business administration skill. The exective board page linked above is 22 people, even if all of them held MBAs could it really be that 22 expert business administrators is too many for a global company with 350,000 employees?

It's not about skills, it's about priorities.

Their job is to make money; they don't care, and they are not paid to care about anything else.

Now... the question is, does someone with a different background care about the company vs making money in different proportions to the set of 'expert business administrators'?

I posit that yes, someone with a different background will have different priorities to simply 'make as much money as possible right now'.

Maybe even a chef.

As a % top leadership, yeah it totally can be too much.

"The secret of Costco’s success revealed! (hint: no MBAs need apply)", https://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costc...

"... Costco does not hire business school graduates—thanks to another idiosyncrasy meant to preserve its distinct company culture. It cultivates employees who work the floor in its warehouses and sponsors them through graduate school." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-06/costco-ce...

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