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Comment by tinyhouse | Hacker News Reader

Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.

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Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume.

What makes you think that?

The tech industry on aggregate has plenty of disdain for MBA's, both the degree programs and people with those degrees. Some of it is deserved, but MBA's aren't automatically BS degrees.

Maybe calling it a BS degree is too harsh. But I have a major problem with programs that exist just to milk money, cost a fortune ($90K for like 15 months in some schools), and almost everyone who is enrolling in these programs do it for the wrong reasons (i.e., not for the knowledge but for the prestige and networking; but I don't blame them, it's part of the system and they are just following the rules). They are also much less competitive than many people think. Getting into an MBA at Harvard is 100 times easier than let's say Math. It's not as bad as their executive programs, those are really BS and I always laugh when people put it on their resume cause they think the name Harvard would help them.

Perhaps it can be BS but perhaps (and perhaps unfortunately) it can also be a necessary BS credential/rubberstamp if you want to move into management at big tech.

And if it can flip you from an marketing engineer in a fading semiconductor fabrication (Applied Materials) industry into a leading a $1-2 Trillion adtech/AI company and equip you with the skills necessary to handle being on the frontlines of a DOJ trial.

https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/spring-summer-2020...

And an undergrad degree from Manipal, a private university whose reputation pales in comparison to the publicly funded Indian Institutes of Technology that a lot of Indian CEOs seem to be an alumnus of.

Being an IIT grad mainly proves how well you could prepare for its brutal entrance exam (<1% acceptance). At work, I've seen IIT grads fare no better than other people. Sure, there are some brilliant people among IIT grads but that's to be expected with a filter that selects the top 1% of any population.

A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing.

So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.

Can you share some sources on these claims?

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