Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.
When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally managed $2MM-$3MM books of business.
What do you think happened? He was slowly stripped of responsibilities and eventually forced out, for the crime of standing out as an exceptional performer.
I love that dynamic /s
It's not really conducive to communication to fill in the blanks like that, even though any person in someone else's work story could be one of Them walking among us... ;)
I don't mean some trading-only companies like Cargill who have extra prostitues budgets (at least 5 years ago that was true, and with expensive alcohol parties was the only way to do any business in places like Russia or most 3rd world countries). I mean any kind of bigger corporation. Banks have it. Any kind of finance business does. You won't get far without it.
There are obviously rules, but often they go the other way - employees shouldn't accept bribes in forms of these gifts. But getting clients, that's a free for all, the winner takes all (and biggest bonus).
Just want to call out that the multi-million dollar salespeople I know wine and dine their spouses and friends far more lavishly than their clients. The people being sold to, similarly, aren’t alien to fine dining. For two people who enjoy that (versus a baseball game), it can be a genuine way to bond far from bribery. Gifts, on the other hand, yes.
Just about every week I comb through my inbox unsubscribing from all the companies' mailing lists that I most certainly did not subscribe to.
He was incentivized to hustle harder, until incentives were stripped, out of spite.
We need to get people out of this kind of thinking, and the sooner the better.
MBAs, in my experience, is the worst example of it. They treat themselves as some higher order creatures, without actual skills or understanding of things.
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
For anyone else reading, I enjoyed it tremendously and highly recommend it. It's a very fun book to read.
"Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview. Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).
In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".
"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."
The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore."
Hard to believe Microsoft was so utterly reviled by competent people in 2007. Nowadays I look at some of the things they're doing (mostly Surface line) and I would love to be involved with that. I feel like, even though they're not always hitting the bullseye, Microsoft is really aiming for the target with Surface devices. I know the Surface Duo got a lot of hate, and I really wanted to get one, but I feel like it just isn't "there" yet. Microsoft has been on that sort of track record for the past 5 years or so... the first version of a new product is a little questionable, the second is decent enough, but the third iteration, they're really nailing it.
My Surface Book 3 is the best laptop I have ever owned, and I've had many.
As someone who was there, I have no problem believing it.
If you were doing _anything_ that touched anything unixy in the 90s until the mid aughts MS wasn't just "uncool", they were actively "the enemy" directly competing against everything you did. After a while that adversarial relationship turned into joking with your peers about every mis-step they made. It didn't help that they seemed to make a lot of mis-steps and put a lot of effort into things that turned into dead ends.
They had to put a _lot_ of work into re-establishing their reputation this past decade.
Combine "my way or the highway" stance of Google when it comes to tech and standards, Oracle's utter corporate ruthlessness, turn it up to eleven, and consider they had a lock-in in the entire IT market similar to how Apple now controls the iOS market, and you'll start to get sense why.
You know which ones still have them, because on Zoom calls, they'll occasionally have their audio sound like a demon trying to murder them very loudly.
Even the best phones and laptops won't match a DSLR, so I don't try to.
That's gotta count for something.
Happens on many levels though, it's not as if engineers don't get credit for team efforts.
99% of MBAs give the rest a bad name.
The old "Personnel Department" did that perfectly well long before HR was a thing.
Maybe it is because I've never worked in the valley, but I can't think of a positive 401k plan experience. I do remember a lot of onboarding powerpoint with regards to penalties and limitations. The whole thing feels coercive, having to participate in the market when you aren't interested in managing the position - simply to protect your savings from intentionally set inflation rates. All those "unsophisticated investors" (no joke, that is what they call you) are arguably the cause of the dot-com bubble as well, not because people were daytrading pets.com, but because fund managers had to put that surge of disinterested capital somewhere. I imagine that if powerpoint was around back in the day, the guys managing company store credit schemes would have functioned much like today's HR reps.
In my experience, there are many great leaders with MBA degrees. However, you never hear about their MBA degree because they have so many other accomplishments to lead with. They are managers who happen to have completed an MBA program in the past.
The troublesome people are those who lean on credentialism in the hopes that merely having the MBA degree will allow them to skip to the head of the compensation structure. Anyone who builds their identity around the university they attended or the degree they received will raise a lot of red flags.
CompSci -> Work in industry -> MBA usually produces the best managers.
That's the usual MBA mistake when dealing with IT. Most of what you've been taught applies to ditch diggers or bottling Coca Cola.
In the case I described, the issue was literally that having an MBA put you on a lower payscale than being a mid-tier engineer.
The problem was that we had several people who invested years of their lives and six figures into post-graduate MBA education with the expectation that it was a cheat code for moving them up to the top of the payscale. It was a shock to land in a company where that was not true at all, and furthermore that it was codified into the payscale.
Having an MBA is certainly not a negative signal like HN tends to suggest. The bigger issue is resistance to the modern dual-track career ladders. Many people still want the management title (or an MBA credential) to guarantee them higher compensation, and they're resistant to any system which doesn't match those expectations.
My pet theory is that they just have more time to spent scheming, and influencing others. While engineers are busy trying to get shit done.
and/or too busy arguing with product/engineering managers (for better or worse)
They all share the same "pointless" features:
- lawyers: reason for hiring: the company doesn't get sued for breaking laws (boils down to reducing costs even if you only consider the statutory damages)
- accountants: reason for hiring: the company doesn't hide deficits / key employees can't divert money (boils down to reducing costs)
- MBAs: reason for hiring: so that existing processed are optimized, and employees don't slack off too much (boils down to reducing costs)
To which I'd add HR:
- HR: reason for hiring: so that the company doesn't get sued for discrimination or gets bad PR that will reduce sales/good hires (boils down to reducing costs) -- connected to lawyers, except HR may also care about stuff that doesn't directly break laws.
So I think all of them are important! Then again, I'm now a capitalist pig, so feel free to dismiss my concerns.
But even if you only care about the visible features of a product, understand you can't innovate or even excel on a budget - which means reducing costs and trimming expenses whenever possible.
> reducing costs
yeah, or risk mitigation. Haven't decided which is truer.
> Then again, I'm now a capitalist pig, so feel free to dismiss my concerns
Yeah I own a company with ~50-60 employees (call me Mr. Pig). Business owners need to take input from these risk-mitigation roles into consideration but, ultimately, they shouldn't be decision makers. Taking risk is important.
Decision makers should be creators (eng, design) and the sellers (sales, marketing).
Businesses aren't built on reducing costs, they are built on making money. But, then again, you can use money you save by reducing costs and feed it into the creation->sales machine. It's a balance.
Hello Mr Pig, nice to meet a fellow pig :)
> yeah, or risk mitigation. Haven't decided which is truer.
Same thing to me. What do you "risk", except not making money? It all boils down to money.
> ultimately, they shouldn't be decision makers. Taking risk is important
Agreed - as long as you can take said risk, because again it all boils down to money. These people help you do that by not spending as much while achieving the same (or better) outcomes.
> It's a balance.
Totally! As for MBAs and the likes, I see them as XOs: I decide on the direction and give the orders. They implement them.
Their perspective is different from mine - which is surprisingly closer to the first line workers, who hold a lot of valuable insights (about optimization, client needs, etc) that may be lost due to the middle layer (of MBAs etc)
But the middle layer has its own role to play, to save money and keep operations smooth and reduce costs (risks) whenever possible.
I’ve had some great market research done by providing assignments to MBA students (though when I did my engineering MS and we had joint classes I stayed as far away from group work with them as I could - different grading gives different incentives), I just feel they sometimes might have difficulties understanding concepts like opportunity cost, probability or non-linear developments.