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Comment by killerdhmo | Hacker News Reader

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

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MBA here. Does not sound like hate but statement of fact. In my experience the US MBA and general management management teaching is very dollar-based in stark contrast to, say European management education. This will lead to extreme efficiencies and the M&A boom of the past few decades is probably linked to it as well. And it does not have to be the CEO: most practical daily decisions cutting all buffers for maximum efficiency are made by mid to upper management.

It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every single one of these things has a downside, often not visible until "bad stuff happens".

These trite rules get repeated so often they become like The Mandalorian "This is the way".

I think every industry is full of this kind of nonsense. Some closer to home examples : everything needs to be in the cloud; immutability is good; use 3rd party SaaS services for everything; code comments are bad; ...

> use 3rd party SaaS services for everything

OTOH didn't Facebook just demonstrate why building everything in-house is dangerous?

If you use a saas for login, one for business process A, one for business process B, C, D,... if just one of these fail, you might be at risk of losing business and huge amount of money for something you have no control on.

You are lowering you cost but by doing so, you are increasing your risk.

Furthermore, by using external saas, some business will have a tendency to get rid of some IT people to "really" save on cost which means you'll lose manpower for when something happens.

Software development has changed in the last decade and now everybody knows that they have to take failure into account when building software. Chaos Monkey opened the eyes of a lot of It people.

There should be some "MBA" level chaos monkey solution.

Dangerous is a word that doesn't actively justify trade-offs. With SaaS offerings, you're trading opex costs to save on capex costs, which can mean a really big difference in terms of opportunity costs. You also are paying for the expertise that you'd need to develop internally otherwise. These aren't simple black and white choices. Operating at FB level scale means that saving 2% on your cost of revenue is billions of dollars. If this is the only "Big" outage FB has for the next 2 years, and it's saved them billions of dollars, isn't the fairly small risk of a single point of failure worth it?

You have to accept some risk, and it's often hard to compare risks on the business side vs risks on the technical side.

Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works.

The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state.

It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not feel comfortable with.

Are you suggesting that old people uncomfortable with math and tech are the best people to be leading major corporations? Even Herb Kelleher was only 40 when he started Southwest.

Not disagreeing, but also I don't think it's even necessary for any MBAs to be involved (although such a corporate structure would be very unlikely). All that's needed is a set of incentives that reward a certain style of business to the detriment of others. Based on our total set of economic policies, the US has those incentives in many (most?) sectors of the economy.

> a set of incentives

money, responsibility, prestige

> that reward a certain style of business

profitable, growing, innovative

Such a bizarre statement to imply that old people don't understand math, and all but destroys any credibility for the rest of your comment.

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