Why I created MBAHacks.com, or Why I am learning to program | Hacker News Reader

Why I created MBAHacks.com, or Why I am learning to program

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39 pointscoconutrandom26 comments

All great reasons, but there's one I would add as an MBA: Learning to program makes you a better business person.

How?

Made to Stick has a great story about a math teacher who struggled to convince his students of math's importance in life. As he put it, math is like weight lifting. You don't work out to prepare for the day a rogue barbell comes and traps you on the ground, you work out so you can run faster, tackle harder, and jump higher. Math is weight lifting for your analytic mind - it helps you rationally think through problems and establish logical steps to the solution.

Learning to program, and to take it further, learning computer science, is not about making the best app ever created. CS is mental weight lifting on the _process_ of tackling business problems. Dissecting an app into its MVC components will help you understand the business you plan to create, what is core, and what is fluff. In other words, learning to program will make you a better business person, even if you suck.

Absolutely Ryan. Thanks for your sharing your thoughts with me.

I also see other parallels between building great software and building a great business. For one, focus is important for scaling both. You don't want to be all things to all people.

In addition, whether you're bug tracking or solving business problems, it's important to get to the root cause. Full disclosure: I used to be a management consultant.

Finally, it takes a great team to build great software and a great company.

I'm sure there are many others. Would love to hear what others here come up with.

Very well put and I certainly agree. This thought process can also lead to far more realistic goal planning for all walks of life (you give a great example about weight lifting). Learning just to learn is admirable in and of itself but perhaps not as realistic than learning for a specific need that can be enumerated.

I think the world would be a better place if everyone, especially MBA's had at least some knowledge of programming. With the state of the job market in the US, wouldn't it be wise to require even two years of programming in high school?

I used to work with at least a couple dozen MBA's from 1 school, they gave me this advice for bus school:

1) don't lose your coding skills (I was good at perl/awk, APL, C and Fortran). This I did

2) concentrate on linear algebra, stats/prob, calculus (this i didn't)

3) take law school classes (this i did, they were gnarly)

tl;dr your 2nd year you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can make it a profoundly intellectual experience, or start your business, or whatever

This is exactly what I did. I treat the MBA as just another tool. Started a business sadly it failed after a couple years, but I just moved out to SF last week and loving it. As an engineer with an MBA that can code well, does stats, and took a handful of law classes it's a seller's market.

i dont get it, whats so special about stats ? dont al engineers take a stats class and then end up not using most of the concepts ?

That's a good idea. My advice: forget the MBA. Just learn to code and start making contacts in the field you want to go into. Why pay grad schools? YC is the new grad school, and they pay you.

lol...yes! out of all the degrees out there...I don't understand the MBA. Want to start a business? Start it! If you get the MBA you'll be stuck paying off a $100k debt.

Starting a business is only half the battle (at best). The biggest value of the MBA is the networking that happens. You're meeting people who will go on to work in a diverse set of industries. It's not uncommon for an entrepreneur with an MBA to go a year or two in business only calling on people they met in school, or fellow alumni. That networking isn't impossible to replicate, but an entrepreneur who forgoes the MBA route needs to make a concerted effort to make up for that.

I agree.

I've also learned that there is no one path to entrepreneurship, or programming for the matter. For some people it makes sense to quit school or avoid college. Others follow a more traditional route. There are pros and cons to each. More importantly, it is an extremely personal process. What makes sense for one person does not make sense for another.

As for me, I am very happy in my decision to attend business school. In addition to the networking benefits you pointed to above, I've found that some of the things that I've learned (e.g. Coaching and Mentoring) have wonderful applications to my personal life. Put differently, business school has made me a better father. I plan to write a post on this soon. All the wonderful friendships I built while I was there is icing on the cake.

I should also point out that I didn’t go to business school for the hard skills (i.e. finance, accounting, etc.). You can learn a lot of that by picking up a book. I went to business school to become a better leader and person. Classes like Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy feely"), High Performance Leadership, and Leadership Coaching and Mentoring are the main reasons I attended business school.

Finally, while at business school, I made an effort to meet and build friendships with brilliant graduate and undergraduate students across all of Stanford. I now know wonderful people that studied CS, Engineering, Earth Sciences, Stats, Medicine, and much more. I feel fortunate to have had the chance to study with all these people.

To follow up to the parent, there is a lot more to B-school then just to network. From common MBA-bashing that takes places on HN it seems that that many people fail to grasp the difference between building a product and building a company. If you want to build a product - MBA may not be necessary, but if you want to build a good company, an MBA will be a great help along the way. With all aspects of running a business covered in one class or another, you at least have an understanding of the issues you'll run into.

An MBA doesn't provide you a road map, it gives you a framework of how to approach business questions and an understanding how simple decisions cascade down to all aspects of a company (hr, accounting, operations).

Nice point. You can build a great ruby site without Rails, but Rails gives you a nice framework to make the process easier. Similarly, you can build a business without an MBA, but an MBA gives you a convenient framework to help with important decisions.

True. Good point. So it comes down to - which type of person are you? I stick by my original point - YC is the new grad school. MBA's learn all the theory of business, and YC throws you right into it. There's no better way to learn.

"but if you want to build a good company, an MBA will be a great help along the way."

An easy way to see if this is statistically valid, or just something that MBAs tell themselves, is to make a list of 'good' companies (by your personal definition of 'good') and see if the folks who built them had MBAs. The results might be surprising (either way).

To each his own. An MBA helps some people - the network is powerful coming out of schools like HBS and SBS. At the same time, a determined entrepreneur can create his own network and wow people with a great product.

This myth is so widely repeated I have to call it out. The people you meet doing an MBA either a) leave and go into corporate middle management or b) go start their own businesses. The chance that the middle managers end up in a position where they can directly or indirectly help your startup is extremely low; the idea that you could be fully occupied as an entrepreneur just exploiting those contacts for 12-24 months is laughably naive. As for your MBAers who become fellow entrepeneurs - well they have their heads down working on a startup which is probably in a totally different sector to you - they're incredibly busy building their own businesses and contacts in a totally different sector, and even less able to help. Overall, best case scenario is that an entrepreneur starts a B2B business and a handful of his classmates end up as potential clients/introducers to potential clients - but even with five of these contacts, at $100k for an MBA that works out at $20k per lead, hardly the best return on investment. There are plenty of reasons to do an MBA, but networking to establish a startup isn't one.

It depends on the school you attend. The networking effect is bigger than just the people you attend class with, although those connections are often very valuable. Most MBA students aren't studying for entrepreneurship. They're someone who has already had success in the business world and are going to advance their career. Having a network of connections across business domains can be very valuable.

Obviously it depends on the startup. B2B businesses would get more value out of those connections. I stated that it's likely the biggest benefit of business school, not the only benefit. A true cost-benefit analysis would look also at the knowledge acquired as well as the strength of the alumni network.

My impression was always that MBA programs are best suited for people who wanted to work within an existing organization rather than create their own. Most of the MBAs I know are middle management or above in engineering companies, and the MBA is one way of moving up for them. Maybe it's a new fad for business schools, but I hope they aren't beginning to advertise themselves as good preparation for starting your own business.

Edward is a savvy guy not above getting his hands dirty with code.

Coming from a similar perspective as the OP, but so far I always failed to go through with actually mastering a language. Over the years I attempted to learn so many different ones, from Action Script to Assembler, from Delphi to C++, but always became either bored of it after a few hours or got frustrated because the ideas I had in mind turned out to be far more complicated to realise than I had hoped for.

That's why great programmers are boundless optimist and masochists.

Great point. I've been accused to being dogged in the past. Truth be told, it helps to be both focused and determined.

@stfu There are two ways you could try to go about it:

1) Try sticking to one technology and working on a project you're really passionate about.

2) Work on a tutorial from start to finish.

Thanks for trying to help! 1) This is really difficult. Like I tried getting started with PHP but as soon as potential project ideas became "interesting" I needed to go at least into JavaScript or Databases/MySql. Like for a seemingly simple project that I had in mind (e.g. that took data from a form and generate a pdf file based on that) I needed at least JavaScript to make it a smooth process. 2) I seem to suck there in the "transferring the knowledge" part. One of my most recent ventures is into RapidMiner, an (open source) data mining/text mining software. While I went through each and every tutorial available I am still unable to understand basic issues like when to use certain algorithms or how to adopt the knowledge towards a concrete research idea/problem that I have in mind. But if you have any suggestions for great tutorials feel free to share. I won't stop trying :)

Some web frameworks build wrappers for MySQL. That being said... SQL isn't too hard either! Google is your co-pilot, always.

This summer I was thrown onto an android project with no experience, no in-company mentors, and I barely remembered how to write java. The first two weeks I just did tutorials. I didn't even try to patch them together to actually make a product-- I just did a dozen tutorials which covered different aspects and left them all in my code folder. When it came to actually building my app, I now had a personalized pool of code to grab from! It really helped to be able to go back and reference it.

Also, I think you are not going to be well helped by tutorials. You need a freaking textbook. http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/index.html You are required to do at least 50% of the exercises for each chapter.

Furthermore, it is important that you master a single language rather than dabble. Once you understand a single language in&out, it will make it much easier to pick up other ones. (My 'mastery' is in python, and I've picked up java, C#, SQL, javascript.)

I have had to grind out many tutorials over the years; helped my immediate focus since there were obvious steps to take towards a goal I wanted to acheive. Nothing says love like getting your feet wet via tuts!

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