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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this.

I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.

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I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides.

Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars.

From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.

I don’t think there’s a “both sides”.

The reason this is lazy thinking in my view is because usually it’s not associated with the good (Apple example, nobody goes “dang they really MBA’d the price on that MacBook Pro that I love) and because when something “bad” occurs there’s no understanding or analysis of the situation that lead to the current state. Just a bunch of “that’s bad, must be MBAs screwing me”. You find similar issues with “those Silicon Valley engineers all screwing us and stealing our attention” and other common phrases. The MBA one I think is even less nuanced than the contrived Silicon Valley one.

If we go back to the MBA thing. Well. I have one. I don’t like fast fashion. I wouldn’t want to support it even if it made more money. The degree doesn’t make you do anything, your incentives and who you are as a person are much more powerful. There’s no class on fast fashion (or similar) where MBA students are trained to maximize profit at all costs or not think about sociological impact. At least at Ohio State (Fisher) that was the case in all classes I attended. We spent a lot more time learning about not doing such things and how they are bad for business and society in the long run. My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.

So I really hate seeing this. To the extent it can happen on an internet board I find it a little offensive and disrespectful. Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it. Especially when you’re a regular person trying to be nice and do good, value-add work. Idk. Thanks for your comment.

Perhaps you are taking it personally because you have an MBA. It's not meant as a personal attack on literal MBA's. I use the term as shorthand for the people who do the vital work of making a business run efficiently and profitably. When companies focus on that to the exclusion of the actual value-creating, bad things happen. The opposite case is when a startup does not find a market and only focuses on making a product. This, too, fails.

As an investor, I look for companies that do well on both ends of the spectrum.

No, I wouldn’t say I’m taking it personally. My self-worth exists independent of a degree, of which is obtainable by many. What I find disrespectful* is lumping large groups of people in together based on a degree, and then saying “that group is responsible for all the bad decisions”. I have to imagine you can see why this is simply lazy thinking.

Let me give you another contrived example:

“Social media co is found to have withheld information that lead to bad social thing”

“This is what happens when companies become Software Engineered. They lose all focus on the customer and society just to create better algorithms”.

You don’t think that if we just constantly repeated something like this that would be a bad thing and might alienate people? Especially when it’s not true and ignores good things that people have done as well?

What I’ll say is this. It’ll stop being lazy and disrespectful when large groups here also give credit where credit is due instead of only blame without evidence.

* Note that I don’t actually care, I’m never at home offended by something, I’m just commenting on the nature of the action, which I would classify as disrespectful.

The problem with your counter example is that it doesn't recognize prevailing power dynamics. In the vast majority of cases, software engineers, designers, product managers, and other people hands-on in the business of creating commercial software products, are outranked and have less authority than MBAs within their sphere of interaction. Many of us have been forced to be party to terrible decisions made by someone who has focused on an executive career path with no skill-based qualifications, and a deficient moral compass. Very often, these type of individuals happen to have an MBA, and so the stereotype was born. While it certainly isn't fair to tar all individuals with that brush, the short-hand has been earned by the actions of many MBAs over the decades. Whether you agree with that or not, the bottom line is you're simply not going to get much sympathy around here for the plight of the poor maligned MBA.

You are just doubling down on intellectual laziness and stereotypes which I thought we were supposed to disregard.

I guess those Silicon Valley software engineers have earned the title of bad actors with all the addicting software they write! There isn’t much sympathy around here for the plight of the poor maligned Software Engineer. After all you make a killing ruining people’s lives and destroying their ability to interact with their community with your addicting algorithms and your advertisements. You wait until a company relies on your cloud software or tools and then you raise the price just to squeeze every last drop of revenue. You have no moral compass and if you did, you wouldn’t build this stuff. I mean all you care about is career advancement. Build and ship a product and then move on before it gets shut down for not being viable. Skills? Hardly. You run easy pipelines and use software tools only you can afford to invest in to make you feel super productive while you ruin people’s lives. All in the name of getting enough “I shipped that” to put you on the executive CTO track before you dump dog shit companies on public equity markets. *

Same song different dance. Not buying it.

* I don’t actually believe this, nor do I believe similar lazy comments about any degree or profession because they are dumb and lazy intellectual positions.

> I guess those Silicon Valley software engineers have earned the title of bad actors with all the addicting software they write

You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do. This is a problem of culture. It's fair to point us out as a group when it's this systemic. Even if it's a small portion of people who are actually part of the problematic situations, the majority still accepts it for what it is, seniors will happily hire engineers without moral compass, FB and Palantir engineers working on destructive stuff still have a lot of street cred.

Of course it's frustrating being lumped together with the bad ones. And there's little you can do as an individual when you're outnumbered or outpowered. But those who can should do what they can to do good and not participate in the bad.

That aside, would it be fair to say you have an issue with that they scope the tribe/group they're accusing completely wrong? That MBAs are just a caricature if the people they're actually talking about, some of whom don't have an MBA and many MBAs are not those people? If so, agreed, it's a lazy and unfair one.

> That aside, would it be fair to say you have an issue with that they scope the tribe/group they're accusing completely wrong? That MBAs are just a caricature if the people they're actually talking about, some of whom don't have an MBA and many MBAs are not those people? If so, agreed, it's a lazy and unfair one.

Yes, generally speaking, I’d agree with that. I simply take issue with that actual espoused sentiment that “if something bad happens it must be an MBA type” and if at the same company something good happens said MBA type couldn’t possibly deserve credit.

> You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do.

I agree too. But I would also say in a similar vein it wouldn’t be fair to go around and say “those software engineering types” as a response ya know?

> “This is what happens when companies become Software Engineered"

But... people do use a very similar term, overengineered. Quite appropriately. You are absolutely allowed, encouraged, to call out someone specifying a product to the nines because they can. See Juicero, I'd argue Peloton, a.. decent proportion of products that involve Heroku or Kubernetes.

But so are engineers allowed to call out someone playing financial find-the-lady to obscure what they're really doing: using trust relationships built over decades, if not centuries, to fuck over customers.

Would another spin on this be: if the connotation of MBA includes "bad" in it, then applying this label to bad stuff is tautological and doesn't add information?

Here's another example: made in China has a connotation of cheap and low quality, despite the fact that the iPhone and all the other high quality electronic products are made in China too. But if someone says "made in china" we know they're referring to the cheap stuff.

Yea I’d say that’s a nice and concise way to summarize a lot of the issues here.

> At least at Ohio State (Fisher) that was the case in all classes I attended. We spent a lot more time learning about not doing such things and how they are bad for business and society in the long run.

Well that's good that you were in a humane class ; from the people i know in France who received "MBA"-like education, it sounds like the exception, though. Are you familiar with critiques of neoliberal micromanagement, or as David Graeber's put it manageurial feudalism? How else would you explain the rise of bureaucracy ruling even non-profits (!) and ruining everything for everyone who cares about what they do?

> My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.

Cool, but how can you change the system by following its own rules? Do you feel that as an MBA working in a company you can go against the stream of anti-social control-based measures? I know as a random worker it doesn't work (which is why we have unions and cooperatives) but maybe you have a different perspective to share.

> Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it.

Well, the thing is as a class both we software people and you business people are ruining the lives of literally billions of people. So we're bound to get some resentment. Still, as Nabil Hassein points out in his talk "Computing, Climate Change, and All our Relationships", it's very mild. (paraphrasing) Given the evil we do to society as a whole, and the fate that's usually reserved to collaborators of oppressive regimes, angry messages on forums and stoning Silicon Valley buses is just the beginning and we should be very careful whose side of the barricade we are on when the revolution does come. I strongly recommend to watch the rest of the talk :)

Isn't it ironic that this comment thread was originally about devices not lasting long enough and you bring up Apple, who purposefully crippled old phones and created AirPods to generate enormous amounts of e-waste, as an example of MBA types doing a good thing?

Does Apple do any good things?

They had some interesting UX in early apps like Hypercard. Too bad none of it was free software so it's lost in this day and age.

Have you actually looked at the competition and see how long android phones last and/are maintained?

Apple also has a pretty accessible recycling program but more importantly Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market. No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.

Btw the “crippling” you referred to was apple throttling phones so weakened batteries were able to supply enough voltage to prevent the phone from randomly shutting off. It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened. It was just bad communication and built up sentiment that old phones kept getting slower with each new update.

> Have you actually looked at the competition and see how long android phones last and/are maintained?

Yes the Fairphone are doing well thank you. Very easy to tear apart, setup the system of your choice, and find replacement parts for.

> Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market.

What does that mean? Money is just imaginary numbers. A phone is a phone: either it works good or it doesn't, how much and why it's valued by people brainwashed into a commercial cult [0] matters little in the equation.

> No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.

Kudos for them to respect the law. Although i must point out that for some years, at least in France, they were obviously breaking EU laws by saying their phones had only 1y warranty (2y minimum by law) and selling people "upgrades" to get the 2 years.

> It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened.

Do you have a source for this? It's the first time i hear that explanation, and it certainly was not put forward by Apple in their update log at the time (suggesting malice). Also worth noting that Apple makes it harder than it should to crack your phone open to replace the battery, so i don't think that's a strong argument in their defense.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/43884-neurologists-apple-is-li...

The first sentence of the wikipedia article explaining the debacle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

Transferrable warranties are very much not the law in the US. This, along with a healthy used/refurbished market mean that old devices stay in use longer. The saying is reduce, reuse, and THEN recycle. But the impact in reduce and reuse is much better than recycling.

I’m not sure what you mean “a phone just works or it doesn’t.” I’ve never heard of the Fairphone but I’m sure if it has good usability it would be catching on. I had in fact switched to Android for a year before and went back to iPhone after countless both hardware and software based quality issues.

Apple is not a religion, at least it does not affect me in that way. While I use a macbook and iPhone, I am fairly against their other products (like unnecessary icloud usage, apple watch).

If anything it sounds more like users of esoteric android feature phones (where the feature is some arbitrary definition of sustainability) is under some cult or religion.

The Fairphone you mentioned has lukewarm reviews, is objectively an inferior phone aside from its more sustainable materials. https://www.theverge.com/22716194/fairphone-4-review

If you look at mass market phones with actual market share, Apple does way better on the sustainability side by simply *keeping old phones usable.” If you want to be sustainable reduce first. Then reuse. An old iphone being resold or handed down is by definition made out of 100% recycled parts.

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