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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.

> 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 :)

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.