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Comment by thunderbird120 | Hacker News Reader

I realize the whole MBA bad idea is popular right now on HN but it's worth remembering that Intel's struggles with 10nm were the result of too much engineering ambition rather than too little. The original 10nm was very VERY ambitious and if it had actually worked and had hit volume production on anything resembling the original timeline Intel would have essentially had a half decade worth of a process advantage over its competitors. Unfortunately, letting engineering go nuts can sometimes screw you just as much as letting the out of touch bean counters rule. Engineering based businesses have to manage both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means disaster.

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You can't accurately describe Intel's 10nm disaster without mentioning that they were making a huge bet that EUV wasn't going to be ready anytime soon so they were trying everything they could to keep up with Moore's Law except using EUV. But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out to be harder to get working correctly than EUV.

It wasn't simply the engineers going nuts trying to make a huge jump all at once. They were taking a bunch of unique risks in order to follow a different path from the rest of the industry. If Intel had planned to follow a similar EUV timeline to the rest of the industry, they would have been subject to the same risks as everyone else regarding EUV and probably could have maintained a moderate lead throughout that transition, with a worst-case outcome being that they would be part of an industry-wide failure to keep up with Moore's Law if EUV didn't work out. Instead, they ended up years behind.

> But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out to be harder to get working correctly than EUV.

Is that actually true? The direct competitor to Intel 10nm is TSMC N7, which is an overall similar process - DUV, multiple patterning etc. -, achieves similar performance and power efficiency, and had a similar timeline to how the Intel process played out (as opposed to how it was originally scheduled). TSMC also only began using EUV for processes following N7.

Don't indulge Intel's attempts to erase Cannon Lake from history. The 10nm that Intel shipped in 2019 was significantly scaled back from what they originally planned for their 10nm node, but was still a year later to the market than TSMC N7 and was never good enough to be competitive for desktop CPUs. By the time they had iterated enough to have a new process that could be used to offer faster desktop CPUs than their mature 14nm process, they decided to rename it to "Intel 7" and shipped it at the same time as TSMC N5 products (though still before AMD's N5 products).

The Wikipedia article for Cannon Lake is a riot. Click the "Products" list to open it and... a table with one row.

This. Intel 10nm and TSMC N7 aren't comparable in their development. Intel didn't simply scale down their 14nm but took a different parth. TSMC N7 is basically a scaling of their N16. These two processes are 90% comparable. Only base layers are slightly different. N5 is quite different compared to N7 due to new litho though.

The MBA idea is correct in this case. Intel had the board and leadership that led it to ambitious process without enough urgency or resources, or ability to course correct quickly enough.

The most important question must be discussed at C-suite. Intel didn't have have enough people there to make decisions.

> Engineering based businesses have to manage both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means disaster.

Top engineers can learn to manage business at the highest levels. Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies.

> Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies.

Cisco Systems was led by CEO John T. Chambers from 1995-2015. His education was BS, BA in business and a JD. After he got his MBA he started in sales. During his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion. In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world.

Before Chambers was John Morgridge, who was an MBA. He helped oust the two founding engineers. Before him was Bill Graves (who had a BS in physics, but was only at Cisco for a year).

I think a lot of the reasons that engineers rag on business leaders more than engineering ones are that:

1. They haven't tried creating a product and then making money off it. It's amazing how painfully difficult that can be (without good Sales and Marketing).

2. They haven't done a (good) MBA and don't understand how much goes into it, so write it off as similar to an undergraduate business degree.

3. They have a superiority complex from their university days where engineering was the hardest discipline.

Pat Gelsigner's favourite phrase is "We all work for Sales and Marketing". He says it over and over. I think at this time in Intel's history an engineer is the better one to be running the ship, but the idea that you need to be 100% tech savvy to run a successful tech company is, as you proved through your example, patently false. A good CTO can make all the difference in the product, while a good MBA-type CEO can focus on everything else.

This hits the nail on the head.

I’ve worked at both large and small companies, and engineers do tend to forget that no matter how good what they build is, it’s going nowhere without someone selling it.

Similarly, people on the business side often neglect the blood sweat and tears that can sometimes go into building something, forgetting sometimes that without a product there is no sales or marketing.

I really liked this response, but this is HN, people love romanticizing engineers to a fault.

At the end of the day, it’s just another false dichotomy. There are shitty business people just as there are shitty engineers.

Best to not be married to anyone idea in this case and just take it on a case by case basis.

Which is another way of saying: it's gotta be a partnership. That generalizes across all business categories, right? Product and Sales/Marketing have to work together.

That's such a banal insight that it's absurd so many businesses screw it up (in either direction) so badly.

Yes, even at my current company, which is by most measures, I'd say successful, this comes up to an absurd degree.

PMs will be ready to roll out a product with their finger on the button and Sales is like yo wtf we don't even know what we're charging for it yet or it's not even built into cpq/billing yet. So absurd that it's almost funny

Yeah but does the person selling it deserve 100-1000x the renumeration than the people making it? Business leaders get all sorts of perks that the engineers don't, that's where the resentment comes from.

There's basically no crunch in MBA land.

Not sure Cisco had "two founding engineers", actually. Len would've qualified as an engineer, but Sandy was just... Sandy. And IIRC she thought of herself as the "business side" of the pair. Other pure engineers were of course there early on, but weren't running the company.

On the other hand, it's not obvious Chambers can be counted as a success in running an "engineering company". Chambers ran an acquisition company. It's entirely possible that an acquisition company was a more profitable idea than an an engineering company, but still.

> It's entirely possible that an acquisition company was a more profitable idea than an an engineering company, but still.

I think the primary criticism engineers have against "MBAs" is that they make money, but frequently destroy value.

So "during his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion." is clear evidence of making money, but is not at all clear evidence of producing value and not any evidence at all of producing more money or value in the US in aggregate.

I don't think very many engineers would agree that "value == money," but it wouldn't surprise me if that was a core axiom of many people defending "MBA" leadership.

This is very very left field, but when the US went off the gold standard, money ceased to have a hard relationship to value because money could be invented and thus money games became more profitable than producing. It's worth contemplating China's strategy. Our money first businesses sending production to China made china the place where value is created. So when covid hit and we needed masks, we had money, but not value and people started to understand the difference leading to many of the efforts we see now like CHIPS. War is an economic shift where value is everything and money is nothing, and since the world is heating up (metaphorically and literally), it's worth centering arguments around value produced rather than money made.

I think it is more common that "shortsighted value" or "false value" is looked-down on by engineers. For example, you can increase profitability in the short-term by gutting R&D expense (engineers) but over time maintaining the system and innovating to stay-abreast of the competition will significantly suffer. Or "combining" products that on paper are complementary, but are made of such different tech-stacks and designed for different personas, that combo gets botched and users hate the product even it manages to be sold to exec that won't ever use it themselves.

Your are doing "If I can find few counterexamples I debunked your argument."

You made an absolute statement . . . "business leaders can never lead an engineering firm." All that is needed to disprove that statement is one counterexample, because then it has to morph into "some business leaders can lead an engineering firm and some can't."

Ironically given the subject matter, this is similar to how math proofs work . . .

This is why I try to not correct people’s spelling in comments on the internet, your own comment is bound to have a misspelling or other grammatical faux pas somewhere in there.

It's the nature of the word "can't" which allows a single counterexample to debunk an argument.

If the grandparent poster really meant "It is quite difficult", then it seems that we have arrived at a more accurate representation of the original argument, and thus 0xbadcafebee has been contributing greatly to the discussion.

>In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world.

And there definitely wasn't some bubble going on distorting that value

And yet, in 20 years he still left the company with 20 times more sales than he received it. You could certainly do far worse as a CEO.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Maybe "most valuable tech company in the world" would be a more convincing argument, since the tide receded shortly afterwards.

At the time that Cisco was top of the world, there were plenty of other high profile tech companies -- Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, DEC. On the networking side there were 3Com, Nortel etc. They all rose the tide of the dotcom bubble, yet Cisco came out on top. You should wonder why.

Cisco made routers during a period when the internet boomed. They’d have had to have screwed up badly to not grown rapidly.

Cisco had a lot of competitors in its growth era. Of them only the tattered juniper (soon HPE) remains.

Arista is doing very well now but Cisco is long past that growth era.

And PaaS takes care of it now. What do I care what router AWS uses?

So what happened to all their competitors?

This general argument is so tiring, and really dismissive and ignorant of the capabilities of other people who do work outside of the realm of engineering, as well as being ignorant to the actual content and usefulness of an MBA education. All this argument really signaling is "business bros have dumb monkey brains and can't learn technology but the engineers are so smart that they can learn business."

So many flaws with it:

0. MBAs are Masters degrees, which means that they're the second degree of those who have them. For example, Tim Cook's first degree was an Industrial Engineering degree, and his masters degree was an MBA. So the idea that someone who has an MBA is incapable of learning how to do technical work is essentially backwards.

1. How many tens if not hundreds of thousands of self-taught no-degree engineers are out there coding right now? If a person without an engineering degree can write code, build technical products, etc, what makes you think that a person with a business degree can't learn or understand technological concepts? Aren't some of the most famous technical founders of Silicon Valley college drop-outs? If Steve Wozniak could design the Apple II without having finished his engineering degree couldn't someone who happens to have a business degree do the same?

2. What makes you think that the information within an MBA is trivial to learn and apply effectively? Do engineers know when to structure the company in a matrix organizational structure versus a foundational organizational structure? Do engineers know how to apply organizational behavior techniques to diagnose and resolve group psychology issues like demotivated teams or poor product quality? Do engineers know how to evaluate the business and political climate of a different region to decide what type of business structure to enter into when expanding internationally? Do engineers know how read the financial disclosures of a company to evaluate whether they are a healthy company, how much their valuation should be, whether they should be acquired? Do they know how to prepare a balance sheet, statement of cash flows, or income statement? The list goes on and on - even if an MBA won't confuse you with Fourier transforms, the time investment to learn all the concepts is similar to any degree with similar credit hours.

3. How much in-the-weeds technical work do you think top management is doing at engineering companies anyway?

4. An MBA is a breadth degree just like your typical computer engineering or computer science degree. Just like engineers, people who get MBAs build most of their skill set through on-the-job experience. For example, in computer engineering you might learn about power systems, transistors, microcontroller programming, digital circuit design, and analog circuit design, but it's unlikely that you would do all of those things in one career path. In the same way, an MBA is a foundation in a number of topics: accounting, corporate finance, organizational behavior, operations, information technology, entrepreneurship, etc. The measure of the person who has the degree isn't just the content of the degree, it's where that starting point leads them and how effective they build their career on top of it.

> Do engineers know when to structure the company in a matrix organizational structure versus a foundational organizational structure? Do engineers know how to apply organizational behavior techniques to diagnose and resolve group psychology issues like demotivated teams or poor product quality?

The better question is, do MBAs?

> How much in-the-weeds technical work do you think top management is doing at engineering companies anyway?

You don't have to be in the technical weeds to be making decisions where technical considerations are important.

I think your comment is circling the crux of the issue. Technical individual contributors see the results of bad management decisions and attribute blame to an easy, but tangible target (MBA's), which crucially has a "solution" that appeals to them: ignore the bean counters and let me do my own thing.

Good leaders don't need to be technical, though it helps, and just as an engineering degree doesn't guarantee a good IC, an MBA doesn't guarantee a good leader. But it's less appealing to complain about bad employees, and also it's easy to forget that even good employees (on both "sides" of the IC/management divide) can make bad decisions if there's incomplete info and someone has to make a judgement call

Yeah, I find the thought similar to other trope assuming a lone engineer could have built the startup's product over weekend.

In both cases loudest voices would be from someone who has not experienced them and seeing only top of iceberg.

A business where one unit thinks it can make decisions in a vacuum is going to suffer regardless of the particular field of training that the leadership comes from.

If Engineering and Business work _together_ it doesn't matter who's in the lead position.

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