I made five-page web sites when I was 15. I had published code, marketing (business cards!), customers, and more money than I would have gotten had I worked the help desk.

What's the point of engineering school?

The point of business school, for the most part, is for people who work in large bureaucratic organizations to get a pay bump at the middle management level.

But contrary to the MBA's are idiots stereotype, most MBAs don't flaunt their education or turn into "House of Lies"-style management consulting idiots after getting their degrees either.

Uhh, people get an MBA to be something like a vice president at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, or a consultant at McKinsey, or maybe even eventually a CEO of a major corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue, not to run a lawn mowing business.

Edit: I see now that you were being sarcastic.

I'm glad someone brought this up. Someone might be able to start a successful solo business venture without any formal training. But that is very different from being an executive or having some administrative job in a medium or larger-sized company (I am assuming). The guy that started the solo business has that experience, great - but he's only got that perspective of being a business administrator. Do you need formal training to do most of the jobs that MBA's do? Maybe not - but the person who has only done that one solo business probably does not have enough perspective on that either.

In this case, I don't know if the author is only talking about building that one first app, apps in general or programming in general (probably just apps, I reckon). But if the audience is non-programmers who gets the impression that programming is just about "winging it" and that formal education is totally optional#, then it only offers a perspective from a very limited vantage point.

#this could be a valid opinion, but only really interesting to me if it came from an experienced programmer.