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Comment by dmk23 | Hacker News Reader

I am the last person to defend the idea of hiring MBAs for sake of hiring MBAs, but the author really loses me with the last two paragraphs.

   Imagine that if instead of getting an MBA, ambitious young over-achievers spent
   two years in design school. Or spent two years getting a masters in computer
   science. Or two years getting into Y-Combinator and doing their own startup.

   Who would be worth more in the open market when all is said and done? Who
   would have a better chance of building their own great company?

The problem with MBAs is that they are oftentimes too expensive / not the right fit for startup roles / environment, not that they have limited career prospects.

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>>The problem with MBAs is that they are often too expensive / not the right fit for startups, not that they have limited career prospects.

MBA's are best suited at places where you need things to be generalized and managed even if it is at the expense of efficiency.

If you are looking at hard focus based work which requires a lot of application of specialized knowledge and effort. MBA's not just make a bad match for those jobs, but will likely mess it up.

You need MBA's when you need some super abstracted generalized knowledge applied to non critical tasks. You can hire an MBA to run a hospital's billing unit, but not to treat patients. Same with software and start up's. You can use them to do some work on stuff like market research, setting up the pay roll unit, attendance systems etc.

That's explicitly what an MBA was for - the fast track managers with several years real world experience at say age 28-32 at global companies like IBM.

Now a lot of people do an MBA directly after doing a first degree some of this is to game the immigration system as a masters qualification is seen as better than a BSC.

A lot of women in my family have an MBA, you can do an MBA in India though distance education. Which is basically reading a few books and appearing for exams. A lot of women see this as a good way to keep themselves busy while their parents look boys for them.

Exams are super easy(by any measure) and those three letters in the degree give an impression you are well read and educated.

For this reason alone. I've lost trust in M.S(MTech too). A friend of my mine has MS from BITS Pilani(Distance education program) and can't write a 100 line program. Masters degree programs, especially evening college and distance education ones are a joke. These are degrees only for namesake, and generally done for extra titles and because the person has nothing better to do.

Getting an MBA right after a BSc is rather useless IMHO. You won't get much benefit out of it unless you first get, say, 5 years of whatever full-time work anywhere - otherwise you'll read/hear the same thing, but get entirely different message out of that; in order for the theory to be practically useful and filter out insights from bullshit, you need some context of how that would apply in a real working environment.

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