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Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many (if any) of these MBAs had some tech experience before the degree.

Tech companies, which once may have dismissed business-school graduates as smooth talkers with PowerPoint skills, are warming to M.B.A.s who may be able to help lead their fast-growing operations as they mature. At the same time, Wall Street has offered fewer opportunities for ambitious young graduates.

such public info might not portend upside to the equity, tho

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As a student in an okay program (with many friends in the truly elite ones), I will say "not many". It's very rare to find someone here who lives and breathes the entrails of technology and data rather than just the nice and shiny and sexy parts of it.

That being said, I know some from finance and marketing tyle backgrounds who are totally gung-ho about data and have track records of getting their hands dirty, so I'd say that if you're intent on finding students with non-tech backgrounds who have the cultural instincts for tech, you can find them (maybe about 3% of the class).

edit: That being said, many of my peers would be fantastic at roles like BD.

We exist. I graduated from Booth recently and was a developer in the PnP subsystem team at Microsoft for over 6 years prior to b-school. In my class I had a hardware engineer (VLSI) and a telecom systems architect among others with strong technical backgrounds.

I've moved into a PM role now but still code everyday and join the dev team in deep technical discussions whenever I get a chance.

Look at the Haas (U.C. Berkeley's) Evening-Weekend MBA program (I'm currently enrolled, and am a Software Engineer in my day job, Founder of a startup on the side where I wrote all code). Link: http://ewmba.haas.berkeley.edu/community/students/classprofi...

Engineers and people with tech background are the biggest single block.

"Tech companies, which once may have dismissed business-school graduates as smooth talkers with PowerPoint skills, are warming to M.B.A.s ..."

I'm not buying it.

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