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Comment by derekjobst | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this is not indicative of a rise of engineers who become interested in management, but individuals already interested in management (or are of that mindset) choosing to get a degree in engineering instead of Business. Given the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a guaranteed high level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers would prefer such a safety net.

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> Given the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a guaranteed high level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers would prefer such a safety net.

Practical experience (of a practicing engineer) shows that the value of an engineering degree outweighs that of one's work only in the first couple of months, or even weeks, on a job. The skills of incompetent engineers are in significantly less demand than that of incompetent managers (sadly). Unlike an MBA, the engineering diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on the moment people realize you're clueless. It's not a very good safety net :-).

That level of basic incompetence is not in scope for a discussion of CEO candidates.

How is an MBA any more than just paper if you are clueless??

There's no "rise of engineers" becoming interested in management. FTA: "In fact, engineering long has ranked as the most common undergraduate degree among Fortune 500 CEOs."

Out of the top-20 MBA programs, STEM undergraduate degrees are about as common as business/economics undergraduate degrees: http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2009/11/20/which-undergrad-ma....

So, an engineer can perform managerial work with limited formal training... You seem to be implying that a business degree has little value.

As an engineer with an MBA, I can tell you that an engineer breezes through the hard sciences part of management. It's all about modelling, and that's the core training of an engineer. The social sciences aspect of management is not so easy, but if there is underlying aptitude/informal training present, the jump from engineering to management is not that hard.

"...not that hard."

For a business major to do the vice versa would be virtually impossible (programmer is possible, but not 'engineer' in the traditional sense).

Programmer seems to be the largest market for "engineering" business leads these days.

I dont think that is true at all.

I am pretty sure I could teach just about anyone who is motivated and interested enough math/chemistry/physics/computer science to get through any given engineering degree in those areas.

I think the amount of business people who are motivated to and interested in learning the engineering skills is way lower than the amount of engineering people who are motivated to and interested in learning business skills, but that isnt about ability, that is about motivation and interest.

Engineering interest maps much more directly to engineering education than business interest maps to business education.

I don't think so. Remember that if you are talking about someone with a good formal management degree, you may assume there is a solid mathematical foundation. You can't be good at university level math without good analytical reasoning. Going from good math reasoning to programming isn't any more foreign than what engineers do when learning the social aspects of management.

You don't see to many people doing that switch, but I'd attribute it to factors other than any kind of ability chasm. What we do isn't rocket science[1].

[1] Unless you are a Kerbal Space Program developer. Then it is rocket science. Of the fun kind.

It's not that it has little value, just that it is extremely easy for someone with an engineering mindset.

I took a single class at the USC Law School on Constitutional Law. It was considered a brutal general education class, but myself and some fellow engineers in the class found it absolutely trivial. Turns out case law has many similarities to formal logic.

An engineering education gives you a huge toolset with which to model and solve different kinds of problems, a toolset that non-engineers simply do not possess.

This is getting common in law as well, because patent law is lucrative, and having an engineering degree is an asset for practicing in that field. So people get an engineering degree not because they are really interested in engineering, but because it's a useful add-on to a lawyer's CV.

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