Hacker News Reader

"linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image"

What do you mean here by linear combination? If you wrote the same thing and said nonlinear combination would we have come away with a different interpretation? Is this just injecting random math terms to raise the status and credibility of the speaker?

It's a problem I see in a certain non-MBA culture (and am guilty of myself all the time too).

Or maybe I'm just missing something about what you meant.

> "linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image"

> What do you mean here by linear combination?

I suspect that Michael means that the people who claim on leadership position without having proved themselves will justify their self entitlement x % by their pre-existing social resources and (1-x) % by what they think of themselves.

Yes, you don't have to hold an MBA to think like that, but a diploma from a prestigious institution sure helps boost your ego, and being born from wealthy parents helps as well.

You're reading too much into it. I could have taken out the word "linear" and it would have been fine, but it wasn't exactly a random math term.

A linear model is the simplest model, which is sometimes an asset (in some cases, linear regression is the best statistical model for its simplicity) and sometimes makes it crude and underfit to the problem. I was focusing on the latter.

> Most of these people (not all of whom are MBAs) just want to be bosses, not entrepreneurs. Their goal is to be executives ("big picture guys") shouting orders, not worker bees, but they don't have the social resources to make it happen in an existing company so they drum up some seed funding and hire some engineers (usually, scraping the bottom) and try to kick something together.

That seems like a very mean way to say they don't want to be a cog in a machine.

> "I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were.

By "I want to be an executive" do you mean "I'd rather not work for a boss"? Is there a difference in those two desires? How is that fucking [sic] lame?

> What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."

Actually, "I have the right" is your words, not theirs.

> I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags.

Whoa, whoa. Nobody said they were douchebags.

> I know plenty whom I like a lot.

And I have a lot of gay friends (but I wouldn't say I like them "a lot").

> Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking.

What is a culture of entitlement? People just go to business school and... sit there and be entitled? What is a culture of position-seeking? Do they seek positions in companies? Does engineering school also have a culture of position-seeking, or is that different somehow?

> When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies.

So some MBA's aren't that good. I think we all already know that some startup founders suck. But others must be good, or turn out to run successful companies, or investors would just unilaterally cease funding any MBA's. The phenomenom of bad founders is not limited in any special way to people that got MBA's, either. So in what way is the problem with business schools, or the people that go to them? (Aside from the usual complaint you hear from a lot of people, that you're repeating, about MBA's that don't really know what they're doing because they don't have experience, which we get when people make stereotypical complaints about management consultants too.)

> In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).

It would be helpful if you could point us to an academic study that makes these measurements of douchiness. I don't hang out with enough law school graduates and business school graduates from these respective schools to be able to tell if what you are saying is true, but I guess you hang out with enough of them from each major business school and law school to have figured this all out.

"douchebaggery"...Sweet. My new favorite word.

It starts even earlier than business school, with the kids who campaign to be president of ten different school clubs just for the sake of being in a leadership position and being able to put it on their resumes. American culture really encourages this shallow sort of leadership by entitlement, while truly great leaders almost always earn their authority through a medium to long period of hard work side by side with other people, not necessarily as a follower, but at least as an equal.

In what way is becoming president of school clubs a form of entitlement?

Becoming president of school clubs isn't entitlement. What I mean is that the culture around leadership positions in high school incubates the attitudes that Michael was complaining about. Some students do legitimately learn a lot being the president of a high school club and are able to do good stuff with it. Many students, though, just run for the resume item, to help themselves rather than really to serve the organization and help it do interesting things. And because of the way our culture treats leadership, as if it were something that can exist without context, that becomes part of their identity. They've been the "leaders" of organizations all their life (which in some cases involves little more than organizing social events), they've gone to these fancy schools, and now, as a result, they ought to be in charge later in life, because that's who they are and because Harvard doesn't train followers, it trains leaders. But just because someone is the president of a social club or an a capella group in college (not to say that this is not a worthwhile thing to do), it doesn't give them any more right or qualification to be the leader of a law firm, or an engineering firm, or an advocacy group, or a theatre troupe. Leadership isn't a single skill or quality; it exists entirely within a context.

I don't have any problem with club presidents in general. I do have a problem with some of the ideas U.S. culture (or at least middle class upward-aspiring culture) has about leadership, and I think those attitudes do lead to a destructive form of entitlement.

I don't think you're going to get an accurate view of people at Harvard, even people that were involved in student government or were club presidents, if you generalize them like that. If I were to generalize, I'd think that most people that were high school club presidents and leadership camp-goers were really cynical about it, not entitled. (That's just based on the people that went to my high school.)

I also don't think the cause-and-effect story is really there. The one startup founder that I know personally that I've heard be called a douchebag is somebody that started the company early on in high school, that bootstrapped it up with his brother from money made by selling bootleg CD's at soccer practice, and never went to college. And the other >bad person< I know that started a startup isn't your generic entitled club president type -- he is, far more specifically, your basic clinical psychopath.

Also, to the degree that these people do exist, or to which this attitude has been inculcated into a group of people, the sink-or-swim situation of running a startup seems like a great place for them.