thegoldenchild

New levels, new devils ;)

No, but it's the same as a CS student taking one class on operating systems, machine learning, android development, etc. You won't be an expert after one or two courses, but you develop a foundation level of understanding. As a CEO, you'll be in meetings with accountants, marketers, engineers, recruiters, lawyers, etc. Knowing the common vocabulary helps you avoid wasting unnecessary time asking questions about the core concepts.

Finance I, II, III. Accounting I, II, III. Corporate Strategy. Emerging Markets. Micro/Macro Economics. Business Acting. Marketing Strategy. Ops Research.

There's nothing stopping you from learning everything on your own. BUT you miss out on the MBA network. When you're forced to spend 2 years with a cohort of 75-100 people, you develop a close-knit bond when you spend most of your time eating, drinking, studying (and sometimes sleeping) with these people. If I want a job at a company that one of my MBA classmates works at, an interview is literally one phone call away.

I'm aware that HN is a pro-engineering, anti-MBA group of folks, but hopefully my perspective helps add a bit of color from the other side.

I got a BS and MS in Computer Science and ended up working as a software engineer for a number of years. After a while, I was left wanting more, so I enrolled in an MBA program. IMO, 50-60% of classes in business school are fluff leadership rah-rah self-development bullshit. But the other 40% is valuable.

Why? Because Sundar Pichai isn't losing sleep at night over which tech stack the Gmail team is using. Satya Nadella doesn't give a fuck about a 5% latency reduction on the Bing landing page. The higher you climb in the ladder, the more you focus on non-technical topics like scaling, budgeting, revenue growth, recruiting, etc etc etc.

In the bubble of Silicon Valley, it's easy to generalize every incompetent MBA you meet into a group that you classify as being useless in an organization. Just remember: a handful of tech CEOs have MBAs. HBS will always produce leaders, regardless of whether or not they succeed once they're in the CEO role. McKinsey churns out more CEOs than any other company in human history. The business skill set may seem trivial, but playing the political game usually gets your further than raw skill alone.