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Something to ponder. Engineer hiring at the big silicon valley firms usually consists of 3 intense rounds of technical interviews by peers and a huge amount of

Something to ponder. Engineer hiring at the big silicon valley firms usually consists of 3 intense rounds of technical interviews by peers and a huge amount of background checks and screening. Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring MBA degrees are by far the most common masters degree, 126,214 new MBAs graduating each year. Link - http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-are-officially-too-many-mbas/266880/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-ar... Meanwhile the number of new engineering graduates across all disciplines per year is 126,194. Link - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obama---we-don-t-have-enough-engineers-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obam... This is leading to a cycle. Small startups run by the hard to hire engineers smash the competition. They then get established and stagnate, they stop hiring new engineers because it's too expensive (whilst hiring the more common MBAs for millions) and they stagnate because of this. Google came out of nowhere in the 90's as an innovative company of engineers. They became huge. They're now going into MBA focused stagnation mode just like HP, Yahoo, IBM and about a hundred other examples.

carlosnunez 11y ago
> Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience Not quite. Hiring for high management positions is usually much more selective and fickle, and the risk for people in those positions to succeed is much MUCH higher than what most engineers need to deal with (hence the significantly larger compensation delta). I've never been to B-School, but if I had to posit a guess, they do do a better job of teaching people how to run existing companies in various scenarios than what most engineers learn over their career. (Also, keep in mind that the biggest value of going to an expensive B-School is the high value networking opportunities. This means that the school you choose matters A LOT. A lot of people get useless MBAs. :/ )
rajacombinator 11y ago
I think you're confused innovators with engineers. It's always hard to hire innovators because it's hard to offer them the right incentives.

carlosnunez 11y ago

> Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience Not quite. Hiring for high management positions is usually much more selective and fickle, and the risk for people in those positions to succeed is much MUCH higher than what most engineers need to deal with (hence the significantly larger compensation delta). I've never been to B-School, but if I had to posit a guess, they do do a better job of teaching people how to run existing companies in various scenarios than what most engineers learn over their career. (Also, keep in mind that the biggest value of going to an expensive B-School is the high value networking opportunities. This means that the school you choose matters A LOT. A lot of people get useless MBAs. :/ )

rajacombinator 11y ago

I think you're confused innovators with engineers. It's always hard to hire innovators because it's hard to offer them the right incentives.