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One question I asked that turned me off from pursuing an MBA was "what happens when the MBA pool becomes as saturated as the <liberal arts degree> pool?" What o
by acalderaro 10y ago
One question I asked that turned me off from pursuing an MBA was "what happens when the MBA pool becomes as saturated as the <liberal arts degree> pool?" What other degree can one get besides an MBA to demonstrate success at business? How can one manage a social network that large at the minimum level required to get referrals to jobs. What will happen to wages?
When I started thinking long term, I realized that people everything an MBA teaches you can be learned online and through a few books. Excel modeling, financial analysis, case studies, it's all readily available.
And I came to the unfortunate conclusion that one doesn't need an education to teach you how to be a good manager. Good managers are competent in both the technical skills required of their subordinates and also in the interpersonal skills required to communicate and understand their subordinates. So the question for me became how do I learn technical skills? And the solution was to study technical fields.
We're at the start of a transition period, where companies no longer outsource their leadership to individuals with alphabet soup after their name. As innovation and expansion occur more rapidly, people left asking "is it better to be the technical or the non-technical co-founder" will lose to technical founders with a desire to lead.
- no_wave 10y agoWhen people use the phrase MBA on HN they usually mean MBA from one of the top 20 or so programs, which answers your first question.
- nradov 10y agoIn theory you can learn everything that an MBA program teaches through self study. In practice it's tough to get more than a superficial understanding of the subjects without actively participating in class discussions, working together with other students on group projects, and taking exams to really measure your knowledge. Autodidacts are often overconfident and missing key knowledge because no one ever really challenged them. The size of the MBA pool is somewhat self limiting because the coursework is kind of a grind. None of it requires any real genius but there's a lot of it.