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It's weird for me to hear all these stories about MBAs. While I'm not an MBA myself, I was in investment banking and planned to get an MBA before I left finance

It's weird for me to hear all these stories about MBAs. While I'm not an MBA myself, I was in investment banking and planned to get an MBA before I left finance and did something else instead. I regularly pay engineers more than I pay myself as a CEO (granted: I am not really interested in draining the company's coffers for my own benefit, since I have equity). It just seems obvious that, at the end of the day, so much of the business's success turns on the engineering quality of the product, of the production lines, of the efficiencies, of the final delivered product quality. While I take time to try to understand engineering issues, I am not an engineer by training and recognize that these people are much, much better at it than I am. So it's strange to see all these MBAs -- the types of people I used to work more closely with -- simply not get it. In most industries, you simply can't paper over operational and engineering incompetence with a slick marketing plan. So you need great engineering and operational chops. For many industries, more than a slick marketing plan.

oceanghost 6y ago
I can assure you you're an outlier (but delightfully so). I worked once for a company where I was doing a product for the iPad. I literally, could not get the company to buy the newest iPad for us to test on. The only iPad we had for development had a bad sensor and would throw errors constantly. One day, marketing brings me 12 new iPads because-- they want me to install a beta of the app on them, because they're going to Fiji for a company-paid vacation (with their families!).
- LambdaComplex 6y ago
  And you quit on the spot, right?
  - oceanghost 6y ago
    I filed a complaint with the appropriate authorities (about the trips to Fiji, not the iPads).
    - _benj 6y ago
      :-D
- jariel 6y ago
  This has many shades of potential pettiness. First, it has nothing to do with MBAs. And of course we don't really know how budgets are allocated? That they might have just bought their iPads as part of the purchase cycle whereas 'Eng guy' already had one, and 'the sensor' wasn't enough to justify a new one? And that everything customer-facing has to be relatively new? And that 'the trip' they were on has nothing to do with anything?
  - nottorp 6y ago
    Actually, if you do software development for a mobile device you need at least one recent working sample of said mobile device to test on. Emulators are a joke. If he's complaining about a bad sensor it means that sensor was hindering his testing, otherwise he wouldn't have even noticed.
  - oceanghost 6y ago
    The point was, the marketing folks were getting illegal trips to Fiji while engineering couldn't get equipment to do their jobs... It's a matter of who is valuable and who is not, in the eyes of the people making the budget.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Incredible! I have the flip side story: We had spent almost 6 figures on factory experiments and needed to get some customer feedback from Europe at the behest of marketing. Being mischievous and predicting the response, I actually asked marketing if they could purchase our engineering team a pelican case to protect the marketing samples ($300 cost). They said it wasn’t in their budget to support, so we used bubble wrap.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
In the case I described, the resistance came from people who invested years and $100,000+ into an MBA degree with an expectation that companies would reciprocate by moving them to the top of the compensation scale. When they joined a company and realized that their graduate degree was not a guarantee that they'd be at the top of the payscale, they interpreted that as an error in the compensation structure. The challenge is that many (though not all) MBA programs virtually promote this idea that an MBA is a key to unlocking the highest salaries. MBA program advertising material often implies that an MBA will have huge ROI and greatly increase their compensation. It can be a shock to land at dual-track companies and realize that compensation is a strict ordering according to credentials.
- pm90 6y ago
  MBAs are especially terrible fit (I’m talking about median here, folks) because managing highly skilled engineers whose skills are in high enough demand so they can quit and get a better job whenever is not what most of the US economy looks like. Software itself is unlike manufacturing/services and there aren’t widely accepted models on how to best organize software development. A lot of creativity and open mindedness, not to mention the ability to handle failures frequently, is required in the industry.

oceanghost 6y ago

I can assure you you're an outlier (but delightfully so). I worked once for a company where I was doing a product for the iPad. I literally, could not get the company to buy the newest iPad for us to test on. The only iPad we had for development had a bad sensor and would throw errors constantly. One day, marketing brings me 12 new iPads because-- they want me to install a beta of the app on them, because they're going to Fiji for a company-paid vacation (with their families!).

LambdaComplex 6y ago
And you quit on the spot, right?
- oceanghost 6y ago
  I filed a complaint with the appropriate authorities (about the trips to Fiji, not the iPads).
  - _benj 6y ago
    :-D
jariel 6y ago
This has many shades of potential pettiness. First, it has nothing to do with MBAs. And of course we don't really know how budgets are allocated? That they might have just bought their iPads as part of the purchase cycle whereas 'Eng guy' already had one, and 'the sensor' wasn't enough to justify a new one? And that everything customer-facing has to be relatively new? And that 'the trip' they were on has nothing to do with anything?
- nottorp 6y ago
  Actually, if you do software development for a mobile device you need at least one recent working sample of said mobile device to test on. Emulators are a joke. If he's complaining about a bad sensor it means that sensor was hindering his testing, otherwise he wouldn't have even noticed.
- oceanghost 6y ago
  The point was, the marketing folks were getting illegal trips to Fiji while engineering couldn't get equipment to do their jobs... It's a matter of who is valuable and who is not, in the eyes of the people making the budget.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Incredible! I have the flip side story: We had spent almost 6 figures on factory experiments and needed to get some customer feedback from Europe at the behest of marketing. Being mischievous and predicting the response, I actually asked marketing if they could purchase our engineering team a pelican case to protect the marketing samples ($300 cost). They said it wasn’t in their budget to support, so we used bubble wrap.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

In the case I described, the resistance came from people who invested years and $100,000+ into an MBA degree with an expectation that companies would reciprocate by moving them to the top of the compensation scale. When they joined a company and realized that their graduate degree was not a guarantee that they'd be at the top of the payscale, they interpreted that as an error in the compensation structure. The challenge is that many (though not all) MBA programs virtually promote this idea that an MBA is a key to unlocking the highest salaries. MBA program advertising material often implies that an MBA will have huge ROI and greatly increase their compensation. It can be a shock to land at dual-track companies and realize that compensation is a strict ordering according to credentials.

pm90 6y ago
MBAs are especially terrible fit (I’m talking about median here, folks) because managing highly skilled engineers whose skills are in high enough demand so they can quit and get a better job whenever is not what most of the US economy looks like. Software itself is unlike manufacturing/services and there aren’t widely accepted models on how to best organize software development. A lot of creativity and open mindedness, not to mention the ability to handle failures frequently, is required in the industry.