Software developer with an MBA here. MBA courses do in fact teach servant leadership style (which is what the article is advocating). As a software dev manager

Software developer with an MBA here. MBA courses do in fact teach servant leadership style (which is what the article is advocating). As a software dev manager, I found the MBA to be useful for three reasons: 1. I could understand the rest of the management team better, and learned the appropriate technical terms to talk to them about the problems they faced. As always, it's easier to reduce conflict if you understand the other participant's problems and objectives. 2. The people-management and leadership training was actually useful, and has been useful since when dealing with some tough people problems. 3. There is, to some extent, a dismissive "you're just a code monkey" attitude amongst some managers. Having an MBA does help with dealing with that. It's difficult to dismiss me as just the nerd who pushes the nerd-buttons when I'm more qualified than them in their own area. I'm not sure I'd recommend that all software dev leads go and get an MBA - it's definitely overkill. But on the other hand, dismissing the entire corpus of management learning as irrelevant because software dev is special is also overkill. There are things to learn from traditional management courses. Devs are still people, after all, and managing them as people is still the same. I do think that a dev manager should be able to code, and preferably have worked as a commercial developer at some point in their past. It does help with understanding the situation and the problems. And it's almost impossible to get any respect from the team if you can't talk the talk and haven't walked the walk. I have experienced the bad management that the author talks about, and seen it in action. But I don't think this is unique to development - there is a lot of bad management around in all industries. The answer to this is more management training, not less ;) Getting dev managers onto management courses is still going to be a net good because they'll be better managers, even if they still don't understand why they can't get accurate estimates for anything. If the author goes on to manage a team for a few years, I'd be interested to read their take on it then. The view is very different from the other side.