10 ms·

This comes up a lot: everyone has some "skills" that transfer from one domain to another. Read an interview with a titan of industry and they will invariably br

• Moodles 5y ago
  Right. But are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? Not to offend, but MBAs just seem like networking and drinking degrees to me, for people that love business. I've seen MBAs syllabuses: I've literally seen very basic things like "profit = revenue - cost" on slides. It seems like with MBAs it's almost entirely soft skills, no?
  • mbot5324 5y ago
    Just as a layperson often underestimates the true depth of a PhD's expertise in their field of study, many people often underestimate the skill of someone who has spent a similarly long time meditating on the "soft skills" that actually glue a good idea into a successful business.
    • Moodles 5y ago
      I'm not arguing for hard skills over soft skills. I'm asking if MBAs actually provide transferrable hard skills.
      • bmeski 5y ago
        They don’t. All MBAs I’ve met in my career have been replaced easily.
        • mlac 5y ago
          You haven’t met good ones, and that’s likely why they were replaced.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
        • pasiaj 5y ago
          That's not an argument against MBA's having hard skills. It's an argument for a finely standardized product. MBAs are a commodity, but they do or at least can have hard skills. I've wasted plenty of time and money on subpar market entry and expansion that could have been saved had I worked with people with some theoretical background on those.
      • mbot5324 5y ago
        You could write an encyclopedic book of counter intuitive organizational dynamics. While I don't know that this is the case with all of them, perhaps MBAs could be understood as internalizing the combination of such an encyclopedia with a few others besides and gaining insight into how they interplay with supply line logistics. The insight mostly comes from experiences; the knowledge of what to reference to find where to find where to find what to find could be (boringly) boiled down to rote memorization and distributed through your standard classroom practices.
    • wittycardio 5y ago
      Soft skills are very valuable but you tend to learn those with experience not classes, MBAs are just as unlikely as PhDs to have them
  • ArnoVW 5y ago
    What I'd expect in an MBA : accounting, finance, marketing, basics in legal, management, business strategy, etc. Sure. It's not higher maths. But they are real skills that are 1) hard 2) are not 'natural'. Yes. It's also a good way to meet other people like you. But then the same thing goes for any 'skill'. How many businesses weren't founded by comp Sci students from the same uni?
  • mlac 5y ago
    Good MBA programs have courses in linear programming and optimization, complex financial modeling, and supply chain that are quantitative in nature. There are also technology components that review basic IT setups for a business. They teach you how to think about markets, and how to review financial statements and understand a business’ profit and operations, and offer opportunity to get capital. The org behavior courses teach about how to actually get an organization to achieve its desired outcome. And that can be way more powerful than a solo person working alone in a lab. An ideal MBA with experience post-school would be able to look at an idea, figure out if it’s a viable product with a good market fit, have the contacts to get financing, the connections to get it produced at the right quality with the lowest possible cost, hedge against forex risks, work with lawyers to negotiate the associated contracts (or know enough to not get screwed), record and accurately report the profits to governments and stakeholders, and get the right people onboarded (these are the soft skills) to get the work done.
    • mlac 5y ago
      I wrote the above, but I think the problematic ones are the “text book MBAs” (I just coined that) who go to mediocre, money-grabbing programs and think they are good to go because they read text books and have the degree. There are too many of these in the marketplace. The other skill a good MBA imparts is solid written and oral communication. I don’t have an MBA, but considered it and chose another MS program, cherry picking MBA courses I felt were relevant. But to discount an MBA as two more years of undergrad partying is missing out on a lot of skills they can bring.
      • toiletfuneral 5y ago
      • mcguire 5y ago
        "I wrote the above, but I think the problematic ones are the “text book MBAs” (I just coined that) who go to mediocre, money-grabbing programs and think they are good to go because they read text books and have the degree. There are too many of these in the marketplace." This is essentially true for all college degrees at this point.
  • hooande 5y ago
    an MBA involves a lot of case studies. that's breaking down what happened with a given business over a period of time in some detail. at least back in my day, MBA programs had a lot of reading and writing them look up some examples of MBA case studies some time. they can be very interesting and informative
  • dirtybird04 5y ago
    Yes, it's entirely soft skills. But they work very hard at using their soft skills to solve trivial business problems. Every worked a marketing or revops job? It's mind-numbingly trivial, the likes of you and I wouldn't last a day. But these MBAs do it all without blinking, and do it passionately. And I, for one, appreciate them for that.
  • analog31 5y ago
    I have friends who earned MBA's, typically through "executive" programs attached to major universities. Their training was being paid for, and they were looking for the more prestigious programs. These programs did not accept students straight out of college, and so the people going into them already tend to have some business experience, and have already sorted themselves according to their math ability. They're already known to be diligent, organized, and satisfactorily literate. The ones who went in with strong math skills found the quantitative courses to be a breeze. Everybody learned accounting and finance principles, which are useful for being conversant in that language. They took a course in business communications, and came out with a fairly standardized approach to writing memoranda and reports. I think they learned how to write and critique a business plan. There were one or more courses on business law, including HR. I call these "hard" skills because they are technical in nature. I believe that these are all good skills for entry into middle management.
  • dxbydt 5y ago
    > are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? You are asking a genuine question that has a lot of backing research. Before I became a Quant, I was a student at the University of Chicago, getting the Masters in Financial Math. So the professor who taught the Options course at MSFM told us one day - Now I have to teach this same material to the MBA class, but at a 10,000 feet level. One of the students asked him to elaborate. So he says - If you have a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest, then a UChicago Finance PhD is like 100. A UChicago MSFM is about 50. A UChicago MBA is like 10. A regular (non-UChicago) MBA is a 1. More concretely, someone like me, the 50, can put up the Black Scholes on the blackboard from memory. I can derive it, solve it, code it up in C++ and price your options on a real equity & tell you whether you should buy/sell the damn thing. But that's as far as I was taught. The Finance PhD i.e. the 100, can derive and solve not just the BS but a whole family of models - the Heston, Derman, SABR, BDT, HJM, HW etc etc - there's like a dozen of these PDEs & it gets seriously complicated very soon. So supposedly this Finance PhD can do all of that & more. The UChicago MBA, which is the 10, knows Black Scholes, knows what the Greeks are & can eyeball the value of the Greek & tell you whether the option is overpriced or not, but can't derive/solve/code up the PDE. The non-UChicago MBA has heard of something called the Black Scholes but that's about it. Ofcourse that's his opinion & you should take it with a grain of salt. That said, during my time in the investment banking industry, I have worked with a boatload of MBAs, some quants(MSFMs) & a few PhDs - his opinions bore true.
    • Moodles 5y ago
      My experience too (in a completely different field to finance).
    • in3d 5y ago
      This sounds like something a biased physics professor who values his own field more than others could also say about teaching quantum computing to financial math students. You don't need more than an overview and it's hard. What percentage of MBAs will need to analytically solve PDEs?
      • Moodles 5y ago
  • omarhaneef 5y ago
    I have heard some version of this argument frequently over the years: there is this "hard" skill in engineering or physics or computer science that has real lasting value, and there there are these other disciplines that don't really have much of value. Now, let's unpack what people mean by "hard" skills. Do you mean they are difficult to learn? Do you mean they are useful in today and tomorrow's economy? What exactly does the hard in hard skill mean. I think you can see how the deconstruction of the argument works here. If by hard you mean difficult to learn, then I can list a bunch of hard skills that are not directly useful. If someone can rattle of all the major proofs in quantum mechanics on a blackboard, they may be a genius, have worked hard, and can do amazing things with their brain but that effort may not directly make them more employable. If by hard skills you mean things that are useful to the economy, then that changes. I could have spent 4 years learning WAMP and then when I come out the economy has moved on to some other framework. Maybe by hard skills you mean some skills that make it easy to pick up the other computer skills. So I may have learned a particular computer language, but along the way I know conditionals, loops, computational expense and so on. Are these harder to learn than presentation skills? Are they more useful than financial statements? The example here of a slide that says "profit = revenue - cost" is hardly fair. That's like saying I once saw a piece of code on github that was very poor. Picking individual examples of something you don't find challenging is easy in any field. Explain what you mean by hard skills, and then we can talk about whether a particular discipline has them or not.
    • q-big 5y ago
      > Now, let's unpack what people mean by "hard" skills. Do you mean they are difficult to learn? Do you mean they are useful in today and tomorrow's economy? What exactly does the hard in hard skill mean. Hard skills are what is the scientific core of your degree course or PhD program. So knowledge about theoretical physics of you study physics or do your PhD in it. Knowledge of mathematics and ability to do hard proofs for mathematics. For computer science, the situation is more subtle: Here the hard skill is knowledge of computer science, being able to understand papers about this topic (degree course) or doing research (PhD program). In this sense, I would consider programming knowledge as a (central!) soft skill of a CS program.
    • 5y ago
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
    High level MBAs are for networking. But the degree is in Business Administration which is a bunch of broad spectrum lightly technical work in accounting, logistics, etc, which lots of businesses or entrepreneurs need and not everyone can self teach like individualist programmers do.
  • refurb 5y ago
    MBA's are generalist degrees. You'll see ex-military, social workers, English majors in addition to technical people get MBAs. As such, the content is generalist in nature. You don't do a deep dive on any particular topic (well you can in 2nd year, but it's still nowhere as deep as a specialist). A technical person could do the statistics class in their sleep (it's freshman statistics) while social worker might struggle. But the technical person would learn something new in a negotiations class, but the English major who studied debate might not. The goal of the MBA is to give students a broad understanding of business, not specialists in any one area. So when the new graduate is given the job of determining if a business line is profitable, they can go and talk to finance and know enough that they can ask the right questions. So the hard skills is a difficult thing to pin down - for some students no (because they had them already) for others? Yeah. And a big part of the skill set (hard? soft?) is an understanding of the different parts of a business and how they interact. That way when the CEO asks your opinion on whether or not the company should acquire another you don't say "yeah their technical team is great!", you can talk about finances, talent, product lines, competitors, etc.
• throwawaygh 5y ago
  I don't think these articles are written for CS PhDs, who are an exceptional class of PhDs. First, CS PhDs can ALWAYS get tenure-track academic jobs. Maybe not at a top R1, but getting a university teaching job in CS is not some sort of prize. Quite the opposite. Most non-phd-granting institutions with sub-billion endowments struggle to hire CS faculty (they pay sub-100K, sometimes as low as 65K... if you go that route in CS, your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig). So there's no "oh no plan B" fear. You don't need to be reassured your PhD wasn't a waste after failing to get any sort of academic post, because if you lower your expectations enough you will get an academic post. This is NOT true in nearly any other field. 2. CS PhDs, with a few exceptional subfields, are in high demand. It's pretty reasonable to expect 300K out of a top CS PhD program; the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that. CS PhDs who choose industry don't need to be reassured that their PhD has value. It's reflected in their compensation.
  • photochemsyn 5y ago
    Most academic professors in CS are mentoring much more than one PhD students over the course of their academic careers, yes? Therefore, as with other academic disciplines, the ratio of academic tenure-track job openings to new PhD's looking for academic jobs is >> 1, even if you look at industry demand for PhD's.
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      > yes? No. The trope you're repeating here has some truth in the humanities and some natural sciences, but it's not true in CS. Industry has a veracious appetite for CS PhDs. Only 40% of PhDS stay in academia, and of those only a fraction take jobs at universities that grant PhDs. Tenured CS professors somewhat leave for industry at much higher rates than other fields. Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollments have surged without a corresponding increase in PhD enrollment. Multiple sources of demand are surging, but supply is waning. From a CRA report on the subject: The demand for PhD’s in computer science (CS) in the US continues to outpace the supply. Both industry and academia struggle to fill positions. Since 2014, approximately 2000 CS PhDs have been awarded annually and about 60% of new PhD graduates take jobs in industry [ZwBi19]. The rapid growth in undergraduate CS enrollments during the last decade has significantly increased the number of open faculty positions at academic institutions, but has so far not led to an increase in the number of PhDs graduated. Historically, US PhD programs have relied heavily on international students. Figure 1 shows the number of CS PhDs awarded annually to domestic and international students since 1985. The percentage of domestic PhD students graduating decreased from 69% in 1985 to 37% in 2018. The reliance on international students to drive innovation and leadership in computing research in the US has become unstable as international students increasingly face obstacles or disincentives to study in the US, and an increasing number return home to attractive opportunities after graduation from a US university. Moreover, some areas of computing have security implications that make positions in those areas inaccessible to non-US nationals. The continuing demand for PhDs in computer science combined with this instability of international student participation requires bold action to increase the number of domestic students completing a PhD in computer science. https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Addressing-National-Need-for-Increasing-Domestic-PhD-Yield-in-CS.pdf https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Addressing-Nation...
• loceng 5y ago
  And likewise an MBA is different than an entrepreneur who trailblazes their own path, learning as they go vs. following a more indoctrinating path.
• p1esk 5y ago
  if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, can communicate, analyze and so forth Correction: if you have multiple publications in top conferences as the first author. Most phds don’t have that. Part of my job is to hire ML researchers. 90% of phds who apply are quite pathetic as far as their publication record.
• algo_trader 5y ago
  Do you feel like the "search space" of MBA problems is somewhat finite? Like, if you read 5 books and 20 blogs on VCs you are unlikely to be mystified by anything that happens to you as you seed/VC/pivot/exit whatever. There are only so many possibilities. (MBA stuff is still hard, and sensitive to luck/timing/networking/cultural factors..)
• BeetleB 5y ago
  > I know if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, Focus, yes. Hard work - not a requirement. Depends entirely on your professor's requirements to get the PhD. Most of what I saw in my time in engineering/physics: Just consistently do the work and stick to it without getting too many distractions. Hard work merely made you get the PhD quicker. Of course, if your advisor is fussy, this strategy won't work. The one other observation is that when you look at the output and career trajectory, there isn't much correlation with the value of the PhD and how hard the advisor makes you work. Most of the value of the hard work slave driving professors make you do goes to your professor, not you,