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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

• 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.