I studied both engineering and management as part of the same degree. I can tell you everything the techies think about MBAs is correct. (The undergrad manageme

I studied both engineering and management as part of the same degree. I can tell you everything the techies think about MBAs is correct. (The undergrad management degree overlapped with the MBA quite a bit, esp as the MBA was only one year). Somehow if you take two thirds of an engineering degree and two thirds of an econ/mgt degree, two thirds of the work is the engineering degree. Most of the reading in management is discovery channel style: lots of interesting things, there's no doubting that, but not real skills. They raise simple ideas to a level of respect that is not warranted by the content. Eg Porter's Five Forces can only really be a superficial checklist for strategy, it doesn't actually tell you anything about what matters in some industry, and you might come across some business where those five items are not so clear cut. Same with SWOT analysis and various other acronyms, they are simply trivial things that cannot stand next to the content of a technical degree. There's also an inherent problem with MBA training: it assumes that there's a general training that is useful to every business. If you're going to apply the material, every grad will end up putting a round peg in a square hole. Fortunately there's not really anything to apply, you get the cool jobs because you're showing that you're smart and ambitious, not because you are qualified technically to do it. Engineering on the other hand is quite hard to BS. We built a crappy radio in the first term, but it was a radio and it played the radio when you turned it on. You had to understand how radio spectrum worked and how to solder the little RLC components together to make it work.