10 ms·

When I was in b-school, it was like they were trying to train us to have contempt for employees, especially the jobs where wages were low. They wanted us to tre

When I was in b-school, it was like they were trying to train us to have contempt for employees, especially the jobs where wages were low. They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers. I got my degree but left utterly disgusted with management and MBA types. I am of the opinion that business degrees and business school are a toxic influence on most companies and that, with a few exceptions, they would be better served by hiring management types from other parts of the business and giving them some light compliance training instead.

mhuffman 4y ago
Basically the entire time I was getting a business degree the word "employee" was never even used! Just different forms of "human resources" or "workers".
- pdntspa 4y ago
  Exactly. It seems that the current trend is to dehumanize folks as much as possible. Nevermind the fact that businesses are made of people, and they SERVE people, and not just their shareholders. In fact, if anything, shareholders need to take a back seat on the list of priorities.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings. Your point regarding business = people stands though
    - atq2119 4y ago
      > Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings. This implication doesn't have to be true though - it's a political choice. There are (well developed) countries in which worker representatives have a significant amount of board vote shares by law, usually applicable to companies beyond a certain size.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        As a shareholder, I’d never vote to continue employee-unfriendly policies in a knowledge work company. There are too many shareholders that merely rubberstamp the decisions that come up at AGMs.
      - rmah 4y ago
        My understanding is that in those nations, non-shareholders have board representation, not voting control. I.e. they have people on the board to hear what's discussed and give them a voice in deliberations, but no actual control. Is my understanding incorrect?
  - ezconnect 4y ago
    The problem is the investors, they don't like companies that has zero growth rate even if it is profitable. Profitable companies that has zero growth rate are used as collateral for loans to buy growing companies with negative profits and this bankrupts the profitable company because of debt burden. It seems greed is too much in the capital markets.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      What you described is stupidity, not greed. Stupid investors get their capital taken away.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
  "Worker" is not exactly a pejorative term. In some circles it would even be considered a mark of pride. Although "human resource" is ironically dehumanizing.
  - mhuffman 4y ago
    Neither were ever used in a pejorative sense exactly, more with a sense of apathy and an even clinical sense that an employee is thought of the same as a widget or a building or a piece of machinery.
  - booleandilemma 4y ago
    I'd rather be called worker than the currently fashionable "individual contributor", the latter just seems so condescending. Just call me what I am, don't try to sugarcoat it.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  IMO "worker" has some dignity but "human resource" implies I'm on a spreadsheet somewhere alongside the depreciation schedule of the physical plant.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    We're all on a spreadsheet or database elsewhere.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Absolutely, so "human resource" has at least the benefit of being true even if it is baldly insulting to us.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    “Human” being an adjective in that phrase, rather than a noun…
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    "Worker" in the economic context is a socialist term. It doesn't sounds dignified to me. Employee is a better word.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  At my company they lately talk about hiring “resources”, not “people”. This really bugs me. They really seem to be hellbent taking any humanity out of work.
- kube-system 4y ago
  And it may be technically correct depending on the topic. Not all workers are employees.
cbar_tx 4y ago
That's a negotiation tactic that wouldn't work so well if the employees realized that a robust economy provides them opportunity to also treat their employer as replaceable.
ericmay 4y ago
When/Where did you go to school? When I did my MBA at Fisher (Ohio State 2018-2020) this definitely wasn't the case. We actually spent considerable time talking about how to get the most out of your team and how dumb of an idea it was/is to treat employees poorly. Many of our in-class discussions that revolved around this topic focused much more on treating employees well and how dangerous bad corporate culture and out of touch leadership was. Many of my classmates came from prior working backgrounds in various fields, however, so perhaps that leads to a different culture at the b-school.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  I went to a state school with a highly-regarded (at least locally) business program, graduated 2013
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  If you learnt about cost centers, you know what OP is talking about.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Knowing what parts of your operation are cost centers vs profit centers does not require you to treat employees in any particular way. If you’re confused about how your company sustains itself, that might even lead you to treat your employees worse over time.
    - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
      Obviously it helps to know where are your costs and your profits, but every company i worked for that used these terms operationally was a bad place to work. Heavy hierarchy and excessive focus on management. Call it how you want but I prefer to not work for people with this mindset.
      - com2kid 4y ago
        Then you have idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.
naikrovek 4y ago
100% agree. every good technical colleague I've ever had who got an MBA completely ignores technical considerations when making technical decisions, and in general, they really seem to be on their own planet afterwards. they are no longer a part of reality.
- bulatb 4y ago
  By their own metrics, are they successful? Do they accomplish their goals?
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    yes on planet manager they do quite well. they get paid a lot more and they laugh a lot.
  - KvanteKat 4y ago
    Yes, but not by "growing the pie"; MBAs increase profits in the sense that they reduce the share of profits going to workers (at least according to this paper; I'm not familiar with the rest of the literature on this subject). From the abstract of the paper: "...Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities..."
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- trinsic2 4y ago
  This is the way I see academia, which has been thoroughly institutionalized by the industrial era. I know that you only mentioned the technical aspect education (which has been impacted as well), but this is a existential problem with humanity. The system attempts to divorce human beings from true knowledge that is based on experience to create artificial and theoretical constraints on human value. This is done to create a power differential by separating people into classes. This is why studying for specific fields are largely theoretical and not experiential. When we allow ourselves to be removed from experiential knowledge, we become automatons that are easy to control.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Isn't that the business model with low skill workers though? Figure out how to employ them in a way that they don't need training and all is well.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  It's an incredibly shitty model for everyone but shareholders. Why do we have to institutionalize abuse?
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    My high level analysis is that this is because of institutionalized 'dispersion of responsibility' stemming from the pure capitalistic doctrine we all have supposedly signed up for. Essentially you have individual entities whose responsibility (& only one) to maximize the profit. so anything that is measurable ends up getting projected on one dimension of 'capital'. There is a lot of talk about social responsibility but most 'don't be evil' lasts until a few bad quarters and then its back to same story. No supposedly the govt/unions are supposed to provide a counterbalance to this but for some incredible reason folks here in America are convinced that any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. So what we are left with is this dispersion of responsibility to do social good but no one actually in charge of it. And don't even get me started on the Senate composition/electoral college & institutionalized gerrymandering (so you can actually fix it with simple majority you need a special kind of majority).
    - yourapostasy 4y ago
      > ...any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. Ironically, the set of interlocking directorships, foundation seats, advisorships, consulting arrangements, share holdings, etc. among politicians, C-suite and EVP layers is every bit as collectivist as an old Soviet farm or modern workers' union. I personally model it as the strongest union out there because it doesn't need to operate by open rules relying upon legislation but is instead an acculturated reinforcement mechanism amongst its members that flexibly adapts to its host socioeconomic framework, making it harder than any conventional union to bust up or influence.
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
| They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers. I have found that when communicating with "business degree" people, I will often use this as a common starting point but then add "but you'll spend far more replacing the knowledge that people take when they leave"
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Institutional knowledge isn't in their metrics so it obviously doesn't exist.
mindtricks 4y ago
When I was in business school for my MBA, the human component was absolutely covered, and I suspect that is the case with many of them. Part of the problem may be though that there are subjects (finance, operations), where I can see the concept of a human resource becomes a bit abstract in order to focus on other concepts. In this regard, schools can certainly do better to connect the people element across disciplines. For those with a complete disdain for "business types", I'd encourage you to read Peter Drucker. Some of his opinions may feel a bit outdated, but he speaks quite a bit to the knowledge worker and their needs.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  It's quite possible that my school wasn't that great. I am glad to hear examples highlighting these issues, but I walked out with a class of over a thousand that year and I don't think any of those folks got the perspective you speak of, and I think it's reasonable to assume lots of other folks around the world aren't getting that perspective either.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    It could very well depend on the school, but also the students who enroll. Where I went (top-10, but not top-3), there was nothing in the curriculum about contempt for employees, and I don't think any previously well adjusted student came out of the program with such contempt. We did have our share of "elite" trust fund snobs and Jack Welch cosplayers, but they brought that into the class from somewhere else, probably their previous jobs at investment banks and consultancies. I think if you go to a MBA to add financial modeling to your toolbox, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go to get your paper stamped so you can move on to banking Associate, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go thinking you're learning how to become Gordon Gecko, well you might get something out of it. Most of my classmates were actually ex-engineers with 5-10 years experience looking to escape from their "senior software engineer" career plateau.
- GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
  "Human component", "human resource", and "replaceable cogs in the machine" sound the same to me.
joshstrange 4y ago
> not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers What am I missing here? Those are in no way whatsoever related. One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different. You should not treat humans are replaceable cogs for moral reasons and the very real reason that they simply aren't. Humans are not 1 to 1 comparable (not that it would be ok to dehumanize them if they weren't) so that way of thinking is not only gross but it's silly/short sighted/wrong. I've seen companies treat employees as cogs then be all surprised when they fire/layoff one of those "cogs" which causes a mass exodus (sometimes resulting in literal decades of experience walking out the door in the span of months). Servers/computers are a whole different ball game. For all intents and purposes a server is a server is a server (blah, blah, same instance size, disk, etc).
- x86x87 4y ago
  That was the point. You should not treat humans like you treat machines but this happens all the time.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Hmm, I read it as "just they wanted to treat humans as 'fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine' it's stupid that some people want to do the same things with server". I think the "stupid" modifier is what really pushed me to think that was the case as I don't think the pets-vs-cattle debate for servers is stupid, it makes a lot of sense.
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      I think that both mentalities with regards to servers have their place, but right now it is very fashionable to bash servers as "pets". Like Windows vs Mac or Playstation vs Xbox, the debate itself is stupid. For either humans or servers, everyone wants to commoditize them. Maybe stupid isnt the best word but I feel strongly in both cases.
      - 4y ago
version_five 4y ago
I did an MBA and what opened my eyes was the contempt for customers, treating them as an annuity, which maybe works if they come back because of good service, but in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in.
- trinsic2 4y ago
  > in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in. Which we see causing all the major problems of the world right now. I'm glad people are waking up to this. Post-covid, I see many people that work at these jobs choosing not to support institutions that are turning the human part into resource extraction.
toss1 4y ago
Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper", that nearly destroyed the entire set of advanced societies and still threatens to destroy democracy — that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Not only have the US and EU shipped off much (and in some industries effectively all) of the R&D and manufacturing know-how required to lead an industry, but we have put ourselves in a militarily weak position by relying on manufacturing in adversary nations and even subjected to espionage from uncontrolled manufacturing. The MBA schools focusing solely on short-term optimization to extract greater superficial profits are truly toxic for society. Worse yet, they are toxic for the businesses that rely on their "expertise". Everything is optimized away, including R&D investmentand market development, and the numbers look better and better. Until they don't. At that point, the company has zero capability to recover, because it has lost all the internal talent that knows how to develop products and markets, and the death spiral begins. My company was once invited to bid on a large software project for GE, very cool document management system. Later in the process, we were given some astonishing terms — this was developing new-at-the-time technology, and we were to be both paying our software developers something like 3rd-world rates, and exposing all our books to GE, and could not have more than iirc 10% profit on any hour of labor. Basically, they were hiring us only to run a software sweatshop, and showed zero interest in state-of-the art development. I passed and decided that with that attitude, GE was on the road to failure. It took over another decade of the stock rising nearly 10x, and then some before all the chickens came home to roost, but it really was a true sign of MBAs rotting the company from the inside out.
- FredPret 4y ago
  And that is why the “house that Jack (Welch) built” came tumbling down. Decisions were made on spreadsheets instead of between ears - among other things, they did stack ranking of employees and they seemed to take pride in being oh-so-tough and hard-nosed. It worked great until it didn’t.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  > ...that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions... That's putting it lightly. No one who made these decisions actually understood the sophisticated interlocking nature of technology and interplay of knowledge innovation. And now that advanced techniques in weaving have to be rebuilt at the operational floor practically from the foundations on up to be re-purposed to advanced laminate manufacturing, do we realize that wholesale offshoring and dismantling our "low-margin" textile industry was perhaps a little premature... One of but countless examples where Western financialization interests not only shot themselves in the foot, but the shot the EMT's that came to try to help them.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Khurana, Rakesh. “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.” From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Princeton Univ. Press, 2007 I’m reading this book which talks about how business schools lost their purpose and shareholder primacy upended attempts to add professionalism to management. The success of shareholder primacy fed back into the business schools and displaced any broader social missions that exist in the professional fields such as engineering, medicine, and law. Instead, fiduciary responsibility blasts through the greater good. It’s very dense and full of jargon so it takes time to unpack, but it appears to be a very well researched book.
godelski 4y ago
This is just classical first order thinking gone wrong. It seems "obvious" that if all things equal, you reduce costs (by reducing wages, your highest cost) that you should get more profit. This is true. But the premise is false that affecting this one variable will allow "all things equal." What I've noticed is that the standard businessman MBA type believes the first order thinking and gloats about how "obvious" things are (always be wary of those that claim common sense). But the really effective ones understand the coupled nature of many elements and the complexities involved. Which there's some irony because the standard MBA types also talk about Google and companies that make their employees happy with high salaries and free food. Working with humans is a complicated solution space and should be treated as such. There are certainly no universal answers and no solution works forever because the environment is constantly changing.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  It is very evident that most MBA “managers” don’t understand a fundamental concept that just reducing cost doesn’t necessarily mean profitability. You have people requesting small, reasonable increments to their wages as their tenure grows. Instead of giving them that, most managers would instead prefer letting them go, spend time and money hiring someone new, who most likely will be paid the same or even more (because usually your wages stay lower if you stay in a job than if you jump around), spend time training them and still not get the same level of productivity as the person who left. Ultimately they may end up reducing wages or saving some money on paper, but it comes at a huge cost to the company in terms of productivity and profitability.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Most managers I know just want to grow their headcount and are not too critical of their hires.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't understand why wage renormalization is such a "radical" idea. Retraining people (even if it is just to your style of work) takes time and is expensive. It is far cheaper to renormalize a current worker than to have them leave and train someone new (assuming the worker is competent). Experience, especially experience in your work's framework and culture, is valuable. Wage renormalization is also an essential practice if one wants to avoid wage discrimination. What's odd though is that it seems MBA types understand that people leave jobs because of managers and not money, but don't see how the two correlate. Wage differentials between old hires and new hires are always seen as personal attacks from managers and I think this is perfectly reasonable. It is a signal of how you are valued. Employees are also not naive and do understand an (average) inflation of 2-3% per year and that a matching raise is equivalent to a wage reduction (more so in times like these). Wage renormalization (especially with back pay) is often a relatively cheap means of garnering employee satisfaction and increasing productivity. It can turn burned out low productive workers into hard workers. Asymmetric pay information surprisingly can (not always) cause employees to think they are being treated unfairly. Especially if they find this to be true. But I think there is so much more and really what it comes down to is "humans are complicated. There is no universal solution within all businesses, a single type of business, a single department, or even a single team. If nuance is not actively demonstrated then malice/naivety is." The "simple solution" is that you need to recognize there is no simple solution.
Terr_ 4y ago
That reminds me of a Pratchett quote, an exchange between a respected local witch and a visiting priest: > "[...] And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." > "It's a lot more complicated than that--" > "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts." > "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--" > "But they starts with thinking about people as things..." -- Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Gibbon1 4y ago
My opinion is undergraduate MBA's should be banned. And you should need an degree in another field and 5000 hours of management experience to be accepted at business graduate school.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Why do you think this is not a reflection of the macro level system? You make it sound like it’s an aberration to be remedied and set industry back on course
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
That’s because bureaucrats are threatened by people who actually know how to make things.
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
I am a senior manager but not an MBA. Years ago a legacy dot com wanted to hire me as a consultant. The guy I was supposed to report to asks a question on the lines of how would you handle such and such scenario. I indicated I would handle it in a collaborative nature and bring the negotiation to closure. He wanted to know if I would start the conversation with my subordinate with a “f you”. I said I can’t and walked out at that moment in the middle of the interview. They call me 2 weeks later if I can come back lol. Long story short most (caveat) MBA types are a scourge.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
huh...that's weird. I guess it depends on where one goes to school. This for sure is not what I got out of my business classes. Most were how to keep employees, even low-wage employees, how to make them happy despite low wages... I think also, just because a b-school says this, we all have our own minds. There's a lot of other stuff to learn in b-school that is helpful, at least it was to me. The stuff I don't like, I just don't pay attention to it. Most of the classes that I took in business school were and are invaluable to me. But, I read other stuff other than what is in b-school, there are a ton of books that say how to treat employees right, how to use them as a marketing assist to help what customers want, and all that. We go to school to hopefully learn how to learn - how to be autodidactical. Let's all temper our expectations. Get knowledge from multiple places. Reject what you don't want, keep what is useful and ethical to you. I never understood the hate people have for different majors. Some hate b-schools, some hate computer science majors, some hate art, some hate etc, etc, etc. Chill, everyone, learn where you can. Accept and reject specific items as you see fit. It's all good.

mhuffman 4y ago

Basically the entire time I was getting a business degree the word "employee" was never even used! Just different forms of "human resources" or "workers".

pdntspa 4y ago
Exactly. It seems that the current trend is to dehumanize folks as much as possible. Nevermind the fact that businesses are made of people, and they SERVE people, and not just their shareholders. In fact, if anything, shareholders need to take a back seat on the list of priorities.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings. Your point regarding business = people stands though
  - atq2119 4y ago
    > Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings. This implication doesn't have to be true though - it's a political choice. There are (well developed) countries in which worker representatives have a significant amount of board vote shares by law, usually applicable to companies beyond a certain size.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      As a shareholder, I’d never vote to continue employee-unfriendly policies in a knowledge work company. There are too many shareholders that merely rubberstamp the decisions that come up at AGMs.
    - rmah 4y ago
      My understanding is that in those nations, non-shareholders have board representation, not voting control. I.e. they have people on the board to hear what's discussed and give them a voice in deliberations, but no actual control. Is my understanding incorrect?
- ezconnect 4y ago
  The problem is the investors, they don't like companies that has zero growth rate even if it is profitable. Profitable companies that has zero growth rate are used as collateral for loans to buy growing companies with negative profits and this bankrupts the profitable company because of debt burden. It seems greed is too much in the capital markets.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    What you described is stupidity, not greed. Stupid investors get their capital taken away.
asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
"Worker" is not exactly a pejorative term. In some circles it would even be considered a mark of pride. Although "human resource" is ironically dehumanizing.
- mhuffman 4y ago
  Neither were ever used in a pejorative sense exactly, more with a sense of apathy and an even clinical sense that an employee is thought of the same as a widget or a building or a piece of machinery.
- booleandilemma 4y ago
  I'd rather be called worker than the currently fashionable "individual contributor", the latter just seems so condescending. Just call me what I am, don't try to sugarcoat it.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
IMO "worker" has some dignity but "human resource" implies I'm on a spreadsheet somewhere alongside the depreciation schedule of the physical plant.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  We're all on a spreadsheet or database elsewhere.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Absolutely, so "human resource" has at least the benefit of being true even if it is baldly insulting to us.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  “Human” being an adjective in that phrase, rather than a noun…
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  "Worker" in the economic context is a socialist term. It doesn't sounds dignified to me. Employee is a better word.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
At my company they lately talk about hiring “resources”, not “people”. This really bugs me. They really seem to be hellbent taking any humanity out of work.
kube-system 4y ago
And it may be technically correct depending on the topic. Not all workers are employees.

cbar_tx 4y ago

That's a negotiation tactic that wouldn't work so well if the employees realized that a robust economy provides them opportunity to also treat their employer as replaceable.

ericmay 4y ago

When/Where did you go to school? When I did my MBA at Fisher (Ohio State 2018-2020) this definitely wasn't the case. We actually spent considerable time talking about how to get the most out of your team and how dumb of an idea it was/is to treat employees poorly. Many of our in-class discussions that revolved around this topic focused much more on treating employees well and how dangerous bad corporate culture and out of touch leadership was. Many of my classmates came from prior working backgrounds in various fields, however, so perhaps that leads to a different culture at the b-school.

pdntspa 4y ago
I went to a state school with a highly-regarded (at least locally) business program, graduated 2013
pastacacioepepe 4y ago
If you learnt about cost centers, you know what OP is talking about.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Knowing what parts of your operation are cost centers vs profit centers does not require you to treat employees in any particular way. If you’re confused about how your company sustains itself, that might even lead you to treat your employees worse over time.
  - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
    Obviously it helps to know where are your costs and your profits, but every company i worked for that used these terms operationally was a bad place to work. Heavy hierarchy and excessive focus on management. Call it how you want but I prefer to not work for people with this mindset.
    - com2kid 4y ago
      Then you have idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.

naikrovek 4y ago

100% agree. every good technical colleague I've ever had who got an MBA completely ignores technical considerations when making technical decisions, and in general, they really seem to be on their own planet afterwards. they are no longer a part of reality.

bulatb 4y ago
By their own metrics, are they successful? Do they accomplish their goals?
- naikrovek 4y ago
  yes on planet manager they do quite well. they get paid a lot more and they laugh a lot.
- KvanteKat 4y ago
  Yes, but not by "growing the pie"; MBAs increase profits in the sense that they reduce the share of profits going to workers (at least according to this paper; I'm not familiar with the rest of the literature on this subject). From the abstract of the paper: "...Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities..."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
trinsic2 4y ago
This is the way I see academia, which has been thoroughly institutionalized by the industrial era. I know that you only mentioned the technical aspect education (which has been impacted as well), but this is a existential problem with humanity. The system attempts to divorce human beings from true knowledge that is based on experience to create artificial and theoretical constraints on human value. This is done to create a power differential by separating people into classes. This is why studying for specific fields are largely theoretical and not experiential. When we allow ourselves to be removed from experiential knowledge, we become automatons that are easy to control.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Isn't that the business model with low skill workers though? Figure out how to employ them in a way that they don't need training and all is well.

pdntspa 4y ago
It's an incredibly shitty model for everyone but shareholders. Why do we have to institutionalize abuse?
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  My high level analysis is that this is because of institutionalized 'dispersion of responsibility' stemming from the pure capitalistic doctrine we all have supposedly signed up for. Essentially you have individual entities whose responsibility (& only one) to maximize the profit. so anything that is measurable ends up getting projected on one dimension of 'capital'. There is a lot of talk about social responsibility but most 'don't be evil' lasts until a few bad quarters and then its back to same story. No supposedly the govt/unions are supposed to provide a counterbalance to this but for some incredible reason folks here in America are convinced that any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. So what we are left with is this dispersion of responsibility to do social good but no one actually in charge of it. And don't even get me started on the Senate composition/electoral college & institutionalized gerrymandering (so you can actually fix it with simple majority you need a special kind of majority).
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. Ironically, the set of interlocking directorships, foundation seats, advisorships, consulting arrangements, share holdings, etc. among politicians, C-suite and EVP layers is every bit as collectivist as an old Soviet farm or modern workers' union. I personally model it as the strongest union out there because it doesn't need to operate by open rules relying upon legislation but is instead an acculturated reinforcement mechanism amongst its members that flexibly adapts to its host socioeconomic framework, making it harder than any conventional union to bust up or influence.

WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago

| They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers. I have found that when communicating with "business degree" people, I will often use this as a common starting point but then add "but you'll spend far more replacing the knowledge that people take when they leave"

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Institutional knowledge isn't in their metrics so it obviously doesn't exist.

mindtricks 4y ago

When I was in business school for my MBA, the human component was absolutely covered, and I suspect that is the case with many of them. Part of the problem may be though that there are subjects (finance, operations), where I can see the concept of a human resource becomes a bit abstract in order to focus on other concepts. In this regard, schools can certainly do better to connect the people element across disciplines. For those with a complete disdain for "business types", I'd encourage you to read Peter Drucker. Some of his opinions may feel a bit outdated, but he speaks quite a bit to the knowledge worker and their needs.

pdntspa 4y ago
It's quite possible that my school wasn't that great. I am glad to hear examples highlighting these issues, but I walked out with a class of over a thousand that year and I don't think any of those folks got the perspective you speak of, and I think it's reasonable to assume lots of other folks around the world aren't getting that perspective either.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  It could very well depend on the school, but also the students who enroll. Where I went (top-10, but not top-3), there was nothing in the curriculum about contempt for employees, and I don't think any previously well adjusted student came out of the program with such contempt. We did have our share of "elite" trust fund snobs and Jack Welch cosplayers, but they brought that into the class from somewhere else, probably their previous jobs at investment banks and consultancies. I think if you go to a MBA to add financial modeling to your toolbox, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go to get your paper stamped so you can move on to banking Associate, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go thinking you're learning how to become Gordon Gecko, well you might get something out of it. Most of my classmates were actually ex-engineers with 5-10 years experience looking to escape from their "senior software engineer" career plateau.
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
"Human component", "human resource", and "replaceable cogs in the machine" sound the same to me.

joshstrange 4y ago

> not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers What am I missing here? Those are in no way whatsoever related. One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different. You should not treat humans are replaceable cogs for moral reasons and the very real reason that they simply aren't. Humans are not 1 to 1 comparable (not that it would be ok to dehumanize them if they weren't) so that way of thinking is not only gross but it's silly/short sighted/wrong. I've seen companies treat employees as cogs then be all surprised when they fire/layoff one of those "cogs" which causes a mass exodus (sometimes resulting in literal decades of experience walking out the door in the span of months). Servers/computers are a whole different ball game. For all intents and purposes a server is a server is a server (blah, blah, same instance size, disk, etc).

x86x87 4y ago
That was the point. You should not treat humans like you treat machines but this happens all the time.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Hmm, I read it as "just they wanted to treat humans as 'fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine' it's stupid that some people want to do the same things with server". I think the "stupid" modifier is what really pushed me to think that was the case as I don't think the pets-vs-cattle debate for servers is stupid, it makes a lot of sense.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    I think that both mentalities with regards to servers have their place, but right now it is very fashionable to bash servers as "pets". Like Windows vs Mac or Playstation vs Xbox, the debate itself is stupid. For either humans or servers, everyone wants to commoditize them. Maybe stupid isnt the best word but I feel strongly in both cases.
    - 4y ago

version_five 4y ago

I did an MBA and what opened my eyes was the contempt for customers, treating them as an annuity, which maybe works if they come back because of good service, but in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in.

trinsic2 4y ago
> in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in. Which we see causing all the major problems of the world right now. I'm glad people are waking up to this. Post-covid, I see many people that work at these jobs choosing not to support institutions that are turning the human part into resource extraction.

toss1 4y ago

Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper", that nearly destroyed the entire set of advanced societies and still threatens to destroy democracy — that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Not only have the US and EU shipped off much (and in some industries effectively all) of the R&D and manufacturing know-how required to lead an industry, but we have put ourselves in a militarily weak position by relying on manufacturing in adversary nations and even subjected to espionage from uncontrolled manufacturing. The MBA schools focusing solely on short-term optimization to extract greater superficial profits are truly toxic for society. Worse yet, they are toxic for the businesses that rely on their "expertise". Everything is optimized away, including R&D investmentand market development, and the numbers look better and better. Until they don't. At that point, the company has zero capability to recover, because it has lost all the internal talent that knows how to develop products and markets, and the death spiral begins. My company was once invited to bid on a large software project for GE, very cool document management system. Later in the process, we were given some astonishing terms — this was developing new-at-the-time technology, and we were to be both paying our software developers something like 3rd-world rates, and exposing all our books to GE, and could not have more than iirc 10% profit on any hour of labor. Basically, they were hiring us only to run a software sweatshop, and showed zero interest in state-of-the art development. I passed and decided that with that attitude, GE was on the road to failure. It took over another decade of the stock rising nearly 10x, and then some before all the chickens came home to roost, but it really was a true sign of MBAs rotting the company from the inside out.

FredPret 4y ago
And that is why the “house that Jack (Welch) built” came tumbling down. Decisions were made on spreadsheets instead of between ears - among other things, they did stack ranking of employees and they seemed to take pride in being oh-so-tough and hard-nosed. It worked great until it didn’t.
yourapostasy 4y ago
> ...that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions... That's putting it lightly. No one who made these decisions actually understood the sophisticated interlocking nature of technology and interplay of knowledge innovation. And now that advanced techniques in weaving have to be rebuilt at the operational floor practically from the foundations on up to be re-purposed to advanced laminate manufacturing, do we realize that wholesale offshoring and dismantling our "low-margin" textile industry was perhaps a little premature... One of but countless examples where Western financialization interests not only shot themselves in the foot, but the shot the EMT's that came to try to help them.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Khurana, Rakesh. “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.” From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Princeton Univ. Press, 2007 I’m reading this book which talks about how business schools lost their purpose and shareholder primacy upended attempts to add professionalism to management. The success of shareholder primacy fed back into the business schools and displaced any broader social missions that exist in the professional fields such as engineering, medicine, and law. Instead, fiduciary responsibility blasts through the greater good. It’s very dense and full of jargon so it takes time to unpack, but it appears to be a very well researched book.

godelski 4y ago

This is just classical first order thinking gone wrong. It seems "obvious" that if all things equal, you reduce costs (by reducing wages, your highest cost) that you should get more profit. This is true. But the premise is false that affecting this one variable will allow "all things equal." What I've noticed is that the standard businessman MBA type believes the first order thinking and gloats about how "obvious" things are (always be wary of those that claim common sense). But the really effective ones understand the coupled nature of many elements and the complexities involved. Which there's some irony because the standard MBA types also talk about Google and companies that make their employees happy with high salaries and free food. Working with humans is a complicated solution space and should be treated as such. There are certainly no universal answers and no solution works forever because the environment is constantly changing.

darth_avocado 4y ago
It is very evident that most MBA “managers” don’t understand a fundamental concept that just reducing cost doesn’t necessarily mean profitability. You have people requesting small, reasonable increments to their wages as their tenure grows. Instead of giving them that, most managers would instead prefer letting them go, spend time and money hiring someone new, who most likely will be paid the same or even more (because usually your wages stay lower if you stay in a job than if you jump around), spend time training them and still not get the same level of productivity as the person who left. Ultimately they may end up reducing wages or saving some money on paper, but it comes at a huge cost to the company in terms of productivity and profitability.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Most managers I know just want to grow their headcount and are not too critical of their hires.
- godelski 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't understand why wage renormalization is such a "radical" idea. Retraining people (even if it is just to your style of work) takes time and is expensive. It is far cheaper to renormalize a current worker than to have them leave and train someone new (assuming the worker is competent). Experience, especially experience in your work's framework and culture, is valuable. Wage renormalization is also an essential practice if one wants to avoid wage discrimination. What's odd though is that it seems MBA types understand that people leave jobs because of managers and not money, but don't see how the two correlate. Wage differentials between old hires and new hires are always seen as personal attacks from managers and I think this is perfectly reasonable. It is a signal of how you are valued. Employees are also not naive and do understand an (average) inflation of 2-3% per year and that a matching raise is equivalent to a wage reduction (more so in times like these). Wage renormalization (especially with back pay) is often a relatively cheap means of garnering employee satisfaction and increasing productivity. It can turn burned out low productive workers into hard workers. Asymmetric pay information surprisingly can (not always) cause employees to think they are being treated unfairly. Especially if they find this to be true. But I think there is so much more and really what it comes down to is "humans are complicated. There is no universal solution within all businesses, a single type of business, a single department, or even a single team. If nuance is not actively demonstrated then malice/naivety is." The "simple solution" is that you need to recognize there is no simple solution.

Terr_ 4y ago

That reminds me of a Pratchett quote, an exchange between a respected local witch and a visiting priest: > "[...] And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." > "It's a lot more complicated than that--" > "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts." > "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--" > "But they starts with thinking about people as things..." -- Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Gibbon1 4y ago

My opinion is undergraduate MBA's should be banned. And you should need an degree in another field and 5000 hours of management experience to be accepted at business graduate school.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

Why do you think this is not a reflection of the macro level system? You make it sound like it’s an aberration to be remedied and set industry back on course

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

That’s because bureaucrats are threatened by people who actually know how to make things.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

I am a senior manager but not an MBA. Years ago a legacy dot com wanted to hire me as a consultant. The guy I was supposed to report to asks a question on the lines of how would you handle such and such scenario. I indicated I would handle it in a collaborative nature and bring the negotiation to closure. He wanted to know if I would start the conversation with my subordinate with a “f you”. I said I can’t and walked out at that moment in the middle of the interview. They call me 2 weeks later if I can come back lol. Long story short most (caveat) MBA types are a scourge.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

huh...that's weird. I guess it depends on where one goes to school. This for sure is not what I got out of my business classes. Most were how to keep employees, even low-wage employees, how to make them happy despite low wages... I think also, just because a b-school says this, we all have our own minds. There's a lot of other stuff to learn in b-school that is helpful, at least it was to me. The stuff I don't like, I just don't pay attention to it. Most of the classes that I took in business school were and are invaluable to me. But, I read other stuff other than what is in b-school, there are a ton of books that say how to treat employees right, how to use them as a marketing assist to help what customers want, and all that. We go to school to hopefully learn how to learn - how to be autodidactical. Let's all temper our expectations. Get knowledge from multiple places. Reject what you don't want, keep what is useful and ethical to you. I never understood the hate people have for different majors. Some hate b-schools, some hate computer science majors, some hate art, some hate etc, etc, etc. Chill, everyone, learn where you can. Accept and reject specific items as you see fit. It's all good.