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What makes you think that being a MBA equates to having business skills? Being MBA is just being MBA. People who don't get higher education and just start thei

by fear91 14y ago

What makes you think that being a MBA equates to having business skills? Being MBA is just being MBA. People who don't get higher education and just start their companies fresh out of high-schools will have WAY more business skills than MBA. I'd say that 2 years of running your own business gives you more business skills than 5 years of MBA education.

benbataille 14y ago
Doubtful. In the same way being an hobbyist programmer will never give you the same skill set than a CS degree. It's highly unlikely you are ever going to study extensively algorithm, os and databases design, compilation or declarative and functional programming all by yourself because objectively it's not something you need to get the job done. Nevertheless, this knowledge becomes really useful as soon as you start designing complex system. Doing an MBA (or an MSc for what it's worth, MBA cult is mostly anglo-saxon) is exactly the same thing. You will study a broad range of subjects and business areas and see different theories on them. Don't misunderstand me, practical knowledge is invaluable and running your own company gives you a good understanding of your area. It's just than MBA will give you a broader if less practical view.
- loboman 14y ago
  "In the same way being an hobbyist programmer will never give you the same skill set than a CS degree." Never? Despite the countless examples, including Torvalds and Carmack? I really disagree on that.
  - pdubs 14y ago
    Torvalds has a masters in CS. "Never" is a strong word, but the rest of the paragraph you're harpooning makes a different point than the one you're refuting.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      According to Wikipedia, Linux was developed around his second year in university. That would suggest that he did not have a degree during its development and had a formal education, at that time, roughly equivalent to the average university dropout. I think that still supports the parent's claim, even if it is a little misleading as written.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        Linux 0.0.1 was not a sophisticated piece of code.
        randomdata 14y ago
        While I'm sure that is true, I'm sure he also learned a lot of lessons from writing that code, which goes against the idea suggested earlier that such things are only learned in the interest of formality. What it really highlights, though, is that anyone can jump in and start writing an OS (or whatever else you want to learn about). You don't need a degree to do that and people without them do.
        rayiner 14y ago
        Operatic systems are very simple creatures fundamentally. They just move bits around. They don't require anything more theoretically complicated than a linked list. That is not to say you can't learn to do theoretically complex things without school, but when you're learning about DFA's or register allocation or the like, sitting down with a textbook and working through problems is often the best way to learn. I'm a largely self-taught programmer, and I'm always running up against the theoretical background I don't have. Try writing a compiler for a modern language without understanding type theory, and try learning type theory by doing.
        tptacek 14y ago
        I'm self-taught (I went right to work in industry instead of going to school). The first genuinely complex system I built in my career, back in the mid-90's, was a scripting language. It did indeed force me up against a lot of background I didn't have; I had a very good mentor though and largely did learn it by doing. I've since learned-by-doing distributed systems (quorum and 2pc commits and logical timestamps in one sprawling system we built around 2000) and routing, graph theory (for routing and later for analyzing binaries, also graph visualization, which is a tricky problem), code generation for compiler backends, and very large scale data storage (for instance, in order to sample all the flows running over a tier 1 NSP backbone). To that obviously add all the security and cryptography stuff; I've always been involved in security but I consider myself a developer by training. There are things I have run up against that have been too challenging to just learn. Linear algebra was one of them (although I've been slowly clearing that hurdle). RF and signal processing another. But those things are the exception, not the rule. I might also contest how simple operating systems are fundamentally. They just move bits around, yes, but they're moving bits to and from a very complicated asynchronous and sometimes distributed system, and bridging it to code that runs under artificially simplified assumptions. It's true that most of it tends not to be interesting from a data structures perspective --- especially back in the 90's, when the whole process list and every TCP TCB were just stored in simple linked lists --- but there are parts, like the virtual memory system, that are much trickier. And all of that code runs in a much more complicated environment than userland.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Of the top 5 developers I've ever worked with -- they are the X when I ask myself "what would X do?" when faced with a really hard problem -- 5 of them have PhDs in Computer Science. Now, a PhD in CS is a bit of a double-edged sword. It's often a danger sign that someone has spent too much time on just one theory. I wouldn't recommend getting or using a PhD as a signal of being a good developer since there is way too much variance. (Ob: I have also worked with great developers with no formal education.)
- fear91 14y ago
  Programming and business managament are two different fields. You can't compare them. I agree, you can't become a good chemist without proper education, the same goes for particle physics. Business is not a hard science, it's a set of skills you have to develop such as: perseverance, creativity, people-skills and confidence. You can't learn it in any school, even the top-ones. You can be a great actor, amazing cook, great musician or artist without having any degrees. Running a business is similar - it can't be simply in schools because it's not a hard science. You get the experience from running your own company, look: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison They don't seem to have any degrees and there are thousands of CEO's just like them who didn't get higher education yet built something amazing.
- z3phyr 14y ago
  You might be familiar about this whole 'hacker' culture. Right? The 'hobbyist' programmers were creating the most beautiful things, when the enterprise with 'trained' programmers had no idea about the term 'internet'. The hackers gave us the internet.... The spirit of software development.. They create better things with haskell and clojure, and the trained graduates are stuck with what their boss say. True pragmatism comes from within, and believe me, it librates you.
lusr 14y ago
The real question is whether 4 (or 5, etc.) years of running your own business gives you more business skill than 2 years of MBA education and 2 (or 3, etc.) years of running your own business.

by fear91 14y ago

benbataille 14y ago

Doubtful. In the same way being an hobbyist programmer will never give you the same skill set than a CS degree. It's highly unlikely you are ever going to study extensively algorithm, os and databases design, compilation or declarative and functional programming all by yourself because objectively it's not something you need to get the job done. Nevertheless, this knowledge becomes really useful as soon as you start designing complex system. Doing an MBA (or an MSc for what it's worth, MBA cult is mostly anglo-saxon) is exactly the same thing. You will study a broad range of subjects and business areas and see different theories on them. Don't misunderstand me, practical knowledge is invaluable and running your own company gives you a good understanding of your area. It's just than MBA will give you a broader if less practical view.

loboman 14y ago
"In the same way being an hobbyist programmer will never give you the same skill set than a CS degree." Never? Despite the countless examples, including Torvalds and Carmack? I really disagree on that.
- pdubs 14y ago
  Torvalds has a masters in CS. "Never" is a strong word, but the rest of the paragraph you're harpooning makes a different point than the one you're refuting.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Linux was developed around his second year in university. That would suggest that he did not have a degree during its development and had a formal education, at that time, roughly equivalent to the average university dropout. I think that still supports the parent's claim, even if it is a little misleading as written.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Linux 0.0.1 was not a sophisticated piece of code.
      - randomdata 14y ago
        While I'm sure that is true, I'm sure he also learned a lot of lessons from writing that code, which goes against the idea suggested earlier that such things are only learned in the interest of formality. What it really highlights, though, is that anyone can jump in and start writing an OS (or whatever else you want to learn about). You don't need a degree to do that and people without them do.
        rayiner 14y ago
        Operatic systems are very simple creatures fundamentally. They just move bits around. They don't require anything more theoretically complicated than a linked list. That is not to say you can't learn to do theoretically complex things without school, but when you're learning about DFA's or register allocation or the like, sitting down with a textbook and working through problems is often the best way to learn. I'm a largely self-taught programmer, and I'm always running up against the theoretical background I don't have. Try writing a compiler for a modern language without understanding type theory, and try learning type theory by doing.
        tptacek 14y ago
        I'm self-taught (I went right to work in industry instead of going to school). The first genuinely complex system I built in my career, back in the mid-90's, was a scripting language. It did indeed force me up against a lot of background I didn't have; I had a very good mentor though and largely did learn it by doing. I've since learned-by-doing distributed systems (quorum and 2pc commits and logical timestamps in one sprawling system we built around 2000) and routing, graph theory (for routing and later for analyzing binaries, also graph visualization, which is a tricky problem), code generation for compiler backends, and very large scale data storage (for instance, in order to sample all the flows running over a tier 1 NSP backbone). To that obviously add all the security and cryptography stuff; I've always been involved in security but I consider myself a developer by training. There are things I have run up against that have been too challenging to just learn. Linear algebra was one of them (although I've been slowly clearing that hurdle). RF and signal processing another. But those things are the exception, not the rule. I might also contest how simple operating systems are fundamentally. They just move bits around, yes, but they're moving bits to and from a very complicated asynchronous and sometimes distributed system, and bridging it to code that runs under artificially simplified assumptions. It's true that most of it tends not to be interesting from a data structures perspective --- especially back in the 90's, when the whole process list and every TCP TCB were just stored in simple linked lists --- but there are parts, like the virtual memory system, that are much trickier. And all of that code runs in a much more complicated environment than userland.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Of the top 5 developers I've ever worked with -- they are the X when I ask myself "what would X do?" when faced with a really hard problem -- 5 of them have PhDs in Computer Science. Now, a PhD in CS is a bit of a double-edged sword. It's often a danger sign that someone has spent too much time on just one theory. I wouldn't recommend getting or using a PhD as a signal of being a good developer since there is way too much variance. (Ob: I have also worked with great developers with no formal education.)
fear91 14y ago
Programming and business managament are two different fields. You can't compare them. I agree, you can't become a good chemist without proper education, the same goes for particle physics. Business is not a hard science, it's a set of skills you have to develop such as: perseverance, creativity, people-skills and confidence. You can't learn it in any school, even the top-ones. You can be a great actor, amazing cook, great musician or artist without having any degrees. Running a business is similar - it can't be simply in schools because it's not a hard science. You get the experience from running your own company, look: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison They don't seem to have any degrees and there are thousands of CEO's just like them who didn't get higher education yet built something amazing.
z3phyr 14y ago
You might be familiar about this whole 'hacker' culture. Right? The 'hobbyist' programmers were creating the most beautiful things, when the enterprise with 'trained' programmers had no idea about the term 'internet'. The hackers gave us the internet.... The spirit of software development.. They create better things with haskell and clojure, and the trained graduates are stuck with what their boss say. True pragmatism comes from within, and believe me, it librates you.

lusr 14y ago

The real question is whether 4 (or 5, etc.) years of running your own business gives you more business skill than 2 years of MBA education and 2 (or 3, etc.) years of running your own business.