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sigh I just got home from my evening MBA class after a full day of work. I'm the Director of IT at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida and graduated with

by chime 18y ago

sigh I just got home from my evening MBA class after a full day of work. I'm the Director of IT at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida and graduated with 4.0 in CS and Econ with Math minor as my undergrad. After my MBA, I'm hoping to pursue a CS/Math PhD degree and I consider myself a lifelong student with no desire to make millions. I mentioned all of this because I want to make it clear that my reasons to defend the pursuit of an MBA program is solely academic in nature and not based on the potential earnings or promotions. I could make a lot more by switching companies, networking, or working overtime. I don't have to get an MBA just to make more money. An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work. Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty low and I've had the mis-experience of being in groups where 35 year old finance majors with 8 years of field experience didn't know how to use the Excel SUM() function. Nevertheless, the professors are extremely experienced, industry stalwarts from all sorts of background. Tonight an ex-IBM'er with 20+ years of Sales & Marketing experience across various IT sectors taught me about building customer value. Here on HN we see blog posts by know-it-all nobodies dispense wisdom on "10 ways to blah blah" and all of us discuss the merits and demerits of the post for hours and days. An MBA is a superset of that, formalized and organized. Yes, you can learn business skills anywhere, especially by running your own company. However, that does not mean you cannot benefit from decades of knowledge, wisdom, and research in every field from finance to management to marketing. The goal of a well-designed MBA program is to equip you with the knowledge and skill to make better decisions in addition to letting you employ your gut instincts and intelligence in your ventures. The problem with MBA programs is that too many people treat them as "bigger paycheck" tickets and smaller universities lower their standards to welcome anyone who can pay them $20K/year. This has the negative side-effect of making even the hard-working MBA graduates appear to be useless greedy monsters like this article portrays. > The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty. It's now clear that we would have all been much better off if, instead of cloistering these people on fancy campuses with world-class golf courses, we'd have sent them off to do two years of national service. This entire paragraph is a complete load of crap. Over and over our professors, books, seminars, and presentations mention that doing the right, socially-beneficial thing is the only way to go. We read cases about bad businesses, identify the good ones, and isolate the bad ones pretending to be good. Not once has any of my professors even so much as sugar-coated what Enron, Worldcom, Lehman, AIG, or any of the tons of other companies have done as being acceptable. Yes, profit and shareholder value maximization is the legal requirement for any public corporation but not at the cost of long-term corporate and social goals. Sorry about the rant but I'm pretty sick of the dumb-greedy-MBA stereotype. Everything I learn in school at night, I get to immediately apply it at my job the next morning. My advice to anyone reading this is if you have a technical background and have often lacked in management and leadership skills, an MBA from a good university will genuinely help you be a well-rounded entrepreneur. Don't have unrealistic expectations about suddenly being transformed into Steve Jobs but do realize that leadership skills can be learned and 360-degree knowledge of business operations (from tech to finance to sales) will make you a very valuable asset to any organization, including the one that you start.

wheels 18y ago
I think it's backlash against the fact that a lot of bad middle managers are MBAs and a lot of programmers have worked for them. They then generalize, "This is what MBAs are." and apply it to the universe as a whole. There's a similar phenomenon in the startup world when you get some fresh MBA who's ready to try his mojo and "has The Great Idea and just needs to find a programmer", again, annoying and leads to this sort of generalization. But flipping things around it's like saying, "Haha, yeah, coders never shower and have never had a date!" Sure, there are people that fit the stereotype, but they don't have exclusive rights on business or technical study. My co-founder has his masters in business and communication. So far as I know, he's never had a computing course. He uses Ubuntu, can sling a little PHP, CSS and JS and discuss graph clustering and collaborative filtering in an overview-ish way. Oh, right, but he's supposed to be dumb.
ojbyrne 18y ago
As someone with an MBA (though not from a so-called "good" school") I definitely agree with your "know-it-all nobodies" sentiment. In fact this is one of the things I found hardest to stomach about Silicon valley - so many pundits spouting platitudes that would get you laughed out of even the worst B-school get lauded as geniuses.
- unalone 18y ago
  That's what you get from having a huge vast thing like the Internet and giving people free reign, though. I remember joining my first forum - I was 13, and everybody who said anything and sounded decisive was a "pro" to me. I remember telling my father that Squaresoft was making Final Fantasy games based on the work these people were doing, and getting mad when he told me that wasn't the case, because this guy said it online. I also find that every time I join a new "scene" online, there's the same reaction. When I was a big user of TheAdminZone, there were a lot of people running huge forums that knew their shit, and a lot who just got lucky and would spout pretty stupid things, and it took me a little while to realize that these was this disparity. Same thing with the writers on DeviantART, the community managers at Zoints, the popular blog scene at Tumblr, and especially with Gawker, which is the one that I feel makes the biggest rift in my online communities today. On the Internet, everybody's a noob and an authority. If I want to diss Tim O'Reilly and say he doesn't know anything, I can, and somebody will read my diss and be influenced by it. On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind. Finally, there's the fact that we're all still pretty much n00bs here. The Internet's less than 20: this isn't like the world of, say, movie making, which has a century's knowledge to it. Furthermore, everybody's aware of this lack of precedent, and so everybody wants to be the person that gets known for the equivalent of Orwell's tips on writing. We're a very postmodern medium in that regard, because the discussion happens on the same plane as the publication. Everybody's as much of a celebrity as other people say they are, and there is no distinct authority. I'd be willing to bet that 20 years into movie-making things were similar. In fact, the one similarly young industry today - the gaming industry - suffers from the same problems of amateurism and groupthink.

by chime 18y ago

wheels 18y ago

I think it's backlash against the fact that a lot of bad middle managers are MBAs and a lot of programmers have worked for them. They then generalize, "This is what MBAs are." and apply it to the universe as a whole. There's a similar phenomenon in the startup world when you get some fresh MBA who's ready to try his mojo and "has The Great Idea and just needs to find a programmer", again, annoying and leads to this sort of generalization. But flipping things around it's like saying, "Haha, yeah, coders never shower and have never had a date!" Sure, there are people that fit the stereotype, but they don't have exclusive rights on business or technical study. My co-founder has his masters in business and communication. So far as I know, he's never had a computing course. He uses Ubuntu, can sling a little PHP, CSS and JS and discuss graph clustering and collaborative filtering in an overview-ish way. Oh, right, but he's supposed to be dumb.

ojbyrne 18y ago

As someone with an MBA (though not from a so-called "good" school") I definitely agree with your "know-it-all nobodies" sentiment. In fact this is one of the things I found hardest to stomach about Silicon valley - so many pundits spouting platitudes that would get you laughed out of even the worst B-school get lauded as geniuses.

unalone 18y ago
That's what you get from having a huge vast thing like the Internet and giving people free reign, though. I remember joining my first forum - I was 13, and everybody who said anything and sounded decisive was a "pro" to me. I remember telling my father that Squaresoft was making Final Fantasy games based on the work these people were doing, and getting mad when he told me that wasn't the case, because this guy said it online. I also find that every time I join a new "scene" online, there's the same reaction. When I was a big user of TheAdminZone, there were a lot of people running huge forums that knew their shit, and a lot who just got lucky and would spout pretty stupid things, and it took me a little while to realize that these was this disparity. Same thing with the writers on DeviantART, the community managers at Zoints, the popular blog scene at Tumblr, and especially with Gawker, which is the one that I feel makes the biggest rift in my online communities today. On the Internet, everybody's a noob and an authority. If I want to diss Tim O'Reilly and say he doesn't know anything, I can, and somebody will read my diss and be influenced by it. On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind. Finally, there's the fact that we're all still pretty much n00bs here. The Internet's less than 20: this isn't like the world of, say, movie making, which has a century's knowledge to it. Furthermore, everybody's aware of this lack of precedent, and so everybody wants to be the person that gets known for the equivalent of Orwell's tips on writing. We're a very postmodern medium in that regard, because the discussion happens on the same plane as the publication. Everybody's as much of a celebrity as other people say they are, and there is no distinct authority. I'd be willing to bet that 20 years into movie-making things were similar. In fact, the one similarly young industry today - the gaming industry - suffers from the same problems of amateurism and groupthink.