Obvious disclaimer: not all MBA's ... I graduated with a BS in Business (Supply Chain) because I knew I wanted to be involved in startups someday, but I've had

Obvious disclaimer: not all MBA's ... I graduated with a BS in Business (Supply Chain) because I knew I wanted to be involved in startups someday, but I've had nothing but big corporate jobs since then. For the longest time, I've held this idea that because all of the bigwigs got their MBAs, and they got them from top schools, that that was what I needed to do. In other words, to become the person I wanted to be, I had to go get an MBA. My thoughts have tempered as I moved progressively towards more technical roles: Business Intelligence, Ops Research, Systems Architecture, etc. In fact, I've started to grow a disdain for the average MBA, not unlike the disdain you hear from a lot of people with backgrounds in CS. The thing is, I've never been anything but a business-end guy...I shouldn't feel that way about business-guys. My own observation on the cause has to do with the toolsets that are given to your typical MBA. Their Root Cause Analysis tools assume that everything has a singular root cause, but those analyses fail when the problem is of combinatorial complexity, where you often have multiple root causes for a problem. Business optimization tends to fall solely on LP models, which again, fail under combinatorial complexity scenarios. Pareto analysis is fine until you have pareto'd your entire business and all that you have left are a bunch of bugs and quality flaws that only affect a tiny minority of orders by themselves, but 100% of orders in aggregate. The entire MBA toolset itself seems to be a result of pareto optimization (a set of tools to use for 80% of the scenarios you will come across as a business leader). Furthermore, I now feel as though the wisdom of any singular person can very easily become overrated, and in the case of top level execs, is almost invariably overrated. As I became involved with Business Intelligence at my last job, I kept running into execs who always had the same mindset: just give me the data, and I will make the decision that will save the day. The problem is, the skillset to extract, transform, prettify, and graph out data is very often the same skillset that can make provably optimal decisions, or at least better-than-human decisions. Why should they spend so much of their time satisfying executive egos by giving them a precious jewel of data that they will just blow with a swagged decision, when they could be applying Machine Learning or Mathematical Optimization instead? Your average smart guy with an MBA will continue to provide value in specific scenarios. The Technology industry (as long as "Technology" implies working with intractably difficult problems) will rarely be one of them. And just for good measure, I'll caveat that one more time, especially since my current employer has a ton of exceptions: not all MBAs ...