Just an anecdote of my personal experience, since there's generally a sense of uselessness for MBAs in tech and I held the same view until recently getting an MBA.
I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were.
For sure learning on your own, doing things, building product, is better than structured curriculum. But there's something to be said for being exposed to a broad set of business information. When heads down writing code and building businesses, it's hard to step out and learn this disparate knowledge unless you're forced to by wanting to graduate. Maybe you're more disciplined than I, but in my free time I wouldn't dabble in accounting for instance, just wasn't interested. The forcing function is surprisingly helpful.
I'm not claiming it's for everyone, but I got a ton out of my MBA and would recommend. My situation was moving from engineering to product, had full time PM job, trying to start a side business, which now has had significant growth that I attribute a lot to my learnings from the MBA.
During my undergraduate program, I was a Teaching Assistant for a statistics department housed within a business school. The department was going through a re-branding from statistics and operations to "business analytics", and I got a lot of exposure to the inner workings of graduate education at the time.
Some students in our department were there for an MS in Statistics, others for a dual MS and MBA program. The single greatest indicator of whether or not an MBA was useless was whether the person was actively or passively choosing to get an MBA. About 70% of students were passively choosing to get a graduate degree. Either they had no idea what to do after their bachelors, they realized really quickly after their bachelors that what they thought was "adulthood" in college was not real and decided to run back to it, or they were following the trope of "bachelors -> 2-3 years in industry -> MBA -> ??? -> profit" with no idea of what "???" was except that they'd put in their 2-3 years already. For all of these students, they were passively choosing to get an MBA either to fill a checkbox or to avoid the alternative.
Then there were about 30% of students that actively chose to pursue an MBA. These students almost all had actual, real-world experience and actively chose to get an MBA because of specific needs or circumstances they had. In some cases it was to make a strategic career shift, in some cases it was to better orient themselves after making a career shift, in some cases it was to get over a ceiling in their industry where it was required to keep growing. But in all cases, if you asked them why they got an MBA, they could tell you without hesitation explicitly what prompted that decision, and the value they expected to derive from completing their MBA program (and why the MBA program was the right avenue for getting that value).
MBAs aren't useless. But a very sizable percentage of people graduate with them are useless[1], and would be equally as useless with or without the MBA. And the same holds true for most advanced degrees, from what I've seen.
[1] From the perspective of "hire a bunch of MBAs to solve problems". An incompetent worker without credentials is just as incompetent with credentials. And success in receiving an MBA from an academic environment does not denote success potential in applying the MBA in a business environment.
I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were.
I went to graduate school to get an MBA from a decently, regionally respected program after one year working full time. I went the part time MBA route. I dropped out because of $reasons after almost finishing.
What I learned from my MBA didn’t have any immediate rewards during the early parts of my career as a software developer, but it really started helping a lot for more senior architect roles - “architect” by title or responsibility - and helped me talk to CxOs and punch above my titles.
I never put anything about graduate school on my resume.
The first time I thought about going back and either getting an MBA or MS in Comp. Sci, I realized that getting either wouldn’t get me an appreciable bump in salary over just self study in technology and aggressively job hopping in my local market.
In two years when things settle down and my youngest is in college and I could realistically think about doing it, it still wouldn’t make much financial sense. I’ll have the skillset, the resume, and the certifications along with my business knowledge to make more as an overpriced “implementation consultant” than I could with an MBA. Especially since I am not willing to move to any of the financial centers and I would basically have to slowly work my way up.
Most development managers are making much less than consultants in my market. Heck when I was a Dev lead, I was making less than ordinary software developer contractors that I hired.
I am a Data Scientist w/ a MS in computer Science, but many of my CS classmates never become one despite desire to do so, while several of my MBA friends did so with ease (granted it is Wharton).
I think an MBA is more useful over a master in CS because many MBA's have great stats programs. In most CS programs you'd have to use up precious elective spots to take those. Also, business intelligence is a huge part of many ds roles. And if you really wanted to take that Machine Learning course in CS, just take it as an elective in your MBA.
I'd love to hear what others have to say on the topic
I think most criticisms I have seen of MBAs is not of the degree itself, but of the associated costs and the amount of debt the program leaves you with.
MBAs are great once you have real work experience in your field already. Duke’s MBA program won’t even admit you until you’ve been working for 10 years.
Without the experience, it’s a different perspective on the program.
EDIT: That was the Global Executive MBA program at Duke. Citation in comment.
Your side business saw growth from what you learned from your MBA? Could you elaborate on that a bit more? What did you learn that you were able to apply to your business that lead to growth?
Can you give examples of things you learned that were useful? My own impression of the MBA is that it's more of a trade degree where you learn anecdotal "best practices" but little to no actual science. I don't put it in the same league as a science master's degree for that reason.
I went a bit of the opposite route. My undergrad was a BS in Computer Information Systems. Basically a CS degree where some classes like physics/high level math electives were replaced with business courses like stats, management, accounting, economics, etc... Later I went back to school and got my MS in Computer Science. I love doing the tech side of things, but I can say that almost without fail I have used business basics I learned (and continued to add to) every single day. I've debating doing an MBA because I enjoy the structure of school, but I just don't have the time right now.
One other non-obvious aspect of school I wished I had focused on more at the time was literature and writing. Communicating in a clear and concise manner becomes increasingly important the more senior you become.
I think an MBA is great in addition to other training or you have some work experience. I think what most people object to is people who only have an MBA and immediately get into leadership roles. A leader should have some experience how things are on the bottom before they start to lead.
Case Study education is extremely valuable and it is a shame that it is locked away in Ivy League curriculums.
It is valuable.
The opportunity cost (time, benefit, other opportunities) for people in tech is still too high. There becomes a time when it is worth it. The Executive MBA may be up people's alley, but even then the network itself is the most important.
For me, I ended up finding a cofounder who was a generation older than me, all of their connections have already done this stuff or floated to the top of the organizations they represent.
Can you provide some examples of how the MBA helped your business' growth? Was it accounting and statistics? Or development of product features via understanding customer needs?
(I don't have much experience with MBAs. So I'm always curious about the benefits.)
I can't read the article, but I wonder if it is just diluted perception of an MBA.
I worked at a company that regularly hired recent MBA graduates, and maybe it was just the school, but I saw little value added to these kids. They got manager type tasks, but showed no skills related to management. Their life experience was so limited that I had to explain it to them that you have to schedule people far ahead of time in order to give them time to schedule their lives, and that you had to schedule them like humans because ... they can't work for 24 straight hours because it would take 5 minutes more to look at the spreadsheet and figure out a more optimal schedule.
Beyond internal stuff, even communicating with customer's took hand holding and teaching basic life lessons.
I often questioned how the candidates I worked with ever got into an MBA program (I'm guessing it was just open). I wouldn't trust some of them to work at a menial job without a great deal of supervision, let alone make decisions for a business / other people.
IMO an MBA just doesn't make sense without significant / proven business life experience for most people.
Obviously there are people with MBAs with FAR more skills, but with other folks like I experienced I wonder if it has watered down the market for MBAs.
At what point in their careers did they go get an MBA? My fiancée went to Kellogg and it was a rarity to see anyone there who didn't already have 5+ years of work experience. It was sort of an unspoken (but kind of spoken, since the M7 all highly suggest it) rule.
I went to a Wharton School MBA program introduction the other day. Or maybe it was Berkeley Haas, I can't remember.
The lady leading the session to sell me a $150,000+ degree which requires me to leave my (extremely successful and promising career) for two years (and screw up my family life while doing it), started talking about how if people in the room got a bad grade in a certain area for their undergraduate degree - they might have to go back and fix it before they apply.
Did I mention I have to pay the costs of this program 100% myself since most employers (and mine) won't cover it anymore?
Once I heard that, I was done. Not only do I have to take three months to study for a stupid GMAT or GRE or whatever, I am also being held accountable for a grade I got over 12 years ago.
In that 12 years, I quit my business career ,taught myself software engineering, built multiple applications used by millions of people every month before resuming my career as a manager of technical evangelist teams.
The idea that I need to go get an MBA, take a GMAT, submit to covering for a bad grade 15 years ago after achieving a very high degree of proficiency in Objective-C and doing the things I have done since was so laughable it ended the desire for me to ever get an MBA.
Maybe if they paid me I might consider it. I just dont get it. It is something I might do if I got rich in cryptocurrency and needed a hobby to pass the time, thats about it.
Dont get me wrong, people (some) with MBAs I have met are often quite smart. But it seemed like an awful lot of time, stress and money and administrative nonsense for what the result is.
The lady is just doing her job recruiting. She doesn't know your full background. MBA is not for you. You wasted an hour of your life. No need to be mad about MBA in general.
I’d argue that you don’t need one, since you’ve already accomplished so much and have a proven track record. An MBA is mainly for people who want to switch careers entirely. Maybe an EMBA would be more appropriate for the stage you are in your career.
I wrote this as a comment in another post a few days ago but I'll cross-post it here as it is relevant.
One of my defining decisions was taking leave and eventually dropping out of a top executive mba program a third of the way in, before I had to take a six figure loan to pay the rest. If I am to be brutally honest with myself, the decision not to finish wasn't entirely my own, but I could have finished.
The shit really hit the fan in my life and this forced me to take stock. Had I not been forced, I probably would have continued down the mba path and career change. Losing my father after two very sick years, being laid off by a business in collapse, having a six figure student loan application on my desk, and other crucial "etc" pushed me to reevaluate my life decisions.
Here are some important lessons learned:
An MBA from a reputable program was leading me into debt servitude and constraints that would shape my career. Debt constraints are major life constraints.
Changing careers to do something that was more meaningful can lead to many new opportunities. I left prime brokerage in financial services and was planning to transition into healthcare, hospital cfo type of work. Helping create novel solutions to rising costs of healthcare was a mission I could align myself with. Helping protect investment bank lending to hedge funds through margin financing paid well but served no higher purpose. Healthcare doesn't have a monopoly on purpose, though, and many who work in healthcare do so just to collect a paycheck. I realized I could achieve my goal elsewhere and with fewer bureaucratic constraints, but at a cost-- as an entrepreneur!
Entrepreneurship has been everything I expected it to be. I had to become the technical expert I needed as a partner. It's been a long, grueling experience. I am so fortunate to have taken it.
So I did a fair bit of an MBA as part of a joint course with Engineering at a well known UK institution. It wasn't literally an MBA, but the MBA there was just one year whereas there was an equivalent amount of time spent at the business school if you chose the right electives.
A couple of my classmates went on and got full 2-year MBAs from very prestigious US institutions.
The verdict, both from those who went on to do something technical, and those who went on to other things, is that Engineering is harder. It may not pay as well, and it's harder, but it's probably more fun if you find the right job. My friend who is a PE partner wondered what he missed out on, since a girl he knew from Engineering went and joined SpaceX very early on. There were a few stories about people who got into F1 as well.
The other part is that you don't actually learn a great deal about business in business school. You won't learn how to make decisions in a strategy class. You won't learn how to invest in a finance class. You might learn some things about the history of thought in the field, eg Taylorism. But generally it is not what it says on the tin.
By contrast I built a working radio in my first term as well as a bridge that an adult could stand on.
A really big issue, which to their credit they pointed out at business school, is that it might be better for managers to have domain knowledge in what they manage, rather than just be general management "specialists". I happen to fall into this more Teutonic camp.
Also, note that very few people that I know report taking an MBA to learn anything. They generally are as cynical as they ought to be about it (!) and did it in order to have better job prospects. It's worked out very nicely for them.
The content of an MBA program is probably useful. The problem is that it became associated with an easy path to a high-earning credential, so it self-selected for people who expect to earn a high wage, who want graduate education to be as easy as possible, and who want credential and status to be the main ways of getting money (instead of, say, working hard to have a skill).
The light got shined on this type of program, these credential-seeking roaches scattered, and now they’ll go ruin some other perfectly reasonable academic discipline, most probably data science.
I don’t blame the roaches. I guess I blame idiots who buy knowledge products based on credential, and thus either employ these credential roaches at high wages, or else generate the demand that makes it profitable for other consulting / white-shoe sorts of businesses to employ the roaches.
You are basically criticizing people for wanting money and not wanting to do unnecessary work for it.
You might as well criticize human nature.
99% of people pick the best path they can see towards an easier life that gives them the most suitable work/money trade-off they are able to tolerate. If MBA grads aren't good at what they do, that's the fault of MBA programs. MBA grads just want to get credentials and training and make money, just like almost every person in the world. I tend to shy away from personal statements, but your use of "roaches" makes me think that some of what you say bleeds from personal wounds.
MBA programs should adjust to the market by developing more concentrated 1-year degrees in specific disciplines: Finance, Operations, Marketing, Product, etc.
The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive.
I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved.
I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.
INSEAD is a highly respected MBA program (outside of the US) that offers a 10 month MBA[1]. This sounds more like what you are referring to, geared towards those with around 6 years of work experience.
I wish this article would touch upon economic trends' impact on MBA applications.
MBA applications go down as the economy performs. The opportunity cost is higher when there are well paying jobs readily available and promotions to be had without needing to go back school.
During a recession, MBA applications should go up as work is not as readily available. People also want to retrain their skills to make themselves more marketable to employers, as anyone else would do by going to vocational schools during hard times.
In engineering circles (coworkers), there is a general theme I notice of looking down on people with MBAs. I dismiss it as “us vs. them” or “technical vs managerial” fight. But, could someone who has a MBA shed some light with an objective view of MBA? Why shouldn’t I get one? Why should I get one?
I would point out that a lot of the techie disdain for "MBAs" isn't at MBAs in general (though there is some of that), but specifically at "Harvard MBAs", the high powered business types that are trained to swoop into a company, assess best how to tear it to bits, sell the pieces, and make a tidy profit for themselves and their paymasters while disrupting the lives of everybody else involved, and possibly the industry as a whole, or perform a variety of other such things that involve offloading all the risk and pain on to the employees while taking the profit and value for themselves.
There is a time and a place for such shenanigans but the techies of folklore saw it happen in a lot of bad places in a lot of bad ways.
Some of the rest of the disdain for MBAs is that a lot of such courses are aimed at the general public; if you are the type that had a computer science degree in your past, you will find the course to be slow and the coursework to be trivial, and you'll probably quite correctly feel you'd be better off on at least the most direct level (ignoring "networking", etc.) studying it yourself. But I kept my qualification to the speed of the course and the homework carefully; the ideas inside can still be useful and valuable, it's just they'll come at a rather slow pace compared to what you may be used to and wrapped in a lot of BS (to you) coursework.
I have an undergrad finance degree + finance career. I also run a website I built my self as a side project (see profile if curious).
For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree.
Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.
Is about the network. I tried to pursue an EMBA, they advertised everywhere that the alumni are in every big company and because of the closed group communication, was really really easy to reach any CXO because of the school.
Otherwise, yes, I declined because of the huge time invest - money wasn't an issue, like being for a month in HK or in Buenos Aires with my class. Interesting, but not really helping.
The reasons given in the article make a lot of sense to me. In a generally strong job market (among those likely to attend business school), taking 1 to 2 years off is a tougher sell, Also noted is that students already have more debt on average making taking on more tougher. There are new specialized degrees of various kinds.
I also sense, though I don't have specific data, that a lot of jobs that traditionally required an MBA because reasons, no longer do so. It may still be valued but perhaps not to the point of being effectively required.
If you read the article, a lot of the decline is from international applicants. Reading other articles, the drop is primarily about visa concerns for post-MBA employment in the US, and who can blame them? My international classmates had a hell of a time getting work authorization even before our current political situation. This is WSJ clickbait, more or less, and you see why they do this because this topic always rouses the attention of the HN crowd :)
Haven't seen any business school professors chime in yet, so as one I'll do so: Increasingly, what "elite" undergraduate schools offer at the graduate level is less valuable than what research universities offer. The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities, not in schools valued for ratings that are focused on undergraduates. The best educations are provided by people who understand learning and make themselves available to assist in the process - nothing about Harvard, Wharton, Tuck, etc. is better suited than University of California, University of Texas, NYU, many other state universities to perform those tasks. Furthermore, and it might deserve an entirely separate post, but many of the best professors in business are being bought up by Asian business schools. I think the net result is the American business school experience is both more valuable in terms of the topics covered and less valuable in terms of the educational experience than it once was.
One thing I've observed is that the MBA degree is valued by people with MBA degrees. This leads to "clusters" of MBA's in the corporate hierarchy. If the path above you contains MBA's, then you might need one yourself in order to advance. On the other hand, if they believe that you have prospects, they might offer to pay for it.
I started on an MBA a while back, and it bored the daylights out of me. There was very little logic or empiricism to the material, barring a few studies that one can find out about in common business publications. The material was mostly fluff. I can see why many MBA'ers have a PHB (Dilbert's boss) reputation, to be frank.
It could be argued the real value is learning how to speak to and think like other MBA'ers (whether logical or not). And group projects are good for developing social skills for those who lack them. Hobnobbing has value in the real world.
In short, it's more of a club than a discipline. But, it wasn't for me. Your mileage may vary; and I'll admit I bailed before taking some of the courses.
Are there any well regarded studies that show that hiring an MBA graduate as a manager benefits the company compared to having an "old school" manager who's only qualification is being clever and shrewd? Or studies that show the opposite?
I strongly advocate a policy of "No MBAs" in a startup. The last thing a startup needs is someone who has little to no business experience, has a big attitude, has spent the last few years on professional networking and partying, and who expects due to the MBA to be able to boss others around.
There are exceptions of course, but in my experience the MBAs want to network to bring in others from their school/program to form a management cabal. It's really bad news. We should also remember that if startups weren't a high status thing to work on these days, all those MBAs would be working for big companies and would have no interest in startups.
Somewhat tangential to the topic, https://personalmba.com/ teaches you more or less all the book knowledge of a fairly decent MBA program, for an infinitesimal price relative to what you'll pay at an Ivy league or even a state school.
What you don't get w/the Personal MBA is the support of your professors, other students, and most importantly the network and recognition ...
MBA is really something one should do if they're passionate about people, relationships - e.g. what any solid business is made of.... more so than about just the knowledge or what school they go to.
I got an MBA from a top 10ish business school and it was probably the best career choice I have ever made. Very technical MBAs (think Carnegie Mellon, MIT, etc) teach way more than business these days and it makes the value skyrocket.
[+] [-] bennyfreshness|7 years ago|reply
I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were.
For sure learning on your own, doing things, building product, is better than structured curriculum. But there's something to be said for being exposed to a broad set of business information. When heads down writing code and building businesses, it's hard to step out and learn this disparate knowledge unless you're forced to by wanting to graduate. Maybe you're more disciplined than I, but in my free time I wouldn't dabble in accounting for instance, just wasn't interested. The forcing function is surprisingly helpful.
I'm not claiming it's for everyone, but I got a ton out of my MBA and would recommend. My situation was moving from engineering to product, had full time PM job, trying to start a side business, which now has had significant growth that I attribute a lot to my learnings from the MBA.
[+] [-] cosmie|7 years ago|reply
Some students in our department were there for an MS in Statistics, others for a dual MS and MBA program. The single greatest indicator of whether or not an MBA was useless was whether the person was actively or passively choosing to get an MBA. About 70% of students were passively choosing to get a graduate degree. Either they had no idea what to do after their bachelors, they realized really quickly after their bachelors that what they thought was "adulthood" in college was not real and decided to run back to it, or they were following the trope of "bachelors -> 2-3 years in industry -> MBA -> ??? -> profit" with no idea of what "???" was except that they'd put in their 2-3 years already. For all of these students, they were passively choosing to get an MBA either to fill a checkbox or to avoid the alternative.
Then there were about 30% of students that actively chose to pursue an MBA. These students almost all had actual, real-world experience and actively chose to get an MBA because of specific needs or circumstances they had. In some cases it was to make a strategic career shift, in some cases it was to better orient themselves after making a career shift, in some cases it was to get over a ceiling in their industry where it was required to keep growing. But in all cases, if you asked them why they got an MBA, they could tell you without hesitation explicitly what prompted that decision, and the value they expected to derive from completing their MBA program (and why the MBA program was the right avenue for getting that value).
MBAs aren't useless. But a very sizable percentage of people graduate with them are useless[1], and would be equally as useless with or without the MBA. And the same holds true for most advanced degrees, from what I've seen.
[1] From the perspective of "hire a bunch of MBAs to solve problems". An incompetent worker without credentials is just as incompetent with credentials. And success in receiving an MBA from an academic environment does not denote success potential in applying the MBA in a business environment.
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
I went to graduate school to get an MBA from a decently, regionally respected program after one year working full time. I went the part time MBA route. I dropped out because of $reasons after almost finishing.
What I learned from my MBA didn’t have any immediate rewards during the early parts of my career as a software developer, but it really started helping a lot for more senior architect roles - “architect” by title or responsibility - and helped me talk to CxOs and punch above my titles.
I never put anything about graduate school on my resume.
The first time I thought about going back and either getting an MBA or MS in Comp. Sci, I realized that getting either wouldn’t get me an appreciable bump in salary over just self study in technology and aggressively job hopping in my local market.
In two years when things settle down and my youngest is in college and I could realistically think about doing it, it still wouldn’t make much financial sense. I’ll have the skillset, the resume, and the certifications along with my business knowledge to make more as an overpriced “implementation consultant” than I could with an MBA. Especially since I am not willing to move to any of the financial centers and I would basically have to slowly work my way up.
Most development managers are making much less than consultants in my market. Heck when I was a Dev lead, I was making less than ordinary software developer contractors that I hired.
[+] [-] autokad|7 years ago|reply
I think an MBA is more useful over a master in CS because many MBA's have great stats programs. In most CS programs you'd have to use up precious elective spots to take those. Also, business intelligence is a huge part of many ds roles. And if you really wanted to take that Machine Learning course in CS, just take it as an elective in your MBA.
I'd love to hear what others have to say on the topic
[+] [-] dman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
Without the experience, it’s a different perspective on the program.
EDIT: That was the Global Executive MBA program at Duke. Citation in comment.
[+] [-] sodafountan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tensor|7 years ago|reply
Maybe my impression is wrong though.
[+] [-] matwood|7 years ago|reply
One other non-obvious aspect of school I wished I had focused on more at the time was literature and writing. Communicating in a clear and concise manner becomes increasingly important the more senior you become.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammateam|7 years ago|reply
It is valuable.
The opportunity cost (time, benefit, other opportunities) for people in tech is still too high. There becomes a time when it is worth it. The Executive MBA may be up people's alley, but even then the network itself is the most important.
For me, I ended up finding a cofounder who was a generation older than me, all of their connections have already done this stuff or floated to the top of the organizations they represent.
An MBA is not in the cards for me.
[+] [-] da02|7 years ago|reply
(I don't have much experience with MBAs. So I'm always curious about the benefits.)
[+] [-] BostonEnginerd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
I worked at a company that regularly hired recent MBA graduates, and maybe it was just the school, but I saw little value added to these kids. They got manager type tasks, but showed no skills related to management. Their life experience was so limited that I had to explain it to them that you have to schedule people far ahead of time in order to give them time to schedule their lives, and that you had to schedule them like humans because ... they can't work for 24 straight hours because it would take 5 minutes more to look at the spreadsheet and figure out a more optimal schedule.
Beyond internal stuff, even communicating with customer's took hand holding and teaching basic life lessons.
I often questioned how the candidates I worked with ever got into an MBA program (I'm guessing it was just open). I wouldn't trust some of them to work at a menial job without a great deal of supervision, let alone make decisions for a business / other people.
IMO an MBA just doesn't make sense without significant / proven business life experience for most people.
It really was the FedEx commercial IRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA
Obviously there are people with MBAs with FAR more skills, but with other folks like I experienced I wonder if it has watered down the market for MBAs.
[+] [-] diminoten|7 years ago|reply
At what point in their careers did they go get an MBA? My fiancée went to Kellogg and it was a rarity to see anyone there who didn't already have 5+ years of work experience. It was sort of an unspoken (but kind of spoken, since the M7 all highly suggest it) rule.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] noMBAplease|7 years ago|reply
The lady leading the session to sell me a $150,000+ degree which requires me to leave my (extremely successful and promising career) for two years (and screw up my family life while doing it), started talking about how if people in the room got a bad grade in a certain area for their undergraduate degree - they might have to go back and fix it before they apply.
Did I mention I have to pay the costs of this program 100% myself since most employers (and mine) won't cover it anymore?
Once I heard that, I was done. Not only do I have to take three months to study for a stupid GMAT or GRE or whatever, I am also being held accountable for a grade I got over 12 years ago.
In that 12 years, I quit my business career ,taught myself software engineering, built multiple applications used by millions of people every month before resuming my career as a manager of technical evangelist teams.
The idea that I need to go get an MBA, take a GMAT, submit to covering for a bad grade 15 years ago after achieving a very high degree of proficiency in Objective-C and doing the things I have done since was so laughable it ended the desire for me to ever get an MBA.
Maybe if they paid me I might consider it. I just dont get it. It is something I might do if I got rich in cryptocurrency and needed a hobby to pass the time, thats about it.
Dont get me wrong, people (some) with MBAs I have met are often quite smart. But it seemed like an awful lot of time, stress and money and administrative nonsense for what the result is.
[+] [-] httpz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] univalent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|7 years ago|reply
Did this degree force fulltime?
[+] [-] 0x8BADF00D|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dowwie|7 years ago|reply
One of my defining decisions was taking leave and eventually dropping out of a top executive mba program a third of the way in, before I had to take a six figure loan to pay the rest. If I am to be brutally honest with myself, the decision not to finish wasn't entirely my own, but I could have finished.
The shit really hit the fan in my life and this forced me to take stock. Had I not been forced, I probably would have continued down the mba path and career change. Losing my father after two very sick years, being laid off by a business in collapse, having a six figure student loan application on my desk, and other crucial "etc" pushed me to reevaluate my life decisions.
Here are some important lessons learned:
An MBA from a reputable program was leading me into debt servitude and constraints that would shape my career. Debt constraints are major life constraints.
Changing careers to do something that was more meaningful can lead to many new opportunities. I left prime brokerage in financial services and was planning to transition into healthcare, hospital cfo type of work. Helping create novel solutions to rising costs of healthcare was a mission I could align myself with. Helping protect investment bank lending to hedge funds through margin financing paid well but served no higher purpose. Healthcare doesn't have a monopoly on purpose, though, and many who work in healthcare do so just to collect a paycheck. I realized I could achieve my goal elsewhere and with fewer bureaucratic constraints, but at a cost-- as an entrepreneur!
Entrepreneurship has been everything I expected it to be. I had to become the technical expert I needed as a partner. It's been a long, grueling experience. I am so fortunate to have taken it.
[+] [-] jackgolding|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
A couple of my classmates went on and got full 2-year MBAs from very prestigious US institutions.
The verdict, both from those who went on to do something technical, and those who went on to other things, is that Engineering is harder. It may not pay as well, and it's harder, but it's probably more fun if you find the right job. My friend who is a PE partner wondered what he missed out on, since a girl he knew from Engineering went and joined SpaceX very early on. There were a few stories about people who got into F1 as well.
The other part is that you don't actually learn a great deal about business in business school. You won't learn how to make decisions in a strategy class. You won't learn how to invest in a finance class. You might learn some things about the history of thought in the field, eg Taylorism. But generally it is not what it says on the tin.
By contrast I built a working radio in my first term as well as a bridge that an adult could stand on.
A really big issue, which to their credit they pointed out at business school, is that it might be better for managers to have domain knowledge in what they manage, rather than just be general management "specialists". I happen to fall into this more Teutonic camp.
Also, note that very few people that I know report taking an MBA to learn anything. They generally are as cynical as they ought to be about it (!) and did it in order to have better job prospects. It's worked out very nicely for them.
[+] [-] mlthoughts2018|7 years ago|reply
The light got shined on this type of program, these credential-seeking roaches scattered, and now they’ll go ruin some other perfectly reasonable academic discipline, most probably data science.
I don’t blame the roaches. I guess I blame idiots who buy knowledge products based on credential, and thus either employ these credential roaches at high wages, or else generate the demand that makes it profitable for other consulting / white-shoe sorts of businesses to employ the roaches.
[+] [-] x220|7 years ago|reply
You might as well criticize human nature.
99% of people pick the best path they can see towards an easier life that gives them the most suitable work/money trade-off they are able to tolerate. If MBA grads aren't good at what they do, that's the fault of MBA programs. MBA grads just want to get credentials and training and make money, just like almost every person in the world. I tend to shy away from personal statements, but your use of "roaches" makes me think that some of what you say bleeds from personal wounds.
[+] [-] currymj|7 years ago|reply
But the comparison of human beings to cockroaches is very troubling to me; it sounds much harsher than I hope you intend.
[+] [-] amb23|7 years ago|reply
The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive.
I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved.
I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.
[+] [-] otoburb|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba
[+] [-] neonate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobJans|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkw|7 years ago|reply
MBA applications go down as the economy performs. The opportunity cost is higher when there are well paying jobs readily available and promotions to be had without needing to go back school.
During a recession, MBA applications should go up as work is not as readily available. People also want to retrain their skills to make themselves more marketable to employers, as anyone else would do by going to vocational schools during hard times.
[+] [-] fermienrico|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
There is a time and a place for such shenanigans but the techies of folklore saw it happen in a lot of bad places in a lot of bad ways.
Some of the rest of the disdain for MBAs is that a lot of such courses are aimed at the general public; if you are the type that had a computer science degree in your past, you will find the course to be slow and the coursework to be trivial, and you'll probably quite correctly feel you'd be better off on at least the most direct level (ignoring "networking", etc.) studying it yourself. But I kept my qualification to the speed of the course and the homework carefully; the ideas inside can still be useful and valuable, it's just they'll come at a rather slow pace compared to what you may be used to and wrapped in a lot of BS (to you) coursework.
[+] [-] canadapups|7 years ago|reply
For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree.
Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.
[+] [-] sjg007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccozan|7 years ago|reply
Is about the network. I tried to pursue an EMBA, they advertised everywhere that the alumni are in every big company and because of the closed group communication, was really really easy to reach any CXO because of the school.
Otherwise, yes, I declined because of the huge time invest - money wasn't an issue, like being for a month in HK or in Buenos Aires with my class. Interesting, but not really helping.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
I also sense, though I don't have specific data, that a lot of jobs that traditionally required an MBA because reasons, no longer do so. It may still be valued but perhaps not to the point of being effectively required.
[+] [-] Rafuino|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srbl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabtab|7 years ago|reply
It could be argued the real value is learning how to speak to and think like other MBA'ers (whether logical or not). And group projects are good for developing social skills for those who lack them. Hobnobbing has value in the real world.
In short, it's more of a club than a discipline. But, it wasn't for me. Your mileage may vary; and I'll admit I bailed before taking some of the courses.
[+] [-] vinayms|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resters|7 years ago|reply
There are exceptions of course, but in my experience the MBAs want to network to bring in others from their school/program to form a management cabal. It's really bad news. We should also remember that if startups weren't a high status thing to work on these days, all those MBAs would be working for big companies and would have no interest in startups.
[+] [-] wutangson1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin1975|7 years ago|reply
What you don't get w/the Personal MBA is the support of your professors, other students, and most importantly the network and recognition ...
MBA is really something one should do if they're passionate about people, relationships - e.g. what any solid business is made of.... more so than about just the knowledge or what school they go to.
[+] [-] Vaslo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aliston|7 years ago|reply