The author went through the trouble of saying he'd eliminate straw-man arguments at the beginning of the piece and then spent the rest of the piece rebuilding the straw man with gems like "MBA thinking" and "MBA's are entitled", "MBAs think they're special snowflakes".
If you're hiring, particularly in a startup, you owe it to yourself and your company to carefully consider qualified applicants. Yes, hiring signals exist, but all signals are not equal. Placing too much negative value on a person achieving a Masters degree can easily turn out to be a mistake.
I also don't buy the opportunity cost argument. Does the author examine every line of every resume to determine what the applicant could have been doing instead and gives the best score to the applicant who left the least on the ground? Or is this pedantic behavior executed exclusively on MBAs, because they deserve the stereotype?
I question the value of yet another article like this. It's just amplifying the noise in the echo chamber. The author states he knows several MBAs who have worked at or founded successful startups. Why not write about that instead of rehashing the same, dull, unsupported claims?
See my reply to RyanZAG. You're misinterpreting the opportunity cost statement. It's a statement about the competition you'll be facing as a candidate, not the hirer's actual judgment of a candidate.
I am starting my own startup, am very active in my startup community, and I'm just about to finish my MBA.
Why? none of the reasons in the article.
I'm a code monkey, I've been coding for over 30 years. But in my career in IT I've found that the hard problems are not the tech problems. The hard problems are the people problems, and most of them derive from communication difficulties between the finance/biz world and the actual implementation required.
Finance and biz types are not going to learn to code, because whatever. So if anyone's going to solve the communication problem it's going to have to be me, by learning finance and biz speak.
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. But it's doing the job I intended it to do. I find that just the knowledge that I am studying an MBA has a dramatic effect on attitudes around me; I'm no longer just a code monkey technician type who isn't qualified to have an opinion.
Agreed. Same story, I also have an 'MBA' (MS in engineering management) and had the same driving force, which was shared by the majority of classmates in my program, which is why I chose it over other school's MBA programs.
The author also said we'd find counter examples. I still agree with the author for most MBAs having come out of traditional programs, for MBA holders which do not have an engineering background.
I had 14 years writing code, running development teams etc. before I did my MBA.
At the time I was technical director for a online service so already pretty business aware.
It helped me to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge but most of all it taught me how to think - how to hold two opposing ideas in my head and work out possible solutions, it really helps to pick ideas and arguments apart and look at the alternatives.
Nearly ten years on from my MBA, I'm still doing hands on technical work and enjoying it but I also can talk to anyone from development, ops etc. right through to board level execs in their own language and that works wonders.
Disclaimer: I'm just rambling but with this disclaimer it's not a rant.
MBA: bad, PhD: bad, I get it. CS-degrees are horrible because you could have build an entire company in the time it takes to get one of those post has to be around the corner.
Those MBA folks are too dumb to understand that startups are different than big corporations (or in other words they can't pick up any of the lean XXX books and read the first 10 pages). Amazing that evil Wall Street is willing to hire such morons let alone pay them enough money to be too demanding on average.
Those snobby old MBAs and their entitled friends, those networks could never be useful either.
Putting a disclaimer at the beginning of a post doesn't turn it into less of a rant.
Why having a CS degree is a negative hiring signal (for startups)
Supply and Demand
There are some basic supply and demand issues for CS graduates. On the supply side, a surprising number of jobs are at angel and venture-backed startups that are burning through cash to pay "market rates" for engineering "talent" and likely won't be around in five years. On the demand side, while there is currently significant demand for candidates with CS degrees, if you didn't graduate from a top CS program and/or don't excel at FizzBuzz, your options may be limited.
Entitlement
CS graduates think of themselves as special snowflakes, future Mark Zuckerbergs, worthy of extremely high compensation and authority.
Misguided Thinking
"CS thinking” involves putting all of the value in technology and then, when it doesn't sell itself, scrambling to find a "growth hacker" who can take it to market. When that fails, "lean startup philosophy" suggests that you pseudo-scientifically iterate over and over again until your angel investor's money is depleted.
Selection Bias
Because building functional CRUD applications that offer value doesn't require a CS degree, it really bears examining a person's motivation for getting one. Was it because he or she is more interested in the theoretical than the practical? Is the individual going to make decisions based on what is best for the business or on what technology or approach is sexiest? Will he or she be able to compromise when business needs dictate compromise?
Limited usefulness
How many startups ever need someone who can reproduce common algorithms that every popular programming language has functions for?
Opportunity Cost
The time someone spent getting a CS degree was time they could have spent actually developing domain expertise.
There is a big anti-intellectualism trend happening in the US right now. It's a lot like the sort of "hate" that the humanities gets these days as being somehow less important than the STEM disciplines. It started with art programs, and then philosophy, then English, then languages, and I imagine it will spread until there are only a few, if any, majors and degrees that are actually "valued."
This is in a country with a pitifully low literacy rate.
Both my wife and I are very luck - we both have MAs in English (she focusing on rhetoric and I on technical communication) and we each landed great, full-time employment in our fields.
Still, we have friends with similar degrees and focuses that work in the same jobs they had when starting college, or worse are without employment at all.
Wow, what an incredibly stereotyped article. Absurd generalizations, biased opinion without any facts backing it up. It reads like it's written by someone who didn't get accepted into their #1 choice of grad school.
OT: Am I the only one who holds the opinion that stereotypes are a useful evolutionary trait, and are not to be conflated necessarily with prejudice and discrimination? (Sorry for Wikipedia ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype#Relationship_with_o... )
As the author points out, there are exceptions to what he's saying (as with most things), but if something is an observation (or stereotype) of a measurable portion of a group, I find that to be of value when taking things into consideration and 'grokking' the world. It does not mean to ignore conflicting evidence.
How would you propose he provide 'facts' to back up what he's saying, When you provide no facts to counter what he's said? Agree with ricricucit that his experience in the field is sufficient facts for me (also helps I have similar experiences in the field, and so concur with his facts)
i can see what you mean...but it's not an article to entirely throw away.
I see how a few thoughts could actually make sense (at least in my head)....and i think "facts for backing it up" requires experience on the field...which he says he had.
It's enough for me (nobody will ever share a full life of experiences in an article to prove he's "right").
> Born in El Paso, Texas, Caldwell graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Psychology
Opportunity cost...? What makes having a B.A. in Psychology not a negative hiring signal too? He could have been getting a business degree which would have helped him know more about accounting! Etc.
Feels like a pretty silly argument. An MBA is generally going to be more likely to be successful than a non-MBA in running a business, startup or not. It might not be worth the kinds of salaries an MBA would demand, but a negative? Feels a bit anti-intellectual. More knowledge is always better.
You're misinterpreting what Dalton said. An MBA is not a negative hiring signal strictly because the hirer is thinking about opportunity costs. The fact is that a candidate who spent two years getting an MBA is at a disadvantage relative to people who spent those two years doing more useful things (e.g. getting an engineering masters, or getting real world startup experience). More knowledge is better, but the idea is that a non-technical candidate with 2 years of operational/sales/marketing experience at a startup will run circles around someone fresh out of an MBA program - this is the opportunity cost Dalton talks about. The argument is that the person with experience will indeed have more useful knowledge than the MBA.
It goes without saying that the opportunity cost of a dual major in Psychology is extremely low (i.e. a few classes) if your primary major is already Symbolic Systems - a degree which integrates CS and psychology.
> in running a business, startup or not.
Saying that an MBA will be better at running any kind of company, implying some sort of equality between the completely different challenges of startups and normal large companies kind of undermines the credibility of this argument.
I could just as easily write a diatribe about developers who think of themselves as special snowflakes, future unicorn founder/CEOs, worthy of extremely high compensation and autonomy, yet have zero clue about business, can't deliver a finished product to save their life and have no appreciation for the importance of usability when it comes to creating a product aimed at users who don't have a CompSci degree.
During my stint as CTO of a dot-com back in 1999/2000, I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about running a business, strategy, marketing, business development, finance, cash flow planning, accounting, cap tables, negotiation and all the other little things that add up to a successful venture. So, I decided to go to business school. But guess what? A lobotomy wasn't on the curriculum. I can still knock together a shell script, tail -f a logfile and pipe it through grep, get some vague clue about why something crashed by casting my eye over a Java exception error, and make a lazy developer deeply uncomfortable when he realises that - would you believe it! - this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.
Going to business school and getting an MBA added many new arrows to my quiver but it didn't take any away. It didn't narrow my horizons - it broadened them. The idea that an MBA can never be of any value to anything other than a large corporation is as ridiculous as the idea that a coder who learnt Java and the Waterfall method at college will never be able to learn Objective C and cope with Agile. True, some won't be able to but that doesn't mean that all won't.
MBA curricula are often perceived as out of date because the content must be approved as part of the academic accreditation process. As a result, they often don't incorporate the latest business methodologies. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on whether the latest business thinking is merely a fad or something that will last as long as Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. But, either way, graduating from business school doesn't mark the end of the learning process. My copy of Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup" occupies the same shelf as "Strategic Management" by Saloner, Shepard and Padolny, "Let Me People Go Surfing" by Yvon Chouinard, "Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L Bernstein and John W Mullins' "The New Business Road Test". My last two Kindle purchases were Brad Feld's "Startup Communities" and "Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank.
Dalton claims that, "to an MBA Strategy > Implementation" but it's truer to say that, to an MBA, Strategy comes before Implementation. To do the reverse, implementing blindly and pivoting wildly, is akin to blindly throwing darts at a dartboard - eventually one of them will end up in the bullseye but that isn't necessarily proof that the thrower is anything other than lucky.
Dalton's entitled to his prejudice. If he wants to take the shortcomings of a subset of MBAs and apply those as a stereotype across the entire population, that's his prerogative. However, to make broad, sweeping generalisations about someone based on a single fact - whether it's the fact that they have an MBA, what school they went to or the colour of their skin - is pretty foolish because the exceptions will bite you on the ass. For every lame MBA, there's a Sheryl Sandberg or Alexis Maybank. For every team of MBA founders with all the strategy and no product, there's a Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, who came up with the idea for CloudFlare at Harvard Business School[1], or a Neil Blumenthal, who attributes much of Warby Parker’s success to his and his co-founders’ experiences at business school, which Blumenthal described as "the most helpful and useful of any of my educational background."[2]
And, for every lame MBA, there are likely dozens of developers who scoff at the notion that building a successful company requires anything other than the ability to code, and certainly none of that crap they teach you in business school. Of course, if that were true, we'd have many more billion-dollar startups and far fewer founders making schoolboy errors that could have been easily avoided.
Maybe if Dalton had taken a few classes in strategy and marketing, Wired wouldn't be writing about "The Great App.net Mistake".[3]
this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.
Be constructive and civil. Instead of congratulating yourself for the transitory sadistic, self-righteous pleasure you obviously derive from making the developers you hired "deeply uncomfortable," try working with them. Teach them exception handling if you know this. That would demonstrate a collaborative team spirit.
Update: I was downvoted, as expected. In that case, I neglected to add "offensively smug." The humorless business attitude of dog-eat-dog with a facade of righteousness is here to stay.
You have written a passionate response, however you don't seem to have addressed any of Dalton's points. Instead you have gone off tangent by characterizing Dalton's view as -- stop thinking about business and keep coding all the time. So you make a silly argument that "Well I can call developers names too, so we are even. MBA's are equally important". No, that's not the impression I got from Daltons' article. The question is - for startups are you better off spending two years doing an MBA or working on your business. Dalton's point, and I agree with him, is that you are better off working on your startup.
To see why, let's take strategy. You seem to think that strategy is developed in the abstract. However, for startups, you need to be fully engaged in the day to day struggle of your competitors, customers, employees etc. From this up close reality you get a feel for the edge/secret that you have. That edge/secret forms the basis for your strategy. There is no optimal strategy out there. You can't think hard and come up with it. You need to work day to day and fit something that works for you in that particular time,customers etc. This ground reality/state of world and how you are single best suited to take advantage is the biggest power you have over incumbents. Not knowledge of some old case studies or porter's framework, ability to do SWOT analysis or whatever the latest framework is. If you are successful you will be the case study 10 years from now in a business school. At that point the frontier has moved on. Specific to Dalton, if I were to do something in social/music oriented business, I would take his competence over any ivy league MBA. Mostly because he has that ground reality in his head.
Yes, there are basic business rules and concepts that you need to know, however spending two years for an MBA is an overkill for a startup. Truth be told, you come across as exactly the arrogant MBA people like to make fun of. You didn't fully understand the point. Made some silly non-arguments which are abstract and irrelevant and to top it off made some bold statements about your capabilities which had the opposite effect (you can tail files and pipe to grep and are proud of that, really? c'mon man).
I have an MBA as well. My background is similar to yours - a developer with an MBA, but certainly a developer first - and I would have agreed with your comment if Dalton had said that startups should never hire MBAs.
However, he merely said that it is a negative hiring signal, and on this point I must agree with him. For a good majority of MBAs I know, the degree is either a way to move into a business-oriented role, or a way to get out of their current field and into something else (usually from tech, into banking or consulting). There is nothing wrong with that, but it's not exactly an entrepreneurial mindset, which is what you want at a startup.
If a company doesn't hire me just because I have an MBA, but am a great fit otherwise, I would consider it their loss. If they consider my MBA a negative signal that turns out to be insignificant once they get to know me better, I would certainly understand their initial mindset.
Like you were in 2000, I'm a software developer who realizes my business acumen is far from adequate for running my own shop. My question is: Why did you decide the way to improve was to go back to school and get an MBA?
As a self-taught programmer, I tell people wanting to get into software development that it's definitely not something you have to go to school for, and that the best programmers I've met are those who are always taking the initiative to enrich their own knowledge, and not those with the most academic degrees. In my experience, number of personal projects is a better indicator of the quality of a developer than GPA in CompSci classes.
Of course, being the CEO of a multinational corporation or a software developer on critical banking infrastructure is different than running your own 5 person business or developing alarm clocks for your phone. At what point does one really need an MBA to further their business development, and why did you believe you had reached that point?
Maybe I misread your blog (http://jackgavigan.com/about/), but it seems all your startups have failed? So how did your "few classes in strategy and marketing" work out for you?
There is this notion in original article 'strategy > implementation' vs 'implementation > strategy'. I think both are equally important, but they need to work in a lockstep sequence. Honestly I think MBAs can bring value early to a startup, I just wonder what the data shows. How many successful startups had MBAs from the get go? This is the only measure we can rely on IMO.
You could avoided the "Dalton's full of shit".
That would have made your response a great piece of information for people (MAYBE like Dalton) who were just trying to learn more, their way.
BTW: that would have also proven the fact that there is no such a thing as "special snowflake".
If MBA is such a negative hiring signal (for startups) - why do I see so many MBAs in startups? The data shows that there are as many MBAs as PhDs or Masters. (% working in startups vs total pool).
Just like a degree in computer science teaches you the inner workings of a computer, a degree in business administration teaches you how to run a business. How can that knowledge be invaluable in a startup?
I do believe that certain segment (including the author) of the population has a strong negative bias against MBAs but majority aren't... Most mature+experienced tech founders understands the value of an MBA degree and even if they don't, they treat it as any other degree...
"Thus one primary motivation of an MBA is to secure their own massive salary, stock and title… and this motivation is diametrically opposed to the psychological makeup of a succesful startup team-member."
--I had to re-choose my co-founder because I found this to be an exact fit of my situation. The person with the MBA felt entitled to everything but would not do any of the hardcore work involved. In fact, at Columbia U, I know tonnes of MBA students and they all have the same characteristic described in Dalton's article.
$$$ glisten in their irises whenever they talk about startups. For me, someone who has no MBA and would not get an MBA if it were the only academic degree on the planet, a startup is about the 24/7 work involved to create and nurture a good, innovative, useful and interesting toy that can do big things for other people. But that is why in the world, we need a million flowers blooming. People are supposed to be different. Variety is good. But as an initial co-founder, someone with an MBA--chances are--isn't the best choice, according to my experience most humble.
: )
The author makes the mistake of thinking "MBA" == "CEO/CFO" - there are huge number of MBAs working in marketing, business development, sales, etc. all of which are skills that can be invaluable to a startup.
Ironically he recommends a Masters in CS over an MBA and then talks about lean startup philosophy, a philosophy that places business development and product management above development.
"Why having an over-simplified title/line-of-thought gets you more clicks"
An MBA doesn't invalidate their previous experience. An MBA doesn't specialise a person or decreases his/her usefulness to only C-level positions (quite the opposite in my opinion, as they often acquire additional skills). An MBA doesn't make you a strategy guy/girl per se or makes you less an implementation person.
Apart from the social pressure one -might- experience because of their achieving peers (and maybe even the financial pressure to pay off their debt), I only believe it increases a person's skills (be it soft, finance, ...)
Eventually, it always boils down to peoples motivations to join X or Y. An MBA should at most encourage you (the recruiter/hiring person/... to ask some other questions during the hiring process.
Next in the series I expect:
"Why having worked for McK/BCG/Bain is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"
"Why having investment banking experience is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"
"Why having studied law is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"
...
First off, I'd like to get a few straw-man argumetns out of the way. I'm not saying MBAs are bad. I'm not saying startups should not hire people with MBAs. I'm not saying there are not numerous counter-examples to the points I make below. In fact, I personally know several people with MBAs that work at or have founded fantastic startups. I have hired & worked closely with individuals with an MBA several times, and will continue to do so if I think the individual is a good fit. Remember, a hiring signal is just that: a signal. Other examples of negative hiring signals are: “earned CS degree from school that advertises on late-night television”, “worked at 4 companies in 3 years” or “2 year gap on the resume with no explanation”. Any positive or negative hiring signal is WAY less important than specific information about a specific candidate.
Now that that is out of the way, let’s get to the point: If a person has a particular skill-set, experience, personality & undergraduate education, that person choosing to buy an MBA has the net effect of the startup market valuing that person as being worth less, not more.
Why?
Supply and Demand
There are some basic supply and demand issues for MBAs. On the supply side, there is a surprising abundance of people with MBAs who want to work at startups. On the demand side, a candidate with those three little letters on their laptop will need to be vetted more closely and will be automatically isolated into a small number of highly-specialized potential roles.
Entitlement
Apple trains people to think of themselves as special snowflakes, future masters of business, worthy of extremely high compensation and authority. Thus one primary motivation of an MBA owner is to secure their own massive salary, stock and title… and this motivation is diametrically opposed to the psychological makeup of a successful startup team-member. Given the social pressure MBA owners must feel from their coffee shop friends, we can’t really blame them; it’s human nature 101.
Misguided Thinking
In my opinion, the lean startup movement, startup genome project, etc have roared into existence as an antidote to "MBA thinking." "MBA thinking" involves putting all of the value in high level design, which is then rolled out to underlings who are responsible for actual implementation. In other words to an MBA owner Design > Implementation.
Lean startup philosophy suggests all of this design stuff is misguided bullshit, and rather you should personally build things as quickly and as cheaply as possible then scientifically iterate over and over again. To an early stage startup Implementation > Design.
Selection Bias
It really bears examining a persons motivation for getting an MBA. Was it so they could skip ahead to get rich? Because they wanted to be powerful? Because they hated their job and showing off in coffee shops was a good way out? Because they originally wanted to work at 37 Signals but are only now considering your startup because they heard that your're building the successor to Ruby on Rails?
Limited usefulness
If someone is on a startup career track that is in design or high-level architecture, an MBA makes a lot of sense. For instance, a smart startup founder might want their lead designer to have an MBA. But how many startups ever get big enough to need a lead designer? How many high-level design gigs are actually out there? This is a very shallow pool to swim in.
Opportunity cost
The time someone spent getting an MBA was time they could have spent installing Linux on a Thinkpad. Losing two inches of screen real estate puts you at a clear disadvantage vs someone with the same CPU who can actually see a decent amount of code at once.
A thought experiment
Imagine that if instead of getting an MBA, ambitious young over-achievers spend two days upgrading and configuring their hardware and software. Or two days building a desktop. Or two days shopping around to see what else they could get for the same price.
Who would be worth more in the open market when all is said and done? Who would have a better chance of building their own great company?
At first I was offended that you would imply that MBAs are purchased rather than earned. I read way too much of that text before I had the hey-wait-a-second moment.
I am the last person to defend the idea of hiring MBAs for sake of hiring MBAs, but the author really loses me with the last two paragraphs.
Imagine that if instead of getting an MBA, ambitious young over-achievers spent
two years in design school. Or spent two years getting a masters in computer
science. Or two years getting into Y-Combinator and doing their own startup.
Who would be worth more in the open market when all is said and done? Who
would have a better chance of building their own great company?
The problem with MBAs is that they are oftentimes too expensive / not the right fit for startup roles / environment, not that they have limited career prospects.
>>The problem with MBAs is that they are often too expensive / not the right fit for startups, not that they have limited career prospects.
MBA's are best suited at places where you need things to be generalized and managed even if it is at the expense of efficiency.
If you are looking at hard focus based work which requires a lot of application of specialized knowledge and effort. MBA's not just make a bad match for those jobs, but will likely mess it up.
You need MBA's when you need some super abstracted generalized knowledge applied to non critical tasks. You can hire an MBA to run a hospital's billing unit, but not to treat patients. Same with software and start up's. You can use them to do some work on stuff like market research, setting up the pay roll unit, attendance systems etc.
Group cohesion often benefits from choosing a nemesis and creating a straw boogeyman--a rallying cry for the group to fight against.
Rubyists hate Java with all of its J2EE and XML configuration (never mind that Rails is at least as complicated, and Java moved on a long time ago). Certain religious groups hate gay people, with their immoral acts in the streets and the corrupting of the young (I hope I don't have to explain why this is BS).
And startup people have their boogeyman: the clueless MBA asshole stereotype.
Learn to see beyond this. There is always some fragment of truth in stereotypes, but it's more useful to understand why these articles are written.
There should be an article "Why it is a negative application signal if the HR worries about MBAs (in startups)". Seriously, there are so many articles out there about this topic. But I don't think there is any good startup team that worries about any of the certificates you can provide. Startup is a game of street smarts. So street cred should count. Having done something cool should count. Having worked with someone cool should count. Being resilient should count. But definitely not having one or another paper.
One of the nice things about having an MBA is that you learn to construct an argument based on facts, not conjecture. OP would likely be much more persuasive if he had gone to B School.
As a result of B School, I am not nearly as opinionated as I once was, until I can cite data to support my conclusions.
[+] [-] ssharp|12 years ago|reply
If you're hiring, particularly in a startup, you owe it to yourself and your company to carefully consider qualified applicants. Yes, hiring signals exist, but all signals are not equal. Placing too much negative value on a person achieving a Masters degree can easily turn out to be a mistake.
I also don't buy the opportunity cost argument. Does the author examine every line of every resume to determine what the applicant could have been doing instead and gives the best score to the applicant who left the least on the ground? Or is this pedantic behavior executed exclusively on MBAs, because they deserve the stereotype?
I question the value of yet another article like this. It's just amplifying the noise in the echo chamber. The author states he knows several MBAs who have worked at or founded successful startups. Why not write about that instead of rehashing the same, dull, unsupported claims?
[+] [-] argonaut|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|12 years ago|reply
Why? none of the reasons in the article.
I'm a code monkey, I've been coding for over 30 years. But in my career in IT I've found that the hard problems are not the tech problems. The hard problems are the people problems, and most of them derive from communication difficulties between the finance/biz world and the actual implementation required.
Finance and biz types are not going to learn to code, because whatever. So if anyone's going to solve the communication problem it's going to have to be me, by learning finance and biz speak.
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. But it's doing the job I intended it to do. I find that just the knowledge that I am studying an MBA has a dramatic effect on attitudes around me; I'm no longer just a code monkey technician type who isn't qualified to have an opinion.
[+] [-] LogicX|12 years ago|reply
The author also said we'd find counter examples. I still agree with the author for most MBAs having come out of traditional programs, for MBA holders which do not have an engineering background.
[+] [-] hershel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youngtaff|12 years ago|reply
At the time I was technical director for a online service so already pretty business aware.
It helped me to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge but most of all it taught me how to think - how to hold two opposing ideas in my head and work out possible solutions, it really helps to pick ideas and arguments apart and look at the alternatives.
Nearly ten years on from my MBA, I'm still doing hands on technical work and enjoying it but I also can talk to anyone from development, ops etc. right through to board level execs in their own language and that works wonders.
[+] [-] testrun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|12 years ago|reply
MBA: bad, PhD: bad, I get it. CS-degrees are horrible because you could have build an entire company in the time it takes to get one of those post has to be around the corner.
Those MBA folks are too dumb to understand that startups are different than big corporations (or in other words they can't pick up any of the lean XXX books and read the first 10 pages). Amazing that evil Wall Street is willing to hire such morons let alone pay them enough money to be too demanding on average. Those snobby old MBAs and their entitled friends, those networks could never be useful either.
Putting a disclaimer at the beginning of a post doesn't turn it into less of a rant.
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|12 years ago|reply
Supply and Demand
There are some basic supply and demand issues for CS graduates. On the supply side, a surprising number of jobs are at angel and venture-backed startups that are burning through cash to pay "market rates" for engineering "talent" and likely won't be around in five years. On the demand side, while there is currently significant demand for candidates with CS degrees, if you didn't graduate from a top CS program and/or don't excel at FizzBuzz, your options may be limited.
Entitlement
CS graduates think of themselves as special snowflakes, future Mark Zuckerbergs, worthy of extremely high compensation and authority.
Misguided Thinking
"CS thinking” involves putting all of the value in technology and then, when it doesn't sell itself, scrambling to find a "growth hacker" who can take it to market. When that fails, "lean startup philosophy" suggests that you pseudo-scientifically iterate over and over again until your angel investor's money is depleted.
Selection Bias
Because building functional CRUD applications that offer value doesn't require a CS degree, it really bears examining a person's motivation for getting one. Was it because he or she is more interested in the theoretical than the practical? Is the individual going to make decisions based on what is best for the business or on what technology or approach is sexiest? Will he or she be able to compromise when business needs dictate compromise?
Limited usefulness
How many startups ever need someone who can reproduce common algorithms that every popular programming language has functions for?
Opportunity Cost
The time someone spent getting a CS degree was time they could have spent actually developing domain expertise.
[+] [-] zacinbusiness|12 years ago|reply
This is in a country with a pitifully low literacy rate.
Both my wife and I are very luck - we both have MAs in English (she focusing on rhetoric and I on technical communication) and we each landed great, full-time employment in our fields.
Still, we have friends with similar degrees and focuses that work in the same jobs they had when starting college, or worse are without employment at all.
[+] [-] InTheSwiss|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LogicX|12 years ago|reply
As the author points out, there are exceptions to what he's saying (as with most things), but if something is an observation (or stereotype) of a measurable portion of a group, I find that to be of value when taking things into consideration and 'grokking' the world. It does not mean to ignore conflicting evidence.
How would you propose he provide 'facts' to back up what he's saying, When you provide no facts to counter what he's said? Agree with ricricucit that his experience in the field is sufficient facts for me (also helps I have similar experiences in the field, and so concur with his facts)
[+] [-] ksk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricricucit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
Opportunity cost...? What makes having a B.A. in Psychology not a negative hiring signal too? He could have been getting a business degree which would have helped him know more about accounting! Etc.
Feels like a pretty silly argument. An MBA is generally going to be more likely to be successful than a non-MBA in running a business, startup or not. It might not be worth the kinds of salaries an MBA would demand, but a negative? Feels a bit anti-intellectual. More knowledge is always better.
[+] [-] argonaut|12 years ago|reply
It goes without saying that the opportunity cost of a dual major in Psychology is extremely low (i.e. a few classes) if your primary major is already Symbolic Systems - a degree which integrates CS and psychology.
> in running a business, startup or not.
Saying that an MBA will be better at running any kind of company, implying some sort of equality between the completely different challenges of startups and normal large companies kind of undermines the credibility of this argument.
[+] [-] fatjokes|12 years ago|reply
It is a negative signal. The BS in Symbolic Systems on the other hand, is a pretty positive one that more than compensates.
[+] [-] nraynaud|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackgavigan|12 years ago|reply
Dalton's full of shit.
I could just as easily write a diatribe about developers who think of themselves as special snowflakes, future unicorn founder/CEOs, worthy of extremely high compensation and autonomy, yet have zero clue about business, can't deliver a finished product to save their life and have no appreciation for the importance of usability when it comes to creating a product aimed at users who don't have a CompSci degree.
During my stint as CTO of a dot-com back in 1999/2000, I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about running a business, strategy, marketing, business development, finance, cash flow planning, accounting, cap tables, negotiation and all the other little things that add up to a successful venture. So, I decided to go to business school. But guess what? A lobotomy wasn't on the curriculum. I can still knock together a shell script, tail -f a logfile and pipe it through grep, get some vague clue about why something crashed by casting my eye over a Java exception error, and make a lazy developer deeply uncomfortable when he realises that - would you believe it! - this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.
Going to business school and getting an MBA added many new arrows to my quiver but it didn't take any away. It didn't narrow my horizons - it broadened them. The idea that an MBA can never be of any value to anything other than a large corporation is as ridiculous as the idea that a coder who learnt Java and the Waterfall method at college will never be able to learn Objective C and cope with Agile. True, some won't be able to but that doesn't mean that all won't.
MBA curricula are often perceived as out of date because the content must be approved as part of the academic accreditation process. As a result, they often don't incorporate the latest business methodologies. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on whether the latest business thinking is merely a fad or something that will last as long as Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. But, either way, graduating from business school doesn't mark the end of the learning process. My copy of Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup" occupies the same shelf as "Strategic Management" by Saloner, Shepard and Padolny, "Let Me People Go Surfing" by Yvon Chouinard, "Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L Bernstein and John W Mullins' "The New Business Road Test". My last two Kindle purchases were Brad Feld's "Startup Communities" and "Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank.
Dalton claims that, "to an MBA Strategy > Implementation" but it's truer to say that, to an MBA, Strategy comes before Implementation. To do the reverse, implementing blindly and pivoting wildly, is akin to blindly throwing darts at a dartboard - eventually one of them will end up in the bullseye but that isn't necessarily proof that the thrower is anything other than lucky.
Dalton's entitled to his prejudice. If he wants to take the shortcomings of a subset of MBAs and apply those as a stereotype across the entire population, that's his prerogative. However, to make broad, sweeping generalisations about someone based on a single fact - whether it's the fact that they have an MBA, what school they went to or the colour of their skin - is pretty foolish because the exceptions will bite you on the ass. For every lame MBA, there's a Sheryl Sandberg or Alexis Maybank. For every team of MBA founders with all the strategy and no product, there's a Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, who came up with the idea for CloudFlare at Harvard Business School[1], or a Neil Blumenthal, who attributes much of Warby Parker’s success to his and his co-founders’ experiences at business school, which Blumenthal described as "the most helpful and useful of any of my educational background."[2]
And, for every lame MBA, there are likely dozens of developers who scoff at the notion that building a successful company requires anything other than the ability to code, and certainly none of that crap they teach you in business school. Of course, if that were true, we'd have many more billion-dollar startups and far fewer founders making schoolboy errors that could have been easily avoided.
Maybe if Dalton had taken a few classes in strategy and marketing, Wired wouldn't be writing about "The Great App.net Mistake".[3]
[1]: http://www.cloudflare.com/our-story
[2]: http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/29/warby-parker-the-result-of-...
[3]: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mis...
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|12 years ago|reply
Be constructive and civil. Instead of congratulating yourself for the transitory sadistic, self-righteous pleasure you obviously derive from making the developers you hired "deeply uncomfortable," try working with them. Teach them exception handling if you know this. That would demonstrate a collaborative team spirit.
Update: I was downvoted, as expected. In that case, I neglected to add "offensively smug." The humorless business attitude of dog-eat-dog with a facade of righteousness is here to stay.
[+] [-] npalli|12 years ago|reply
To see why, let's take strategy. You seem to think that strategy is developed in the abstract. However, for startups, you need to be fully engaged in the day to day struggle of your competitors, customers, employees etc. From this up close reality you get a feel for the edge/secret that you have. That edge/secret forms the basis for your strategy. There is no optimal strategy out there. You can't think hard and come up with it. You need to work day to day and fit something that works for you in that particular time,customers etc. This ground reality/state of world and how you are single best suited to take advantage is the biggest power you have over incumbents. Not knowledge of some old case studies or porter's framework, ability to do SWOT analysis or whatever the latest framework is. If you are successful you will be the case study 10 years from now in a business school. At that point the frontier has moved on. Specific to Dalton, if I were to do something in social/music oriented business, I would take his competence over any ivy league MBA. Mostly because he has that ground reality in his head.
Yes, there are basic business rules and concepts that you need to know, however spending two years for an MBA is an overkill for a startup. Truth be told, you come across as exactly the arrogant MBA people like to make fun of. You didn't fully understand the point. Made some silly non-arguments which are abstract and irrelevant and to top it off made some bold statements about your capabilities which had the opposite effect (you can tail files and pipe to grep and are proud of that, really? c'mon man).
[+] [-] nairteashop|12 years ago|reply
However, he merely said that it is a negative hiring signal, and on this point I must agree with him. For a good majority of MBAs I know, the degree is either a way to move into a business-oriented role, or a way to get out of their current field and into something else (usually from tech, into banking or consulting). There is nothing wrong with that, but it's not exactly an entrepreneurial mindset, which is what you want at a startup.
If a company doesn't hire me just because I have an MBA, but am a great fit otherwise, I would consider it their loss. If they consider my MBA a negative signal that turns out to be insignificant once they get to know me better, I would certainly understand their initial mindset.
[+] [-] v64|12 years ago|reply
As a self-taught programmer, I tell people wanting to get into software development that it's definitely not something you have to go to school for, and that the best programmers I've met are those who are always taking the initiative to enrich their own knowledge, and not those with the most academic degrees. In my experience, number of personal projects is a better indicator of the quality of a developer than GPA in CompSci classes.
Of course, being the CEO of a multinational corporation or a software developer on critical banking infrastructure is different than running your own 5 person business or developing alarm clocks for your phone. At what point does one really need an MBA to further their business development, and why did you believe you had reached that point?
[+] [-] asdfologist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
Startups need the former. Established companies need the latter.
I personally like, and agree with, Guy Kawasaki's formula for pre-money valuation of new companies:
pre-money valuation = ($1M * n_engineers) - ($500k * n_MBAs)
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Keyframe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] devanti|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ricricucit|12 years ago|reply
BTW: that would have also proven the fact that there is no such a thing as "special snowflake".
[+] [-] data_app|12 years ago|reply
Just like a degree in computer science teaches you the inner workings of a computer, a degree in business administration teaches you how to run a business. How can that knowledge be invaluable in a startup?
I do believe that certain segment (including the author) of the population has a strong negative bias against MBAs but majority aren't... Most mature+experienced tech founders understands the value of an MBA degree and even if they don't, they treat it as any other degree...
[+] [-] GuerraEarth|12 years ago|reply
--I had to re-choose my co-founder because I found this to be an exact fit of my situation. The person with the MBA felt entitled to everything but would not do any of the hardcore work involved. In fact, at Columbia U, I know tonnes of MBA students and they all have the same characteristic described in Dalton's article.
$$$ glisten in their irises whenever they talk about startups. For me, someone who has no MBA and would not get an MBA if it were the only academic degree on the planet, a startup is about the 24/7 work involved to create and nurture a good, innovative, useful and interesting toy that can do big things for other people. But that is why in the world, we need a million flowers blooming. People are supposed to be different. Variety is good. But as an initial co-founder, someone with an MBA--chances are--isn't the best choice, according to my experience most humble. : )
[+] [-] ig1|12 years ago|reply
Ironically he recommends a Masters in CS over an MBA and then talks about lean startup philosophy, a philosophy that places business development and product management above development.
[+] [-] pjan|12 years ago|reply
An MBA doesn't invalidate their previous experience. An MBA doesn't specialise a person or decreases his/her usefulness to only C-level positions (quite the opposite in my opinion, as they often acquire additional skills). An MBA doesn't make you a strategy guy/girl per se or makes you less an implementation person.
Apart from the social pressure one -might- experience because of their achieving peers (and maybe even the financial pressure to pay off their debt), I only believe it increases a person's skills (be it soft, finance, ...)
Eventually, it always boils down to peoples motivations to join X or Y. An MBA should at most encourage you (the recruiter/hiring person/... to ask some other questions during the hiring process.
Next in the series I expect:
"Why having worked for McK/BCG/Bain is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"
"Why having investment banking experience is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"
"Why having studied law is a negative hiring signal (for startups)" ...
[+] [-] argonaut|12 years ago|reply
http://www.quora.com/Management-Consulting-and-Management-Co...
[+] [-] Zak|12 years ago|reply
Now that that is out of the way, let’s get to the point: If a person has a particular skill-set, experience, personality & undergraduate education, that person choosing to buy an MBA has the net effect of the startup market valuing that person as being worth less, not more.
Why?
Supply and Demand
There are some basic supply and demand issues for MBAs. On the supply side, there is a surprising abundance of people with MBAs who want to work at startups. On the demand side, a candidate with those three little letters on their laptop will need to be vetted more closely and will be automatically isolated into a small number of highly-specialized potential roles.
Entitlement
Apple trains people to think of themselves as special snowflakes, future masters of business, worthy of extremely high compensation and authority. Thus one primary motivation of an MBA owner is to secure their own massive salary, stock and title… and this motivation is diametrically opposed to the psychological makeup of a successful startup team-member. Given the social pressure MBA owners must feel from their coffee shop friends, we can’t really blame them; it’s human nature 101.
Misguided Thinking
In my opinion, the lean startup movement, startup genome project, etc have roared into existence as an antidote to "MBA thinking." "MBA thinking" involves putting all of the value in high level design, which is then rolled out to underlings who are responsible for actual implementation. In other words to an MBA owner Design > Implementation.
Lean startup philosophy suggests all of this design stuff is misguided bullshit, and rather you should personally build things as quickly and as cheaply as possible then scientifically iterate over and over again. To an early stage startup Implementation > Design.
Selection Bias
It really bears examining a persons motivation for getting an MBA. Was it so they could skip ahead to get rich? Because they wanted to be powerful? Because they hated their job and showing off in coffee shops was a good way out? Because they originally wanted to work at 37 Signals but are only now considering your startup because they heard that your're building the successor to Ruby on Rails?
Limited usefulness
If someone is on a startup career track that is in design or high-level architecture, an MBA makes a lot of sense. For instance, a smart startup founder might want their lead designer to have an MBA. But how many startups ever get big enough to need a lead designer? How many high-level design gigs are actually out there? This is a very shallow pool to swim in.
Opportunity cost
The time someone spent getting an MBA was time they could have spent installing Linux on a Thinkpad. Losing two inches of screen real estate puts you at a clear disadvantage vs someone with the same CPU who can actually see a decent amount of code at once.
A thought experiment
Imagine that if instead of getting an MBA, ambitious young over-achievers spend two days upgrading and configuring their hardware and software. Or two days building a desktop. Or two days shopping around to see what else they could get for the same price.
Who would be worth more in the open market when all is said and done? Who would have a better chance of building their own great company?
[+] [-] sokoloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dmk23|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|12 years ago|reply
MBA's are best suited at places where you need things to be generalized and managed even if it is at the expense of efficiency.
If you are looking at hard focus based work which requires a lot of application of specialized knowledge and effort. MBA's not just make a bad match for those jobs, but will likely mess it up.
You need MBA's when you need some super abstracted generalized knowledge applied to non critical tasks. You can hire an MBA to run a hospital's billing unit, but not to treat patients. Same with software and start up's. You can use them to do some work on stuff like market research, setting up the pay roll unit, attendance systems etc.
[+] [-] fizx|12 years ago|reply
Rubyists hate Java with all of its J2EE and XML configuration (never mind that Rails is at least as complicated, and Java moved on a long time ago). Certain religious groups hate gay people, with their immoral acts in the streets and the corrupting of the young (I hope I don't have to explain why this is BS).
And startup people have their boogeyman: the clueless MBA asshole stereotype.
Learn to see beyond this. There is always some fragment of truth in stereotypes, but it's more useful to understand why these articles are written.
[+] [-] erikb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigchewy|12 years ago|reply
As a result of B School, I am not nearly as opinionated as I once was, until I can cite data to support my conclusions.
[+] [-] rgbrgb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattty|12 years ago|reply