Man, I know no one worth their salt in Silicon Valley respects an MBA, especially the ones who come from consulting. These glorified bean counters whose only real skill seems to be uttering words like synergy, boil the ocean, granularity, directionally correct, wordsmith and other buzzwords and provide pie in the sky solutions that never work in the real world. Yes they are useful if senior VPs want a fall guy, but apart from that spending money on them is a poor investment. Just because you studied a few Harvard business cases, memorized a few frameworks, make pretty presentations and can use Excel, doesn't mean you understand tech. Almost all the consultants I have worked with have surface level understanding of tech which leads to sub optimal solutions and piss poor business outcomes. A lot of them hide their lack of knowledge behind their presentations on which they spend the bulk of their time. Ask a consultant, if he/she has ever built a product in their life? Have they engineered anything? Heck, half of them come from completely non technical baklckgrounds prior to their MBAs and now somehow think they should be offered a seat at the table. Look at the number of firms that have been ruined by consultants (a few large firms mentioned below): Intel Boeing GE If you want to ruin an innovative purpose driven culture, ensure your leadership is filled with MBAs and you will see said firm become more risk averse by cutting R&D spend and more interested in financial gimmicks such as stock buybacks. No engineering/tech firm should ever be run by an MBA, especillay one with non-tech background.
I’m an MBA and I mostly agree with the above. We have a lot to offer tech companies, but there shouldn’t be a TON of us running around in any one company, and you certainly wouldn’t want one or several of us “running” it. Many of us do learn tech on the job and can contribute as product managers quite effectively. Others are able to help with a number of other key activities: finance, ops, gtm. MBAs should be the ones helping the business run well in such a way that puts real tech talent (eng/prod) and revenue talent (sales) in position to do what they do best (build great products / close deals, respectively). My point is as an organization grows, there’s a ton of shit you need to do to run it well. My value as an MBA is that I can do a lot of that shit well so others don’t have to.
Sales
Idk about MBAs specifically but business and finance people are saving tech by being the grownups in the room.
We have a Senior Product Manager, who didn’t know what angular was. I guess it’s normal, these days.
Why would a product manager need to know about the implementation details?
You know that someone has to actually sell the shit you nerds build, right?
Some choose to learn, some just want the benefit. Can anyone who speaks English become the head of quantum or nuclear program tomorrow?
I think career consultants are bigger issue than MBAs. Consultants aren’t held accountable during their consultant gigs and lack execution skills
You forgot their most loved words: North star
Health & Wellness
Yesterday
345
Lasik cost
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1238
Women, help me understand why this is inspirational
Tech Industry
3d
59012
Crossed a line with my boss
Tech Industry
Yesterday
2121
What happens when most of your team is Indian?
Health & Wellness
3d
44682
High performers, how often do you have slack off days?
I think you are over indexing on the MBA part. The companies are ruined not because of they have a MBA but lack of vision to drive innovation. This could very well be an engineer who does not have a vision. To some extent, I agree with apple’s top down innovation and focused approach towards building new products. Google was so bottom up that they lacked their purpose and went building bunch of things that didn’t matter.