[fatman]

Seems like a good a time as any to break out my favorite anti-MBA story.

I took a Masters CS class some time ago, and for our final class project, not knowing anyone else in the class, I got lumped in the "leftover" group with a working engineer and a Wharton MBA student. We meet up the day before the project is due to integrate each of our individual pieces together into a final submission and the MBA candidate shows up empty handed. Turns out he had spent his time trying to "schmooze" the answers/code out of the professor and the TA, who, to their credit, had stood firm. Guess who spent that entire night writing that dolt's portion of the project from scratch.

[ragnarok451]

Why did you write his code for him? You should've just told the instructors he didn't pull his weight, I think. With what happened, he ended up with a successful group without doing any work, which is a great outcome for him.

[beachstartup]

yeah, it doesn't sound like much of an "anti-mba story", more like a "pro-mba story". facetime with the prof and the nerds did all the work without complaining!

[meric]

I think the key thing is to identify the "freeloaders" early.

I was once in a group for a university project when we had to implement this piece of software for a real world client. There was software that needed to be built, and documentation that needed to be written, as well as content that needed to be provided, e.g. weekly meeting diaries one is required to do in such university projects. Everyone else in the group had difficulty writing working, useful code, and progress was slow, even when I thought it was an easy project. A few days before the first milestone deadline, I sat down and finished the thing in an afternoon. And so, for the rest of the semester in that class all we had to do was the paperwork, and naturally that wasn't my job because I saved everyone so much time.

Sometimes BS needs to be written...that's when it's useful to have people who's best to do that kind of thing in your group.

[fatman]

Because I'm a stubborn ass who'd rather suffer a freeloader than hand in an incomplete assignment. In hindsight, I guess I should have finished the project and explained the division of labor.

[TeMPOraL]

> Because I'm a stubborn ass who'd rather suffer a freeloader than hand in an incomplete assignment.

And sadly, off the backs of those like you MBAs flourish.

[dagw]

Guess who spent that entire night writing that dolt's portion of the project from scratch.

And that is how the MBA learnt a very important life lesson about the most efficient way to get work done.

The End.

[wpietri]

A friend of mine, a solid mechanical engineer, ended up going back for an MBA. He said that in 2 years, he learned exactly one surprising thing, one idea that he couldn't have guessed after a little thought. [1] He said that the valuable part was the relationships built up with other people who, over the course of his career, would be placed in a variety of high-flying companies.

It was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

[TeMPOraL]

He could've learned it reading Less Wrong too :).

That said, I think the relationship network is a huge advantage too. Reminds me of a story about, if memory serves me well, an economic university student, who was bad at learning but good at throwing parties (with lots of vodka). It was in Poland around the fall of the Soviet Union. The guy apparently got very successful because through his parties, he befriended a lot of people people who later graduated and became directors of private and national enterprises.