[lordnacho]

I went to business school (top European) as part of my engineering degree.

They actually do make a point of mentioning that there's more than one philosophy of management. For instance, in the Germanic world, it's common to promote managers from the ranks of whatever business is being managed, whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic.

But of course there's a problem. If you tell people they need specific experience in the car industry to be a car industry manager, or as a software dev to manage devs, then WTF are you doing in a business school? Especially as an undergrad? You gonna manage the student bar?

So then when it comes to all the case studies, you have to kid yourself that what happened to Betamax in the 1980s is going to be relevant to you in 2016. It's interesting to read all this historical "strategy" stuff, but the students I hung out with (being engineers, technically competent and skeptical of BS) tended to see them as something akin to a history class. Sure there are lessons, but a lot of it is just interpretation and conjecture. Nothing in it with the rigour of an engineering course.

As to why MBAs are useful, it seems it's really a question of signalling. If you pay a few hundred grand in fees, rent, and opportunity cost to do an MBA, you probably have some motivation. And there is some value in generic management; not every line of business requires deep technical knowledge, and those are fine for hiring some guy who's happy to work long hours and fly around a lot. It's a problem for something like software dev though.

[wpietri]

Excellent points.

> whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic

I now see this as a piece of a self-justifying ideology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

A while back I read an eye-opening book called "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance". [1] They see US-style management as a primarily a caste system.

One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them.

E.g, Amazon, which has been crushing competitors for nearly 20 years by ignoring short-term numbers and focusing on creating long-term customer value. Or Toyota, which went from a nearly-bankrupt company in war-ravaged Japan to the world's dominant car maker using a totally different philosophy of business. Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

[2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561

[otoburb]

>>One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them.

I appreciate the comment, but your Amazon example was jarring because it seems that HN does not like Amazon's culture in part due to the dominance of MBAs in the senior management ranks. This anecdata aligns with graduation numbers across some of the top 20 US business schools in 2015, and one would presume this leads to an overwhelmingly US MBA-centric Amazon management style, albeit one that may be different than "other" US MBA dogma.[1]

[1] http://qz.com/636539/amazon-is-hiring-the-most-mbas-in-tech-...

[wpietri]

Yeah, I don't know much about Amazon's internals. I'm pointing more at the way analysts have been saying for 15 years that Bezos isn't focused enough on quarterly profits, isn't returning enough to the shareholders, invests too much in long-term pipe dreams. But Kindle, AWS, and Prime have turned out to be giant competitive advantages.

[aserafini]

They're not a good example because Amazon is full of MBAs at the middle management and even individual contributor level.

But I agree with the general point that 'conventional' business wisdom might not lead you to Amazon's strategy.

[wpietri]

Thanks for the correction.

[rtpg]

I'm more on the "managers need technical knowledge" side of things, but I think there is value in the professional manager.

Imagine you need someone to help support a team of compiler writers. The kind of support is mainly protecting the team from too much bullshit above, and also just making sure the team has what it needs (someone's gotta get those chairs for them).

How much compiler experience do you need? It definitely helps to know about the constraints of development (difficulty in measuring project length, need for longer periods of concentration), but apart from "street cred" coming from importing within, there's a good argument that someone who's managed across multiple industries will be good at absorbing the right stuff to manage well.

OTOH, if you promote from within, you might be getting someone with good potential. But they likely won't have management experience, and their job changed from "ship this product" to "make sure the team doesn't implode (also ship the product)". If you have the slack to handle the learning curve, it's good. But hiring experienced people for a job is useful.

100% agree abut absorbing lessons though. When you start off with a certain mindset, it takes a while to absorb a new one. But your job is to make the company run well, not to be an advocate for whatever you learned at school

[wpietri]

The common approach in Silicon Valley is that everybody starts as a programmer. At some point, the career ladder bifurcates. Those who prefer to work with people issues become people managers, getting trained in related skills. (They often also work as tech leads, which is an in-between role, and for which smart companies also provide training.) Those who prefer technical issues keep rising up a technical ladder.

I think that's much more sensible than taking somebody who doesn't know much of anything, putting them in an MBA program, and then expecting them to have universal management mojo. So we're not talking about somebody who has managed across multiple industries. We're talking about somebody who, often, has managed across none.

I really don't believe managers from other industries can, on average, manage software teams. I thin software is too different from other kinds of labor. So many behaviors that are arguably reasonable in other industries are clearly catastrophic in software.

[cookiecaper]

>Those who prefer technical issues keep rising up a technical ladder.

The issue being that technical ladder is usually much shorter than the related "people ladder".

Let's call it what it is. If you have the look and act like a hyper-politically-conscious MBA, they'll let you in the club of high-level corporate people that make millions of dollars. If you look like some nerd who hasn't had a tan since 1st grade, you're stuck to the top of the technical ladder, where you're lucky to get $135k ($250k for San Francisco/other high COL areas).

[SkyMarshal]

False dichotomy, dude. You can also look like Vint Cerf or Peter Norvig and be high-ranking high-paid Chief Scientists and the like.

[cookiecaper]

The rules are different for luminaries in every field. We're talking about the career path for normal people. Even if your work is as high-quality as Cerf or Norvig, you can't command the salary because you don't have the name recognition. Google et al hire these types of people for recruitment/PR purposes as much as anything else.

It's quite plausible to be making 200k-300k (again, adjust as necessary for high CoL areas) + performance bonuses on a management career path. Normal technical workers cap out around $120k outside the Valley and somewhere in the vicinity of $200k in the Valley.

Things are different if you've gained notoriety by writing the book on AI, designing large chunks of the internet, or creating some of the world's most widely-used programming languages (van Rossum, Thompson, etc.).

The rest of us peons don't get an exception.

[maverick_iceman]

>someone's gotta get those chairs for them

This seems more like a job for an administrative assistant than a manager.

[badlucklottery]

OP might mean something more like fighting the stupid "why do they need $800+ chairs instead of the cheap $100 ones we already have in storage?" questions coming from above.

[forgetsusername]

>Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant.

Which was closed in 2010, and purchased by Tesla.

[akytt]

It's not that bad. Toyota Production System is taught as part of an MBA curriculum in better schools. Like it says in "Skunk Works", 2/3MBA=BS. The trouble is deciding which part that is. The best schools, in my experience, have realized that.

[icebraining]

Most people I know with an MBA (which, granted, it's less than 10) got it after working for a few years in some industry (including software). The concept of a business school, and of gaining more general business/management knowledge that you can evaluate under your experience as a professional, seems reasonable.