[storgendibal]

Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy/squishy/learnable.

During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, and can make or break a company. Corporate planning from a cost / revenue perspective is super critical. Steering a large organization and navigating personalities and power structures in such a company is difficult and squishy.

Certainly, some MBAs are full of sh but I've also run into plenty of engineers who are full of sh. I think it's hard to stereotype. When I first started business school I thought everyone would be the stereotypical investment banking jerk. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that most people were fun, very sharp, pleasant, intellectually curious, and they really respected folks with a technical background. Exposure to them broadened my own worldview in a number of different ways. Sure, you don't need an MBA to run a company. But you also don't need a CS degree from MIT to be an awesome engineer.

[volgo]

Just because it's hard, and the people running them are sharp and smart, doesn't make it any more righteous or normal.

Back in the Colonial times, sharp smart lads went to prestigious military schools and learned the complexities of how to subjugate conquered people. How to efficiently run a slave camp. How to squeeze every unit of labor off the peasants, etc. People went to these schools were probably very cultured, polite, and were funny and pleasant at social events. But history will judge them harshly

Would not be surprised if the same thing happened to MBAs when the tide of history turns in a few centuries. Maybe squeezing profit off of people will no longer be ethical or acceptable, even if your model is complex and intellectual

[jf-]

I believe the parent’s point was that running a business that is self-sustaining is actually a difficult endeavour, and doing what looks like ‘squeezing customers’ from the outside is actually what the business needs to do to survive. I think this is a reasonable point, considering that no matter what price point many services are offered at, customers will still complain that it’s too high.

Leading me to my question: is your post satire, or do you really consider charging money for a service to be morally equivalent to murdering natives?

[xg15]

But this implies that "squeezing the customer" tactics - where you first focus on growth at all costs, then later find how far you can degrade the service before a critical number of customers quit - is the only way for a company to survive.

I don't see any evidence for that - and in fact, GP proposed/reminded of an alternative business model for WhatsApp.

[jf-]

Actually what I was getting at was pricing - customers who are used to getting something for free will always think that any charge is outrageous. In non-tech examples people think that what are reasonable prices are gouging etc. Not that gouging doesn’t happen, but the public is bad at judging what a reasonable price looks like.

In the specific case of whatsapp, it would be interesting to see what would happen if the service did offer a $1 a year subscription. I’d pay, assuming that data wouldn’t also be used or sold for advertising. But I have a gut feeling that most wouldn’t, they’d rather switch to something that cost nothing, even over something that was very cheap.

Psychologically the gap between free and any cost is large. Which means that for a business, people are either willing to jump that gap or not. The price itself isn’t really a huge factor, it’s free vs not free, so the price may as well be higher than $1, or whatever the minimum viable amount is.

Also the post above was making some wild comparisons that I wanted to point out are silly.

[krageon]

The person you are responding to is talking about the bigger picture, whereas you are focusing on a local detail. While you make a really good point if you consider that you honestly thought you were talking about the same thing, instead you were not. Now it looks like you've subtly moved the goalposts, so that the person you are responding to has an argument that sounds ridiculous. Even though you've not responded to it at all.

[jf-]

Really? Is there a way of equating people with MBAs to conquering invaders that doesn’t sound ridiculous?

[eska]

I'm not under the impression that you moved the goalpost. Instead I think that storgendibal softened russelbeattie's post a bit by saying that not all business tactics are morally wrong, just like it would be wrong to say engineering is evil because one can build nukes. It's not really a secret that a lot of engineers (programmers) don't like business as a subject of study so this website will be very biased against MBAs, but I am quite confident that those engineers also don't run businesses. The engineers that do run businesses show more respect for the kind of businessman that understands and respects the product and its development process as well as the engineers involved.

[sa46]

> Back in the Colonial times, sharp smart lads went to prestigious military schools and learned the complexities of how to subjugate conquered people. How to efficiently run a slave camp.

Source? My understanding was military academies focus on tactical leadership, military conduct and often an engineering background.

It also depends on what you mean by colonial times, military academies didn't show up in the U.S. until the 1800s.

> Maybe squeezing profit off of people

I think the parent's point was significantly more nuanced than this characterization.

[xg15]

And yet colonialism, organized slavery, etc happened and very likely needed substantial expertise in logistics and management to be pulled off.

That expertise had to come from somewhere.

[baud147258]

Well, the prestigious school also taugh all the persons who then led the colonized people to independence, there's that too.

[wadkar]

Nope, the oppressors destroyed the native culture, robbed them off their wealth, social structures, and (however) evolved systems of institutions while leaving no venue for the colonized people to prosper. Few who managed to survive and climb through the inevitable mixing of peoples learnt some of the tricks from their oppressors and fought back for independence.

I am afraid your comment sounds like it is trying to find some silver linings in the oppressors malevolence but please try to sympathize (if you cannot empathize) with those colonized.

[baud147258]

Well, in some case it was a culture of slavery and piracy, so in those case it was an improvment. Infrastructure, education and sanitation were improved in some cases too.

> I am afraid your comment sounds like it is trying to find some silver linings in the oppressors malevolence but please try to sympathize (if you cannot empathize) with those colonized.

No, I was pointing that the schools decried by the parent were also where the persons who led some of the conflicts for independence were taught in the same school; I was defending those schools.

[wadkar]

> Infrastructure, education and sanitation were improved in some cases too.

And I would like to point out that they would’ve improved otherwise had the natives weren’t oppressed. In other words, the oppressors destroyed the ability of the natives to improve. The so called improvements happened despite being oppressed.

As for defending the schools, the same point applies - the oppressors destroyed the systems of education. Had they not invaded the natives and kept there greed to their homelands their wouldn’t be any need for defending these schools.

Edit: a word and newlines.

[baud147258]

I'd agree that some of the colonies would have improved had the colonisation not happened, but not everywhere: in some case it happened because the colonised powers did it. And most of them didn't have systems of education before the colonisation.

[secfirstmd]

Personally I just wish less of our world class minds were working at huge, de facto advertising companies thinking about how to monetise/track the flow of information, sneak an microsecond advantage on the stock market etc and more were solving more important stuff like climate change, disease and democracy/human rights being under retreat.

Lets be honest here, Whatsapp gathered hundreds of millions of users with a tiny team. Signal and Signal protocol made Whatsapp secure with less than 10 people on the team full time. So less than a hundred staff, 1.5 billion per year is more than enough resources to add get most of the benefits of Whatsapp to humanity. Leaving plenty of engineers, MBAs and who ever is left to go do more useful stuff.

[storgendibal]

I don't disagree. I think a lot of the debate on this thread comes down to free market economics and whether you believe it leads to a global maxima or not.

I think that starts to approach a religious belief, so I don't think I want to get into that debate, but I have yet to see a system that works better than the free-market (plus a reasonable safety net )

[ratacat]

Here's my favorite group of smart people working on solving climate change.

Http://regen.network

[nogbit]

Those things are hard, especially when 90% of everything is crap you need good skills to convince people or companies that what you are selling is something they must have.

[Synroc]

I’m curious in your path. What made you decide to get an MBA being an engineer, and what are you doing now with that degree?

[kumarvvr]

This is a very common path taken in India.

Engineer > 1 - 4 years experience in IT/Engineering etc > 2 Year MBA from a reputed college > Management role in related or a completely different field.

There is a general consensus in India that engineers can be groomed to be good managers. No idea why.

One more aspect to consider is that qualifying exams for top-tier MBA colleges in India (IIM's, etc) are somehow cracked more easily by engineers. Of course there are students from commerce / arts / etc that also crack and top these exams, but the trend till date is it's mostly engineers.

Also most of the top Indian guys in Silicon Valley (Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, etc) have are engineers from some of the top engineering colleges in India.

[storgendibal]

I grew up programming and always assumed I'd be a software engineer, without really considering other career paths. After six years of of software engineering (mainly operating systems and cloud infra), I thought it might be valuable to do a breadth-first search for a short period of time, and an MBA seemed a decent route to do that search. In retrospect, I use some of what I learned in bschool in my current job, but largely, the mind expansion was worth it. There are many perspectives and b-school exposed me to a lot more points of view than I had before.

[lx3459683]

It's the path people take when they're not very good at engineering but want the medium bucks.

[edanm]

This is both ungenerous to parent, and ungenerous to anyone who does an MBA.

Just because you don't see the value in something, doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

[ramsr]

Sweeping generalization.

[lx3459683]

Our ability to generalize is one of the key traits that makes us the dominant species on this planet. Describing that particular commenter's path is not nearly as informationally useful as describing the most common path.

MBA is the business equivalent of "<technology name> Specialist Certification" in engineering. It's for the second-rate.

[ramsr]

Can you please point me to your research/rationale on why you think it's for the second rate?

[lx3459683]

I hold an MBA from one of the top schools in my country. It was a waste of time.

MBA is highly dogmatic and highly prescriptive. It does not delve into the why. I can't draw a better analogy than the worthless certification courses that you'll find on the CVs of second-rate engineers.

If you want someone who is leading their field in some technology, you look for researchers, people with significant on the ground experience, people who understand the first principles, limitations, and capabilities of that technology. If you just want to fill the job slot with some rando, you'll settle for someone who has some stupid certification in said technology and thinks there's only one right way to use it because that's all they've been taught. MBA is the same thing but with a lot more self-congratulatory jerkoff. If you're in the right industry, it becomes easy to spot recent MBA grads. The way they talk to their subordinates, the way they talk to their superiors, even the way they act during downtime around coworkers - it's all part of the cookie cutter recipe they were fed and blindly follow. It's nauseating.

[lordgrenville]

A lot of the debate in this thread is conflating two questions: are engineers more capable than MBAs? (Answer: of course not, in the sense that MBAs can do things that engineers can't, and are often very smart and technical people). Secondly, are MBAs less ethical than MBA, or do they make the decisions they do because they are exposed to market realities that engineers aren't? This is a tough and abstract question, and I think the answer depends largely on your feelings about capitalism and economics in general.