| Software engineer with an MBA here. I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA (they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's, with some hoop-jumping). The MBA itself wasn't that instructive. The Leadership unit was the highlight. Knowing how to read a balance sheet and understand Corporate Finance was interesting. The Entrepreneurship unit was farcical - the first step was always to create a 40-page business plan and then consult a lawyer about IP. At the time I was getting heavily involved in the startup scene, and the differences between what I was learning at Uni and learning from actual entrepreneurs were huge. The rest of it was OK, not great, not bad. Certainly not difficult. Having an MBA is useful. It has landed me interesting jobs. It does act to dismiss any "but he's just a code monkey" arguments. It looks great on my bio when part of a startup team. The leadership training has been great when managing people. But it doesn't stop the bias against people who build things. I still get regularly sidelined in meetings in preference to sales and marketing people. I still find it hard to argue my case even with the correct finance terminology. It's annoying, and it was one of the things I hoped the MBA would fix. Apparently not. |