[thruhiker]

I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.

[refurb]

An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.

The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.

My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.

The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.

[ghaff]

It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.

I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.

One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.

[runlaszlorun]

Harsh but spot-on. Especially the last paragraph…