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by danielna 4703 days ago
I had a lawn mowing business when I was 16. I had marketing, a service and collected payments.

What's the point of business school?

4 comments

I made five-page web sites when I was 15. I had published code, marketing (business cards!), customers, and more money than I would have gotten had I worked the help desk.

What's the point of engineering school?

I was being sarcastic, which admittedly is lost on the web.

Software dev is reduced as easily to an overly simplistic implementation as business savvy is. I think we're making the same point.

Well, now I feel like a jerk. Yeah, I couldn't tell that you were being sarcastic (which I guess is a point in of itself) -- my bad.
The point of business school, for the most part, is for people who work in large bureaucratic organizations to get a pay bump at the middle management level.

But contrary to the MBA's are idiots stereotype, most MBAs don't flaunt their education or turn into "House of Lies"-style management consulting idiots after getting their degrees either.

I wonder what positions the good MBAs tend to work in vs the bad, for example which kind are more likely to be big company CxOs.
Uhh, people get an MBA to be something like a vice president at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, or a consultant at McKinsey, or maybe even eventually a CEO of a major corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue, not to run a lawn mowing business.

Edit: I see now that you were being sarcastic.

I'm glad someone brought this up. Someone might be able to start a successful solo business venture without any formal training. But that is very different from being an executive or having some administrative job in a medium or larger-sized company (I am assuming). The guy that started the solo business has that experience, great - but he's only got that perspective of being a business administrator. Do you need formal training to do most of the jobs that MBA's do? Maybe not - but the person who has only done that one solo business probably does not have enough perspective on that either.

In this case, I don't know if the author is only talking about building that one first app, apps in general or programming in general (probably just apps, I reckon). But if the audience is non-programmers who gets the impression that programming is just about "winging it" and that formal education is totally optional#, then it only offers a perspective from a very limited vantage point.

#this could be a valid opinion, but only really interesting to me if it came from an experienced programmer.

blindhippo: I thought I should mention that your posts are appearing dead to me.