[JimboOmega]

Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually? I go back and forth on if I want to pursue an MBA every couple years or so (though I doubt the education would be worth it, it'd be a stamp on my resume for wanting to go that direction).

Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.

[pyre]

> Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually?

I doubt it. The idea of not wanting to manage people gets more noise because 'moving into management' seems to be default path, and in some organizations if you don't move in that direction, you are punished. So people complain more loudly about these issues.

[patio11]

There's quite a bit of variety on "the business side", FWIW. Getting an MBA does not necessarily get one increased access to it, depending on what you want to do and where you want to do it.

Dave McClure had a really good discussion once on starting a startup as the new MBA: far more interesting to hear you talk about how you sold $200k of sales than hear about how you read about someone doing the same. This also gives you a lot of opportunities to directly apply engineering skills in the service of your business goals. Those opportunities exist (in quantity!) in real life, but may not in any given MBA program.

[jlees]

And for the management side, growing an engineering team from 1 to N will teach you more about people and (early-stage) organizational dynamics than any number of case studies. However, learning by doing -- and potentially failing -- doesn't appeal to everyone, and you can certainly balance the "on the job" learning with book-learning too.

I did an executive MBA, and plan to move into people management at some point. I enjoy it and I love the feeling of empowering a team to be excellent. At the same time I feel that you need a solid base as a respected individual contributor, especially if you are leading the team technically rather than playing bug-assignment Tetris -- which is what I'm focusing on for now. Management can seem like a dirty word in engineering, but some of us like doing it.

[analog31]

My observation is that the MBA degree is primarily valued by other MBA's.

[blumkvist]

That really depends on where you got your MBA.

[analog31]

Where, when, and how.

Where: The school that you attend.

When: Straight out of college, or after working for a while?

How: Online or in-person?

In my neck o' the woods, there's a general sentiment that the MBA degree is more valuable (i.e., marketable) if you get it after already establishing your success in the business world. The route of going to business school directly after college is associated with the suspicion that you couldn't get a job, and still need to come up to speed in a business environment.

The people I know who have done this are mostly techies of some sort, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that business school is "hard" because of the math involved (finance and also some basic statistics), so if you're good at math, then it's not very hard.

From what I can tell, online programs from prestigious schools are gaining acceptance.

I don't know if the rule of thumb about graduate education applies to MBA programs: Don't attend grad school unless somebody else is paying for it. A benefit of getting an executive MBA while working, is if your employer is willing to reimburse you.

[walshemj]

only up to a point grad students at top end universities like Harvard and Cranfield will look down on those who could only get into the MBA

[alttab]

Im with you dude. I began programming when I was 10 and have been doing it my entire life. Once I began working in organizations instead of on my own projects I was fascinated as to how the code I wrote was only a piece of it. I moved into management and I haven't really looked back. I still get to code, but its when I want to.

[watty]

No. In fact, every coder I know who also has good social skills seems to want to go the business route.