[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.