One of my in-laws is a geologist who works for the oil companies, and he tells me in that industry almost all the big executives are engineers. Since he's been in the news, take Rex Tillerson. His degree is in engineering.

Or take any of "the professions": law, accounting, medicine, business consulting, engineering firms. In all those cases you have "partners" who have moved into sales and management. Sometimes they are even still practicing too. Also I get the impression their management is more about giving expert direction to their team, rather than watching Gantt charts.

Also when I read Skunk Works by Ben Rich, it sounded like the upper management had come up through engineering.

So I don't think management-by-MBAs is necessarily the right thing for tech workers. The more you consider programming to be "knowledge work", the more it seems like managers should be experts in the field. Of course they will need to learn new skills---to lead, to manage, to design products, to sell, to hire, to budget, to read financial statements, etc.---but having that technical background seems very important.

My hypothesis is that the MBA degree is largely valued by other people with MBA degrees, so you have pockets of high MBA concentration that grow within specific businesses. MBA's hire other MBA's, but also encourage their most promising subordinates to get MBA's.

> My hypothesis is that the MBA degree is largely valued by other people with MBA degrees, so you have pockets of high MBA concentration that grow within specific businesses.

I have a friend who got a specialist business degree and then got an MBA. I don't really recall him ever really talking about what he studied or learned during the MBA, but he did talk a lot about networking. A lot of the program consisted of taking many foreign "educational" trips all over the world (networking with classmates) and then access to the alumni network was supposed to help you get a job. It really sounded more like a high-class job placement club than an educational pursuit. If that's how it actually is, I can totally see how a business can get colonized by MBAs once one gets his foot in the door.

My friend himself is a good guy, but a couple of his classmates are some of the shallowest people I've ever met.

I have an undergrad in computer engineering, and an MBA from a top-10 or top-5 (depending who you ask) school. I learned a LOT from it, even though my experience after my undergrad degree was mostly in business.

Businesses, finance markets are far more complex than people usually think, and if you like to learn, an MBA is a great way to build a solid base for being a product manager, or a director who actually understands the sides of the company: how products are made, how they are sold/monetized/etc. and how to manage the overall structure of the company.

Sadly, I know a lot of great product managers, directors, etc. who are former engineers and have little understanding of competitive strategy, market forces, economics, marketing & finance.

In terms of learning, I took a generalist approach, but focused mostly on strategy & game theory, finance and technology. Here's some of the key things I learned, which I actually use frequently:

- Overconfidence bias: we usually think we're better than the average on something we know how to do (driving) and worse than the average in something we don't (juggling), even if almost nobody knows juggling and everyone knows how to drive

- No alpha (aka can't beat the market): you can only consistently beat the market if you're far better at financial analysis than a lot of people who do it every day all day. So don't bother trying.

- Value chain vs. profits: you'll find that most of the excess profits in the value chain of a product will be concentrated in the link that has the least competition

- Non-linearity of utility functions: the utility of item n of something is smaller than item n-1. Also, the utility of losing $1 is smaller than (1/1000) utility of losing 1000. This explains insurance and lotteries: using linear utility function, both have a negative payout, but they make sense when the utility function isn't linear

- Bullwhip effect in supply chain: a small variation in one link of the supply chain can cause massive impacts further up or down as those responsible for each link overreact to the variation (also explains a lot of traffic jams)

- Little's law: in supply chain (and a lot of other fields): number of units in a system = arrival rate * time in the system

Sadly, a lot of people in my class weren't that interested in learning, and focused solely on the networking and entertainment parts of the MBA.

Hate to be blunt, but first of all, the things you pointed out are really common knowledge/common sense, and secondly, most of these are not necessary to be an engineering manager at all. 'No alpha' is something that even Warren Buffet has been talking about, and it doesn't impact any EM's job day to day.

You'd be surprised how many great engineers I know don't actually follow that, either by believing they can pick stocks better than the market (false) or by thinking that you can derive economic profit simply by doing the same as everyone else in an industry.

There is a major difference between "knowing something" and having it ingrained in your thinking process so it happens seamlessly.

You don't need this to be an engineering manager, but you need this to be a good engineering manager. Knowing and dealing with your own (and other people's) biases, understanding how power works in organizations, how different pieces of an organization interact and how the products you are building impact the financials of the company are basic requirements (but not enough) to be a good engineering manager.

Agree to disagree I suppose. Engineers have the technical skills to look into basic financial and budgeting, and there are financial planning guys involved in big projects to do the really in depth stuff if required. A degree will not fix their unwillingness to learn, MBAs can be earned by going through the motions of the coursework. It happens in more technical degrees all the time.

As for the power dynamics stuff, firms in other professional fields do it all the time, and they don't seem to care about MBAs at all.

Lastly, a lot can be learnt on the job too. Maybe, statistically, engineers are more unlikely to show interest in this stuff, and that makes an MBA a "signal" that this person is interested in management.

It's a bloody expensive signal though, and it just saddens me that my career options and advancement might be limited because of it.

> Engineers have the technical skills to look into basic financial and budgeting, and there are financial planning guys involved in big projects to do the really in depth stuff if required.

If by "technical skills" you mean "being able do to math", you're as far away from finance as "pressing keys on the keyboard" is from "coding".

You don't need a degree to be an engineer, and you don't need a degree to be in "management". But that's not the point.

Book please. Link please. More please.

Awesome reply.

Most of the content was cases, with some parts of books, for example:

Biographies of Robert Moses and LBJ by Robert Caro - we used this for studies of power in organizations. We'd read parts of it and understand where these people would get their power from, how they would yield it, and so on.

A lot of it is hard to learn without discussions and debate, trying and getting it wrong, and figuring out where you got it wrong. Even some of the things I mentioned are never stated like that during the course, you kinda build that along the way (such as the link of the value chain example).

Can't these things be learned by reading?

Micro-/macroeconomics and computer science (queueing theory) could cover most of the key items ... but people would need to understand the connections / generalizations / limitations. Perhaps MBAs make it obvious with case studies and in-class debates.

I have BS in EE, went into software development and got an MBA after becoming a software manager. The two most impactful subjects that really changed the way I think were Queuing Theory and Real Options Valuations.

You don't need an MBA to learn about these yourself, but without an MBA I probably would have come across Queuing Theory (in the form of Kan Ban), but likely never Real Options Valuations.

So if anybody here is considering an MBA, look into both subjects and see if another half a dozen or so similar and related topics might be interesting to you.

Virtually everything can be learned by reading.

I am pretty sure you couldn't learn whitewater kayaking or downhill skiing from reading.

You can learn an incredible amount about those through reading, though it's slower than just doing it so most people don't.

As in all things for which you can be awarded a degree: yes.

Yes, they can, but you can only create "muscle memory" by practice. And practice includes reading cases, trying to figure things out and getting it wrong, discussing how to do it and so on.

You can read a hundred books about coding, but until you actually try, you don't really know anything.

So a technical background with an MBA can be a killer combination. You know how things work across the company, and that gives you a huge edge over everyone else.

That's fair!

Progressive political views work the same way.

As a more obscure example at a former nationwide financial services employer I was the only WAN engineer ever hired on to the team who wasn't involved in a specific niche of IPSC competitive handgun shooting. I got hired only because I was ex-military and the VP assumed I had experience with the 1911 platform (actually we had M9 by then) so I'd join the team once the paychecks rolled in.

Its an expression of human nature in general.

You don't think any of the skills needed to manage people or businesses can be taught in school?

I feel very fortunate that one of my cofounders has an MBA. We'd be much worse off if I had to build financial models and negotiate contracts and motivate the team myself.

Having an MBA obviously doesn't automatically qualify you to manage a dev team (nor does being a good engineer), but speaking from my first hand experience, the skills have value.

I think the ability to manage either people or businesses varies all over the map, and between techies and MBA's, maybe it's like a pair of overlapping distributions. For managing people, I think that there are both positive and negative skills, and I'm not sure MBA's learn exclusively one kind in the absence of the other. Stack ranking and open plan offices had to have come from somewhere.

Negotiating contracts is win-lose, so it's at best a coin toss.

I could see certain tasks being performed by someone who has shown a motivation to learn how, such as making business plans, schedules, and contracts. The MBA's at my workplace are certainly busy. But it could be selection bias: People with MBA's are selected from among people who want to learn those skills.

In big oil, most execs have a degree in engineering but they go up the ranks after they got their MBA's, look at Rex's replacement --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Woods

Unlike programming/software engineering most engineering managers in other domains have other work to do than just approve leaves/vacations and forward emails.

You can't do real work without real experience.

Tillerson's predecessor Lee Raymond (who had a far bigger impact on the industry) had a PhD in chemical engineering.

If you watch Noam Chomsky's 'Requiem for the American Dream' on Netflix it talks about how the heads of all these companies used to be engineers but at some point all the finance/MBA type of people started dominating these positions. This also happened in Washington and now essentially the whole world is owned/run by Finance/MBA types who focus on short term earnings instead of value creation.

Focus on is maybe slightly missing the point, they may not even have the background to appreciate or imagine the possibility of value creation that is not in their area of expertise. So certain possibilities are essentially invisible to those companies. It's made worse because it's the large successful corporations that actually have the resources to fix problems that few other players can even imagine (even with venture funding....).

So those companies (and the market, and society) may miss out on fundamental exploration and expansion of real-world productivity. Perhaps, this is a contributor in the curious drop in economic productivity despite, in theory, so much availability of new technology.

At points during the last decade, 40 pct of profits were made by the Finance sector. And companies like GE can make a billion dollars by lobbying for tax loopholes rather than creating new products. So this seems like the type of stuff they focus on.

GE gets too sweet of a tax deal, but out of many corporations to choose as an example, I don't think my comment applies as strongly to GE. Though they do work with financial matters, they've been backing away from finance as a central profit center, and refreshing their technology core (as exemplified by their divestment of a banking asset). Recently, GE is focused make strong investments in R&D and actually have been on a bit of a binge buying up many startups with advanced manufacturing capabilities. So they seem to have a strong technical vision that they're building towards.

Disclaimer: am an individual GE stock holder so that may color my view here.

When I worked outside of SV, I saw the same thing. Several engineers went off to schools nearby to get MBAs just so their careers could improve.

Once in SV though... I rarely see this. When you get an MBA, it's a huge signal to an employer that you accomplished something, and no amount of bad management can ignore that you were issued an MBA. I think job hopping in SV can accomplish the same type of signal.

> When you get an MBA, it's a huge signal to an employer that you accomplished something

What?

That you bring some core competencies to the table that are actionable [1]. That you can calc the ROI on data-driven paradigm shifts [1]. That you can ensure there are enough boots on the ground to manage customer expectations. That you can peel the onion on our go-to markets and incentivize monetizable synergies leading to win-win solutions [2].

That you have become an irreplaceable employee, that you're a girl who gets up early, a girl who stays up late, a girl with uninterrupted prosperity, who uses a machete to cut through red tape, with fingernails that shine like justice, and a voice that is dark like tinted glass.

She is fast and thorough and sharp as a tack. She's touring the facility and picking up slack.

A girl with a smooth liquidation, a girl with good dividends.

A girl with a short skirt and a lonnnnng jacket [3].

[1] MBA jargon watch, pg 1, 2: http://www.johnsmurf.com/jargon.htm, http://www.johnsmurf.com/jargon2.htm

[2] 89 Business Cliches That Will Get Any MBA Promoted: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/06/19/89-busine...

[3] Cake - Short Skirt and Long Jacket : http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cake/shortskirtlongjacket.htm...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7aDstrDMf0

I think I just had a flashback to some meetings where my EM would spout this jargon endlessly.

30,000 ft view indeed. No wonder the basic stuff never got fixed, when you're head's in the stratosphere, even a tornado on the ground doesn't seem to matter.

I think it's also of nonzero importance that an MBA ups the likelihood that you understand those terms of business art. As much as it pains me to stump for the MBA, being able to effectively communicate these concepts is important, and having an MBA doesn't preclude having been an engineering superstar with deep knowledge.

Comment started out good, then started to flag, then it went to the moon.

Outstanding.

This might be the best comment I have ever read on HN.

This is the best comment on HN.

Paging @shit_hn_says after a 6 month hiatus...

Comment of the year.

Do you write?

Ha, thanks for inspiring me with your terse "What?" that made me laugh!

So much upvote.

I think the key word here is something.

Well, it's a signal, the meaning of which is up to the recipient.

It's all about signals.

Receiving an MBA.

This is the problem that remains unsolved for many businesses.

Good engineers don't necessarily make good managers. So they hire MBA's to be managers, but a MBA doesn't correlate to being a good manager either, in fact there is a chance that they may be a worse manager - because they don't do anything in particular (related to products that is).

So really when it comes down to it, hire managers who are good at managing people/processes and have some kind of real experience in your product or service. And in lieu of that hire a good manager who is smart and can pick it up, way down the line is hire a manager by their degree - if thats all they have going for them you are probably in for a painful ride.

Also a MBA is great if you pair it with a engineering background, but also be concerned about executives (CEO,etc) that can't sniff out people in their organization who would be a good manager regardless of background - some people have knack for management, like any other natural talent.

While I can't speak for what happened at this company. I think the problem is not "MBAs or engineers being managers" rather them not being good listeners.

And that is the point the HBR article is also missing. In my previous job, I had manager (ex-engineer) who would often say - "I don't even understand what are you talking about". But he would always listen patiently to us and even spend some of his personal time after office or weekends on google trying to understand the issue in depth. If he came across articles/links he thought could help us, he would email us. If he couldn't do that, he always approached the upper management to provide us training or help as required.

while in my recent job I had a manager (ex-engineer) who tried his best to come across as someone with "deep expertise". He would often google topics we wanted to discuss with him. The end result wasn't pretty. Lot of times he would make an assertion that he read somewhere that the design we were presenting was unworkable. Example: while talking about a design on "messaging queues" (MQ) using RabbitMQ he insisted on using Microsoft Outlook. It can handle so much daily load of message (email) volume he said.

That clearly isn't an example of a manager with deep technical expertise, its a poor engineer who has been promoted and is faking it. By the measures in the study he would not have counted as a deep knowledge engineer.

Just because he was an engineer doesn't mean he has any deep skills.

That's the difference between a manager trying to be the grease between all the gears of the team, and a manager who wants to provide a little extra force himself on every gear.

Both management styles help the gears turn, but with the latter method you end up with more friction between the gears.

I think the latter manager is a somewhat common example of a poor engineer who escapes engineering by moving to management, but then also makes a poor product/people manager to. Not that you have to be good at one to be good at the other, but some people just aren't good at either.

I suspect you're right.

The reason for the phenomenon this article is about is that deep expertise correlates with being a good listener when an engineer is describing a problem. But it isn't a necessary condition.

Agreed. The best manager I have had was non technical but at the end of the day he knew that his job was to defer to us on technical matters and make sure that there was nothing hindering us from getting things done, while ours was to get things done and making sure that we kept him updated on progress and blockers.

I know a bunch of mid-level guys that have part time MBAs that never really used them.

I think if you really want to be a leader/manager there are lots of opportunities to do so already. If you dont like being the boss, an MBA wont help you magically change you into a different person on a different (better) career track.

It does provide some useful skills for people that want to be managers, but most people I know that did the MBA just kept their same jobs and were happy to do so.

If you really want to be a top manager you might benefit.

Why don't you name the company?

Unless there is personally identifying information about you somewhere in your comment history, your comment would be so much more helpful with useful examples, especially for people that are familiar with the actual company.

Just my 2 cents.

It's flipkart.

Sounded very much like an Indian company. But I'd rather see OP mention the company name :)

Not sure if I should directly name. You can google my info and quickly find out which startup it is.

I have been lucky in my career to become an engineering leader/manager without having to go and get an MBA. But I still have the same concerns for continuing the climb up that proverbial ladder: what if I want to become the head of a large department? what if I want to become a CTO?

The raw truth of the matter is that it seems that having an MBA is likely the same litmus test as having a B.S. in computer science. Perhaps one can skirt around that requirement if they have a PhD in a particular subject matter that is the new sexy thing. But I still question if I should simply get an MBA, or focus on getting a PhD in research I am actually interested in.

Get the doctorate. Don't feed the trend if you don't want it to grow.

The MBA would probably be cheaper and definitely less of a commitment, especially an executive MBA.

Te reverse this trend, engineers really need to look at management as an important function. I don't see lawyers and doctors doing MBAs to move into management positions, but somehow, many engineers have this tendency of looking askance at management. That leaves the field open for outsiders to swoop in.

I think the aversion that most engineers have to management, is that software development is already a very nebulous beast. Actually delivering a solution that is called a "success" is often a slippery moving target. Being the one who is responsible for the project's success is even scarier.

You could say the same about a big legal case or a surgery. In both cases, lives can be on the line. Here it's just code.

It became scary for me when I saw extremely poor leadership that disregarded everything from Andy Grove's high output management. Forget that, I went through a series of YC lectures where speakers covered how startups should mature into companies, and even those simple management techniques were not being used.

In Silicon Valley it is rare that an engineering manager would have an MBA. And at Google or Facebook, they would more likely have a PhD than an MBA.

> I am not in silicon valley, so not sure about there but over here

From what I've seen here there are "product managers" and "engineering managers" and they have very different responsibilities (tho I don't fully understand the former yet).

I've never seen an MBA engineering manager before.

People have an uncanny affinity for the familiar. A company founded by MBA graduates will likely have a preference for more MBA graduates. Engineers prefer engineers. Use that to guide your selection process, but I've tried to find companies that value a balance.

I currently work under an MBA manager. It is very frustrating. Deadlines are unrealistic, micromanagement is the norm, and if things don't go according to their deadlines they threaten.

Sounds like a place run by people who owed a lot of favors

Do you want to move up? Don't you feel that becoming a manager (as opposite to individual contributor) will make you loose touch with the tech?

Unavoidably, but is "becoming a manager" the only definition of "moving up?"

Not at an employer you want to be at long term.

Unfortunately, the answer is "yes." I have avoided doing that and the only way I moved "up" was first to move around, then to move into a consulting firm, then finally to my own corporation that is also a consulting firm. Is that a viable career trajectory? I have made it work, but I long ago gave up the idea that I would be anything except an "independent contributor." I did look at jobs like "architect" but those jobs are holding pens for people who couldn't cut it as developers but had enough company knowledge to want to keep around. I don't know what most architects do all day, I've never had one actually help accomplish anything. They like meetings and conferences and overeating, it seems.

Tech is a badly broken field in terms of career advancement. For a long time it made me very jaded. But I'm rich now, so I could give a shit.

Maintaining contact with tech (as in engineering) may not be the success criterion.

There's a specific qualification called a Masters of Engineering Management. Maybe it needs to be more common.

I have one, but it isn't valued much by employers over here. They'd rather hire an experienced manager or a straight MBA. It was a very good experience though and I hope it will serve in the future.

It's now being discontinued at the university I studied and prospective students are now directed to the MBA program (I actually can get the MBA with a few more hours and paying a lot more money since I already have 95% of the coursework).

From what I have heard, engineering management is neither engineering nor management. :)

You should consider entrepreneurship. Climbing a corporate ladder is only one path to "success".

>> I did not see a single engineer promoted to management

Good engineers don't necessarily mean good managers

Being an engineer does not necessarily make you a bad manager though.

They don't, but my experience is more than half are good managers. The best ones I've found delegate by challenging their teams, but also follow up regularly on both an individual and team level. Even mediocre managers can be upgraded to effective managers if they're willing to learn from effective managers.

The goal post is not "good manager". It is just "better than non-technical managers"

isn't the entire point of this article the opposite?

I think the point is that having some level of technical skills is important, but I don't think it alone will let you be a good manager.

Unfortunately, the article neither publishes the dataset, nor goes into it in much depth.

Yeah sounds like Zenefits sucked.

MBAs are mostly worthless people that get churned out of business schools and have no ability for independent thought. What did you expect?