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Re:MBAs as CEOs by ziszis on Friday March 31, 2017 @09:55AM (#14003782)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has an MBA. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has an MBA. AWS CEO Andrew Jassy has an MBA, etc.

It is easy to undervalue marketing, sales, financial and other non-technical skills. There are definitely terrible MBAs, but also amazing ones.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by aviraldg on Friday March 31, 2017 @10:10AM (#14003930)
But they have that in addition to an engineering degree.
Re:MBAs as CEOs by ziszis on Friday March 31, 2017 @10:15AM (#14003984)
No True Scotsman? [0] What is Andy Jassy's engineering degree? What is Sheryl Sandberg's engineering degree?

The reality is that people aren't one-dimensional. If you have overly simple rules: no MBAs, must have University degree, must have Ivy league, Uber people are unethical etc, you make worse decisions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Re:MBAs as CEOs by benchaney on Friday March 31, 2017 @03:05PM (#14007054)
"No True Scotsman?"

Nope.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by consp on Friday March 31, 2017 @11:01AM (#14004475)
I don't know about them, but since they rose up in the companies you usually get an MBA from that company. So the cause/effect relationship is off. I assume they were proper managers (like actual management, not shitty middle management) before getting the MBA.

This is what usually happens to some of the engineering guys I went to university with who stay at companies and do not specialize in anything engineering but want to progress in management.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by stvswn on Friday March 31, 2017 @01:55PM (#14006266)
Everytime we do this on HN, the same argument shows up -- "MBAs are the worst." "Well what about these popular CEOs?" "Well they're not really MBAs, c'mon."

Sundar Pichai went to Wharton for his MBA before joining Google. He is also ex-McKinsey. So, by HN standards, he's the absolute worst, right?

Google's leadership ranks are filled with MBAs, including tons of VPs that aren't household names but are nonetheless very influential here.

MBA programs are one of the primary ways we recruit product managers (it's how I became a Google PM, full disclosure). Sales, strategy, ops are also full of MBAs.

The next phase of this monthly argument on HN will be, then: "Well, that's what's wrong with Google then, it's all crap after they started hiring MBAs!" which is also nonsense, because lots of the senior people w/ MBAs were hired a decade ago or more.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by slantyyz on Friday March 31, 2017 @02:31PM (#14006622)
I find it odd how MBA's are painted with such a broad brush here. It's literally just a degree.

IMO, anyone who hires purely based on a degree - whether it be a PhD, MBA, CS or whatever, is probably lazy and bad at hiring. If MBAs ruined a company, the people to blame should be the people who hired those individuals who happened to have MBAs and allowed them to ruin the company.

Granted, MBA programs do attract certain types of personalities - there were plenty of jerks when I started my MBA almost a quarter of a century ago (wow, i'm getting old), but there are also plenty of people with MBAs who aren't stereotypical money-grubbing, buzzword-spewing drones either.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by ashark on Friday March 31, 2017 @03:09PM (#14007113)
> The next phase of this monthly argument on HN will be, then: "Well, that's what's wrong with Google then, it's all crap after they started hiring MBAs!" which is also nonsense, because lots of the senior people w/ MBAs were hired a decade ago or more.

To be fair, "a decade ago, give or take" may fit perfectly with some people's view of when Google (and with it, the rest of the Web) become crap.

Re:MBAs as CEOs by Chris2048 on Friday March 31, 2017 @10:22AM (#14004047)
You don't look at what successful people have an MBA, you see which MBAs are successful. There are many factors to success, you could just as easily conclude that people managed to succeed, despite wasting time on an MBA...
Re:MBAs as CEOs by yuhong on Friday March 31, 2017 @10:53AM (#14004388)
John Sculley is a marketer not an engineer, but is probably one of the least bad ones.
Re:MBAs as CEOs by Retric on Friday March 31, 2017 @11:00AM (#14004454)
Sundar Pichai is the nominal CEO as Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Re:MBAs as CEOs by based_log on Friday March 31, 2017 @10:41AM (#14004249)
Jeff Bezos is also an MBA, though I do concur with they guy who said all those people have MBAs in addition to engineering training.
Re:MBAs as CEOs by arjunnarayan on Friday March 31, 2017 @11:02AM (#14004480)
False. Bezos was EECS at Princeton, and then went to work in finance for ~8 years before starting Amazon.com