I’ll bite. There was no indication in the article of anyone with an MBA in particular being responsible for these issues. The reasoning reads as: “lots of stuff is going wrong” ==> “must be because they have management with MBAs”

Why try to make this link if it isn’t there? What if I replace MBAs with ‘foreigners’, ‘women’, ‘people who read HN’, etc?

Why do we need this? Does blaming non-technical people for the failures of management make us feel better about ourselves?

There is no reason to believe that foreigners or women contribute negatively.

The thesis that parties who have negligible expertise in a given area given charge of people with substantial expertise in that area contribute minimal or negative value seems at least arguable.

Maybe we as a society value the idea of teaching people to lead people irrespective of what those people actually do instead of elevating skilled individuals in that area because it allows us to reward all the rich peoples kids that aren't smart enough to do.

This needn't mean you automatically are unintelligent or bad at what you do. You could personally be awesome and contribute greatly to the efforts you work with/lead.

When people blame things on MBAs here, they tend to not elaborate with specifics either.

MBAs are used as straw man punching bags on HN. Anything that goes wrong with a company where there’s the perception that the “obvious technical solution” was ignored, is blamed on this nebulous cabal of MBAs, who are apparently hired in droves just to sabotage their employer. For some reason it’s totally ok to vaguely blame the business folks.

> MBAs are used as straw man punching bags on HN. Anything that goes wrong with a company where there’s the perception that the “obvious technical solution” was ignored, is blamed on this nebulous cabal of MBAs, who are apparently hired in droves just to sabotage their employer. For some reason it’s totally ok to vaguely blame the business folks.

I think you're building a bit of a straw man. I think the criticism of MBAs rests on criticism of the idea that good decisions can be made by people that chiefly have "management skill" but lack "domain skill." A lot of people believe domain skill is extremely important, and if you stuff an organization full of empowered people who only have management skill, you'll get more bad decisions. You'll also get a lot of dysfunction as they spend too much time pursing the "management ideas" they're more comfortable with, and neglect "domain ideas."

This comment actually touches on some of these issues in detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179247

The assumption that MBAs do not have domain experience is often incorrect. Stereotyping is supposedly frowned on in the comments here.

> The assumption that MBAs do not have domain experience is often incorrect. Stereotyping is supposedly frowned on in the comments here.

Obviously not. I think the critique is about MBAs who don't have domain experience and don't think they need it, because they have a generically-applicable "management skill." That ponderous specification is typically shortened to "MBAs" for brevity, since it apparently has some root in ideology that's common in business schools.

No modern business school actually teaches such an ideology. Have you ever attended one?

I think MBA in its usage implicit means 'with no domain experience' because otherwise there would be a reference to as their most relevant skillset in the field. If someone has domain experience they are a 'senior engineer' with the MBA only coming up if that aspect is relevant. If someone doesn't have and they make it they are just a MBA.