The anti-MBA movement is really trying to redefine what an MBA means. Bad business decisions are "M.B.A.-ization". Good business decisions are... something else. Therefore, MBAs are bad.

There are plenty of bad MBAs running around, but it's no different than how we also have plenty of bad software developers out there despite having C.S. degrees. In both cases, the worst offenders are over-represented in the talent pool because they're more frequently pushed out of companies, while the best talent is locked up with high compensation.

The problem is in thinking of MBA cult itself. If I was an MBA without software engineering experience I would also not understand intricacies but would think I can manage it anyway.

A counter example would be to ask the question if AMD could have navigated it's resurgence if it had not been led by deeply technical CEO, Lisa Su

It's not an MBA cult problem, but it is a management-academia problem. Universities provide classes about management and business without focussing on the actual business part of businesses. If you want to succeed, domain knowledge will almost always be the most important thing, and business and management schools basically brush this to the side as an afterthought.

"I have a masters in biology, I know whats wrong with this country's finances". The soft narcisism of credentialism.

Michael Porter has been cautioning about mistaking a business model for a strategy for nearly 40 years, his ideas are taught in every business school, and the lesson still needs to be relearnt by every fresh set of senior managers.

The term for this process is 'The Elves are leaving Middle Earth'.

Coined by Steve Blank in 2009 about when the coffee and sodas aren't free anymore in the break room. When the bean counters look at the line item that is free coffee and soda, they see a big old number to cut. But it causes the staff to have to run over to the coffee shops to grab the joe, taking a lot longer time than the break room commute. Meaning that management isn't really thinking hard anymore. The talent notices this and starts to quietly put out the CV again, as they know that the company is going to go into stasis or downhill altogether without intelligent bosses.

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

A lot of companies have stock holders who expect some return every year without risking too much.

As a society we sure would be better off if had more Elon Musk type company leaders, but for that too happen we would need more exceptional people like him (not going to happen) or more people willing to risk their savings investing in companies that are trying to achieve great things.

Along with the fact that most people don't even have the option to take risk with the massive increase of cost of housing.

Our society has been designed to squeeze out cash flow and it's smothering our creatives.

1) American school education, and college education is amazing. ( if you can afford it). Talk to immigrant parents From other countries for a contra point. Crushing the soul of students isn’t fully installed in America, yet (which brings us to point 2)

2) It’s the economy. At some point, the American economy stopped working as well for blue collar roles as paths to middle class incomes.

The new path required white collar credibility. Humans naturally optimized for this. Which brings us to The fundamental conflict for American education, that gets distorted depending on how you enter the discussion.

3) the American liberal arts system, produced great intellectual output, for an economy where you could pursue both intellectual limits and get a decent paying job. The number of people entering were small, and you could lavish your attention on those pursuits.

It does not work for a majority of America customers/students who simply want credibility when it comes to entering paths to social mobility, and are not interested in a life of intellectual pursuit.

Look, colleges and schools have different problems, but for businesses, a degree has become the basic filter, where it was never meant to be.

Moocs simply don’t have the credibility to fill in the gap, and you can’t make a github or deviantart for roles which don’t have a standardized output.

Related to your second and third points, I think there is at least some case that the U.S. has moved away from the idea of liberal arts schooling towards being more vocationally minded. The intent, going back as far as the mid-1800s with the Morrill Act, was specifically intended to help serve a new growing economy.

If you ask, I bet more people look at college as a way to get a job than to learn to appreciate and contribute to culture

At first blush, I would guess we have a slightly less capitalistic society than, say 200 years ago, but a more industrialized, consumeristic society.

Ironically, in such societies, people will latch on to anything that provides stability. For example, vocational degree that signals high skills or petitioning for NIMBY laws.

The reason people latch on to these is simple. There is too much to lose. The crash is too deep. If one loses a job, they lose healthcare. Not because of shortages like 200 years ago, but because of the extreme capitalism taking over healthcare, incentivizing providers and insurance companies to lobby for shitty laws instead of true competition.

It can just as easily (and in my case also sometimes has) prevented some bad traits from being stamped out. So I need to consciously go way overboard with “I could just as well be wrong” to balance out my natural stubbornness.

The traits that hurt me in school still hurt me today. Like not being afraid to voice a minority opinion. Or correcting the boss/professor. Or having a strong adherence to the rules/policies and holding people/institutions to their word. Thinking outside the box or being more independent.

This just means people won't be taking risks in places like SF. There's plenty of cheap housing out there. Just not in places where the market is driven up by supply constraints and money printers. And before anyone says "hurr durr, nobody wants to live in BFE Alabama" I'm talking about places like Buffalo, Hartford and Atlanta.

Maybe these things are related because the CEO too has the same concerns.

We don't live in a society that favors innovation, we live in a society that's cutthroat.

People have been making this argument since the 1800s, but it doesn't seem to have much solid evidence.

Wall Street seems to be mostly interested by the current quarter's results, or the current year's at best. This may mismatch and undermine your long-term goals.

The financial markets have both very low risk investment options (e.g. government bonds) and very high risk investments (e.g. options), and both ends are attractive to a range of investors. I would agree that you can't pivot a company like Microsoft to a high-risk strategy with uncertain payoff; their existing shareholders would rebel. But if you have this strategy from the start then you only acquire shareholders who are fine with this kind of strategy, and I don't see why that shouldn't work out.

It's easy to say when you're coming after they've built it.

Maybe, but good ol' Elon would be dead and gone if the US Federal Government hadn't come through with a contract that bailed him out.

He was literally begging people like Bezos to lend him money because he couldn't make payroll.

Survivor bias is a thing.

His goal was to increase the share price by x%. It was no secret one of the strategies was to cut jobs in high cost regions (US) and hire in low cost regions. You'd actually hear this in all hands meetings. It was shockingly shameless.

What exactly is wrong with that strategy? You would prefer to own stock in the company that employed people in a high cost region when they could hire someone with the same skill set in a low cost region?

This has happened to me before, the location I worked in shut down and the jobs were moved to a lower cost location. Many years later, they seem to be doing fine. If it was up to me, they would have kept the people in the high cost location but not hired replacements when people left while adding people in the low cost location, but they didn't see it that way.

Also, the longer I work in software development, the more I disagree with "People are not interchangeable parts", at least with respect to developing software. People come work on a code base for a while, they leave, other people get hired on, the code base lives on. If a code base can't be handed off from one group of developers to another group of developers without much trouble, something is wrong. And yes, I know that is an unpopular opinion and the role of a good development manager is to pretend like it isn't true, but there it is. In a well run software shop, you should ensure the people are interchangeable parts.

Low skilled people will slow things down, will destroy any quality and advantages you have in your code and then leave as they get better (or stay if they're really crappy)

It's worse if they stay as they have a tendency to multiply and get promoted to middle management and crap even more on things...

This will only be noticed via the occasional question "why does it take so long when competitors already did this" after a few years.

Also, by not keeping talent you lose their knowledge. All for what?, I doubt their wages factor too much in any product.

Alternative is to keep good people and pay them well, nurture a culture of excellency and kick out occasional bad hires.

That way you get great products and usually good costs as you tend to need fewer people to get things done (even if they cost more)

Note: I've seen both types of companies and some in between.

This isn't a bad thing. Profit and price are, in most cases, still reasonable signals for what consumers want, and growing your market means you're serving real demand in the actual world. This is what creates employment and utility.

Flying to Mars and ignoring market share is nice but doesn't serve any actual point, other than Musks idiosyncratic desire for it. He can pursue it because in other areas the company actually does pay attention to growing their market and funding it.

But overall companies should pursue growing their market share because it means they're serving customers. I don't think the world would necessarily be better served if Walmart focussed on shooting rockets to the moon, rather than making it so the shelves are stocked and the products are cheap.

I heard that musk complained about programmers not willing to put in overtime for Zip2. All his companies after PayPal are based on motivating workers with some goal people can get behind (Environment, Mars colonization).

I agree in spirit, unfortunately there is far more reasonable talent than reasonable places to look elsewhere.

There's 3 things that I judge an employer by

1) Sector the company is in (Space, electric cars - Yay)

2) Revenue/Growth of the company (pie grows, does your share?)

3) Company culture (that's catch-all, but if you want a negative see that "don't hire the hot girl" guy)

A lot of ways I care more about the sector, because that's the thing I cannot hope to influence, but the rest is actually open to improvement if you're high enough on the ladder.

I think the "bean counting led" is a failure on #3, but might be a win on #2.

Yes. There was a lot more than this tweet, but there are screenshots.

https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1333524631219822600 + https://twitter.com/silvestricodes/status/133354701095220838...

I hypothesize that the _MBA type_ of bean counters optimize for their pie, not for the greater good or longer term growth.

Caveat: I have a MBA and my focus was not on finance.