The old "Personnel Department" did that perfectly well long before HR was a thing.

Maybe it is because I've never worked in the valley, but I can't think of a positive 401k plan experience. I do remember a lot of onboarding powerpoint with regards to penalties and limitations. The whole thing feels coercive, having to participate in the market when you aren't interested in managing the position - simply to protect your savings from intentionally set inflation rates. All those "unsophisticated investors" (no joke, that is what they call you) are arguably the cause of the dot-com bubble as well, not because people were daytrading pets.com, but because fund managers had to put that surge of disinterested capital somewhere. I imagine that if powerpoint was around back in the day, the guys managing company store credit schemes would have functioned much like today's HR reps.

In my experience, there are many great leaders with MBA degrees. However, you never hear about their MBA degree because they have so many other accomplishments to lead with. They are managers who happen to have completed an MBA program in the past.

The troublesome people are those who lean on credentialism in the hopes that merely having the MBA degree will allow them to skip to the head of the compensation structure. Anyone who builds their identity around the university they attended or the degree they received will raise a lot of red flags.

99% of MBAs give the rest a bad name.

That's the usual MBA mistake when dealing with IT. Most of what you've been taught applies to ditch diggers or bottling Coca Cola.

That's gotta count for something.

Happens on many levels though, it's not as if engineers don't get credit for team efforts.

CompSci -> Work in industry -> MBA usually produces the best managers.