> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand.

Exactly.

A few years back, I found myself in a one-on-one saying: "you would think someone taking a job managing a hog farm would at least know what a hog is."

Though, that was about web-development.

A suitable allegory.

Except it doesn't always apply.

Lou Gerstner and Meg Whitman are two examples from the technology world. Both came into their jobs at IBM and eBay with zero tech experience, but got up to speed very quickly. Of course, had they failed to do so they would have been out within a year or two.

The life and times of eBay does not say good things about the IT-challenged MBA.

Speaking of Yegge and Amazon: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-clic...

Amazon has continued to grow in simplicity and coverage, including ease of purchase with third-parties (eBay's dealer market). Meanwhile, buying on eBay is still a huge pain, with no integration between eBay and its own subsidiary.

"Not being fired for gross incompetence" is not the same thing as success.

I /hate/ going with hires who are "good enough." The nightmare employee is someone who is not quite bad enough to get fired.

And this is the real truth of the matter. The above posters are correct, you do need knowledge of something to run it, but understand that business knowledge and experience is ALSO that "something".

Once you obtain certain scale, you can't do everything. It's equally ignorant to think an engineer can run a business top to bottom as it is to think an MBA can fully run an engineering company.

I so often read here MBA used pejoratively, but remember that most small businesses fail because they're run by people who have skills but no idea how to run a business. A major corporation needs both (and more!) skills.

Yea, but I think the real problem is that the old MBA courses taught a bunch of horrible stuff.

IIRC there's a similar section in Microserfs but I could be mixing up things.

If we're thinking of the same section, it's the start of the very first chapter which was also published in wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/microserfs_pr.html

This culture at Microsoft was captured nicely in Douglas Coupland's book Microserfs.

Me too. Except that in Joel's piece Bill G seemed to ask an entirely relevant question and in Steve Yegge's piece Bezos seemed to ask about something quite secondary.

Like Bezos has an arsenal of nasty questions up his sleeve and BillG actually knows what the f he's talking about.

"Why aren't these topics on your list" is perfectly relevant to a presentation on "subjects a generalist engineer should know."

joelonsoftware posts are always great reads!

Hey, I see you're new here.

You may be wondering why your comment got down-voted. It's not that we're a community of jerks, I promise. People just really prize a high signal-to-noise ratio here, and while we appreciate that you enjoyed the link, a better way to express that without adding noise is to up-vote the comment.

In general, you should post comments here only when the comment will provide value to someone else. That's largely the rubric by which it will be judged.

Enjoyed that link a lot. Thanks.