Be constructive and civil. Instead of congratulating yourself for the transitory sadistic, self-righteous pleasure you obviously derive from making the developers you hired "deeply uncomfortable," try working with them. Teach them exception handling if you know this. That would demonstrate a collaborative team spirit.

Update: I was downvoted, as expected. In that case, I neglected to add "offensively smug." The humorless business attitude of dog-eat-dog with a facade of righteousness is here to stay.

The fact is, only the people actually implementing a project can know what the reality is. There are times when a technical tradeoff gets made (for specific example, turning exceptions off entirely in C++ is actually pretty widespread for various reasons, good and bad). Sometimes, that tradeoff may even be wrong in hindsight - a legacy of an earlier iteration that there was never budget to correct.

In that sort of situation, a technical person on the outside of the project trying to be helpful can come across as annoying. They are likely telling you what you already know.

However, many of these problems actually originate in people management land, and need a people management solution.

For instance, I think a lot of projects mess up because they are trying to achieve too much with too little budget, or because no one with the right skills for a particular task is on the project.

The people manager needs to solve those problems. It takes an unusually humble programmer to say 'Hey, I've mostly worked in python, and now I'm needing to write all these C++ modules for optimization, I'm in over my head'. If the people manager can understand his skill gaps and hire to fill them, that's really valuable.

Similarly, if you need to explain to your boss that 'In hindsight, the way we are doing this won't scale. I need a whole lot of money to rewrite, and you won't see a single new feature for a month', it's going to be a much better conversation if he has understood how and why things got that way, rather than feeling a betrayal of his trust in the guy who's job it is to understand tech stuff.

So, being able to say 'we should be handling exceptions' is important, but as a people manager, it is actually probably your fault. They are probably not doing it because you insisted they implement 'that important feature absolutely by next week'. If you are in charge, it's worth remembering that at some level, it's usually your fault.

Let me rephrase your comment to something you would approve of:

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>this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.

It's not fun to be berated at work in front of colleagues, and the purpose it supposedly serves can be accomplished by taking the role of mentor, not drill instructor.

Don't you think that's a bit harsh? It's a bad mistake for a coding expert to make, but perhaps coding wasn't their first skill, or they had a bad teacher. Call them out legitimately with their faults, let them know that certain best practices are required, and move on. Or even better: If the organization is large enough, have a coding standards document in place, like the Linux kernel and other large software projects do.

To see why, let's take strategy. You seem to think that strategy is developed in the abstract. However, for startups, you need to be fully engaged in the day to day struggle of your competitors, customers, employees etc. From this up close reality you get a feel for the edge/secret that you have. That edge/secret forms the basis for your strategy. There is no optimal strategy out there. You can't think hard and come up with it. You need to work day to day and fit something that works for you in that particular time,customers etc. This ground reality/state of world and how you are single best suited to take advantage is the biggest power you have over incumbents. Not knowledge of some old case studies or porter's framework, ability to do SWOT analysis or whatever the latest framework is. If you are successful you will be the case study 10 years from now in a business school. At that point the frontier has moved on. Specific to Dalton, if I were to do something in social/music oriented business, I would take his competence over any ivy league MBA. Mostly because he has that ground reality in his head.

Yes, there are basic business rules and concepts that you need to know, however spending two years for an MBA is an overkill for a startup. Truth be told, you come across as exactly the arrogant MBA people like to make fun of. You didn't fully understand the point. Made some silly non-arguments which are abstract and irrelevant and to top it off made some bold statements about your capabilities which had the opposite effect (you can tail files and pipe to grep and are proud of that, really? c'mon man).

Supply and demand: He says there are more MBA's chasing jobs than there are suitable jobs. That's fine: lower your salary or raise the hiring bar - it doesn't make any individual be worth less.

Entitlement: As an MBA, I'll agree with this peer pressure but I might argue that it can be a good thing being pushed to be more successful. How that plays out in team dynamics depends on the individual, some MBA's are team oriented some are not (like some developers!) - select in the hiring based on the role you need.

Misguided thinking: this one is totally wrong. Strategy should always come before implementation. Lean is a strategy, so if you are doing lean then it just means you've chosen that as your strategy. My MBA taught me strategy was on ongoing process, exactly as you describe above, not a rigid fixed powerpoint. An MBA teaches you tools to run this process (allowing you to see opportunities beyond lean for instance)

Selection bias: I agree with this point, but again it depends what you are looking for. Understand the person and their motivations, and make sure they fit with your team. True as much for an MBA as for any other role.

Limited usefulness: More than anything an MBA teaches you a way of looking at the world, more than facts and figures. It does mean you can read a term sheet and plenty of other things. Could you learn more online or by doing? Maybe, but the skills are valuable especially if you get a company to the point where it can scale with product market fit (I'd agree it doesn't help much getting to that point).

Opportunity cost: For me a career is a long time, two years at the beginning doesn't matter much. Could a CS masters or design masters be more useful - for the first phase, getting to product market fit yes - but not longer term.

However, he merely said that it is a negative hiring signal, and on this point I must agree with him. For a good majority of MBAs I know, the degree is either a way to move into a business-oriented role, or a way to get out of their current field and into something else (usually from tech, into banking or consulting). There is nothing wrong with that, but it's not exactly an entrepreneurial mindset, which is what you want at a startup.

If a company doesn't hire me just because I have an MBA, but am a great fit otherwise, I would consider it their loss. If they consider my MBA a negative signal that turns out to be insignificant once they get to know me better, I would certainly understand their initial mindset.

As a self-taught programmer, I tell people wanting to get into software development that it's definitely not something you have to go to school for, and that the best programmers I've met are those who are always taking the initiative to enrich their own knowledge, and not those with the most academic degrees. In my experience, number of personal projects is a better indicator of the quality of a developer than GPA in CompSci classes.

Of course, being the CEO of a multinational corporation or a software developer on critical banking infrastructure is different than running your own 5 person business or developing alarm clocks for your phone. At what point does one really need an MBA to further their business development, and why did you believe you had reached that point?

You don't need an MBA to further your business development. It helps, but you can simply surround yourself with experienced people (and learn from them).

You will only get out of the MBA what you put in. Where it can be valuable is being exposed to other professionals who are taking the MBA who will share their own experiences related to whatever you're learning. For example, if you're learning about contracts, you'll hear what other people in the program have gone through and get more context of how things apply in varying industries.

But keep in mind, an MBA isn't some mandatory thing to succeed in business. I had a few key valuable takeaways from my MBA program, but I also don't think that made me any better in business, but it really depends on your exposure to things like accounting, business law, etc. from your work experience or prior education.

Depending on your focus an MBA is a very broad program, well suited to running a business. My particular focus and program wasn't on high finance it was very focused on the myriad of skills needed to run a business I learned marketing, financial accounting, and operations - heck even shipping logistics in one or two classes each of 3 semesters (I did a night program). Appropriately used an MBA is almost a bootcamp for CEOs. I got a lot of very valuable information. As my small dev shop grows I constantly lean back on some skill or bit of information I picked up from my time in my MBA. Things like being able to project cash flows to know when I can't make payroll to all the science behind effective interviewing. There's a lot that goes into running a business that you can learn in an MBA program.

In business decisions, there is no test bed. Your choices play almost exclusively in time, money, and human capital. You can definitely try to self learn in that environment, and many successfully do, but it's a lot easier to screw up to the point where you can't continue.

His startups could have failed for any number of reasons, and even the best strategy and implementation and ideas and people cannot guarantee a success. Nothing can.

Regardless of what I think of his opinions or ideas, I respect this man's attempts at starting his own endeavors, as I know firsthand how difficult that is.

"MBAs are bad for startups" or "Dalton Caldwell is full of shit" or "All of parent poster's startups have failed; why should we listen to him?" are not useful conclusions. Exactly what actionable intelligence have you gained from them, other than the fact that you have gained no actionable intelligence? If you take "MBAs are bad for startups" at face value, all you do is disqualify a number of candidates who might otherwise be good. If you take "Dalton Caldwell is full of shit" at face value, all you do is disqualify a bunch of information that might come in handy at some point. If you take "All of parent poster's startups have failed" at face value, ditto.

Rather, the useful information is in the supporting details. You can take Dalton's statement that "MBAs think they are beautiful, unique snowflakes that must be better than their peers", and then when you're sitting across the interview table from an MBA, determine whether this MBA believes he's a beautiful, unique snowflake. You have a lot more information at that point, namely his answers to the interview questions, his past work experience, and just the general vibe in the room. Similarly, you can take the parent poster's assertion that he learned things with his MBA, but that doesn't take away from his basic technical skills, and factor that information into your evaluation. It's about having multiple perspectives available to you to decide a specific situation, not about drawing broad conclusions that are ultimately useless.

You're exactly right in that if success requires both competency and luck, then having succeeded means you were competent, but failing doesn't mean you were not. Depending on how much luck is required, failure can be either a fairly strong signal for incompetence or pretty much negligible.

This is very easily proven from the bayesian theorem.

You can also judge an idea around which a startup is built, but that's a tricky game. Should you do so, however, you would not be criticizing this man's strategy or MBA insights.

Startups need the former. Established companies need the latter.

I personally like, and agree with, Guy Kawasaki's formula for pre-money valuation of new companies:

pre-money valuation = ($1M * n_engineers) - ($500k * n_MBAs)

Generalize much?

Most MBAs have undergrads from a wide array of backgrounds, from liberal arts to engineering. Most MBA programs provide some useful education in areas like finance, business law and entrepreneurship, but you don't become a process geek from the curriculum unless you're already a process geek and choose to focus on process oriented courses.

The MBA is usually there to augment existing work experience and education. Most grads just go back to whatever profession they were in armed with a better business context for how things work in whatever industry they're in.

If your experience with MBAs is all about process creation, it says more about the people who hired the MBAs in those companies than it does about MBAs in general.

Big news, huh?

BTW: that would have also proven the fact that there is no such a thing as "special snowflake".