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What is the Value of an MBA to a Techie?
Kengineer asks: "I've heard a lot of hype about techies with MBA's being in high demand. I'm an Engineer who does validation for a Voice over IP company, and before that I coded software projects for a controls automation company. I am considering returning to school to seek an MBA, so I'd like to hear from those of you 'dotters who already have buisness degrees, and your post-MBA experiences."
"I'm considering an MBA or equivalent form of buisness education myself. Why? Because, as any truly aspring techie does, I want to work for -myself"
Based on my experience (MBA from a Harvard equivalent), if you want to work for yourself you would be better off to take a few semesters of Intro Accounting (so you understand the finance lingo) and Business Law at a local community college, then just go start your business.
MBAs are more useful for working in established organizations, or stepping in to provide adult supervision once the person with the new idea/startup drive hits the wall in terms of organization and management.
MBAs don't much help with having the idea or (dare I say it) the entrepreneural spark.
sPh
(wish I had time to write a 2 page essay on this)
That depends on your view of work and organizational behaviour. If you truely believe in the creed of the Second Dilbert Era (that is, Dilberts penned after Scott Adams left his day job):
* All "managers" are idiots
* Resource allocation and setting priorities are useless functions
* All problems have one correct answers
* Per the second and third points, project management and conflict resolution are just political wastes of time
* Marketing departments are only good as sources of dating prospects
then you won't find much use in an MBA. Similarly, if it is very important to you to stay current with a detailed technical speciality (say router network design), you will have a very hard time finding a management job that lets you do that.
If you are interested in learning more about how and why organizations are structured, why people behave as they do, and how to handle resource allocation and project management, then an MBA could be useful to you. Or if you would like to catch up on some of the non-engineering techncial skills, such as financial theory.
However, based on many years of observing technical people and managers, I think there are very few techies who are really interested in, or would really like, jobs in management.
sPh
In my experience, MBA programs teach some very dangerous things.
The bigest of these is that you do not have understand the process that you are managing.
If management is the process of making decisions about a project and allocating resources to complete that project, then you have to have some rational understanding of what is involved in that project. (Otherwise you can be replaced by a random number generator. Probably with better results.)
What happens with managers who do not have that requisite clue is that they make decisions based on "other criteria". (Things like "how good of an ad does the vendor have", "The product the airline magazine recommended", or "which one had the prettier marketing rep".)
Harvard MBAs are the worst of the lot. They are the ones who seem to have started the trend that clueless managers are a good thing.
And heaven forbid that you actually work for a company run by someone who taught in the MBA program! (*cough*NCD*cough*) It is guarenteed that they will drive your company into the ground.
Dilbert exists because this style of "management" has become the accepted norm.
Management has been used as a place to put all of those oxygen-robbing morons who had the fortune to be born to a good family, but not the brains to go into a trade that would really require actual thought. (Like criminal lawyer (redundant, I know), oilwell salesman, or brothel owner.)
And it seems the less you know about the business and what it does, the higher you will rise in the company.
Makes you wonder just how American businesses survive at all. (And judging by the dot-coms, we have our answer...)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The worst part about going to the business side is the lobotomy :-)
Okay, I admit, I am a geek.
And yes, okay, I also admit that I love money.
But if I have to be truthful to myself, not everything I do, I do for money. And not everything I do, I do for the "management" reason.
I have a Master degree in Computer Engineering, and I have just gotten my MBA degree.
The first degree I got, I got it because I was too deep into the computer stuffs - really addicted - and I might as well get something for the time and effort that I have invested in the field.
And about the MBA I got - I got it not solely because of money, but rather, - I got it because I realize that being a geek may be cool, but sometimes, I need to have the ability to look at things not only from the geek standpoint.
In other words, I may be able to come up with a cool software/tech project, but if I don't have the ability to gauge what the market wants, my time/effort for that project will ultimately NOT be fully utilize by the society at large.
If I do something, I might rather do something that will be used by more people than myself, right?
If so, why don't I gain the ability to see what the market at large wants, and then do something that will be acceptable for them - maybe, at the same time, help them (whoever use the product) in their daily lives.
That is why I got my MBA - to see the world from a DIFFERENT point of view.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'm an (ex-)techie who's in the third (and final) year of a distance learning MBA from the UK's Open University. For the last 21 months or so, I've been in management - working in Product Management on the interface between the engineers and the real world.
I decided to take an MBA for a number of reasons. Basically, I'd come to the realisation that although I was a competent software engineer, I was never going to excel at it. I was self-taught, and not driven or brilliant enough to make it to the excellence in engineering. I was also getting frustrated with being told "put this in, take this out" by managers who I really didn't reckon had a clue _why_ they were saying what they were saying. So, I took the plunge, and decided to take a broader view - which meant moving into management.
Of course, I could have moved into management without going with an MBA - good software companies are always keen to find people who can talk to techies and customers - but I was very aware that I really didn't have the frameworks to talk to people outside the discipline in which I'd trained. How do marketing people look at the world? How do finance people calculate future gains? What about HR, Operations, Strategy? I'm genuinely interested to make a difference to the business I'm in, and knowing how it works, and how different types of people think it works, can only help.
So, I'm taking an MBA, and I have to say that it's been very useful. I _can_ see the wider picture, but at the same time, I'm still in a position to talk to the tech folks and, I hope, retain their respect. They know that I've been there, and despite their ragging that I've moved into Marketing, at least I can appreciate their point of view, which can be very helpful.
Conclusions? As a "straight techy", I'm not sure how useful an MBA would have been to me, but as a manager who thinks tech, it has been, and continues to be, absolutely invaluable. Think about why you might do it, and what you might gain, and if it makes sense for you, and you have the time and resources to apply yourself, then go for it.
I have a math degree and a finance-econometrics MBA (with honors) and more than a few years in the field. My experience is that other than attempting to get hired out of school to a Big5 consulting company then it has little if any value unless you are SERIOUSLY considering working in IT for only a few years and have set your sights in Sr. Management, VC's or tech law.
The point is that we work in an industry that does not typically value advanced non technical degrees - unless - and this is a narrow use of it - to specifically get into a Big5 consulting hiring program which is specifically targetted at those people. If you get into a program like that then EVERYONE will have an MBA so it's pretty much just a door opener and a wash
I've heard you get an average of $10,000 more a year with an MBA.
And of course it's much easier to move into a management position if you have an MBA.
Otherwise, when a programmer reaches a certain age, he/she gets kicked in the proverbial nuts and sent on their way. (Or so I've read)
The things I enjoy in my job are delivering solutions that work to customers that have cash. Anything that gets in the way of that I destroy.
How bully for you. I have many friends who make TON of money at companies that make a TON of money peddling shoddy products to people that have lots of cash by convincing them that their product works well enough to keep them from jumping ship to a competitor.
How? By having managers more concerned with single source lockin, rabid copyright and IP hoarding, armies of lawyers, and a minimal underpaid (and underqualified) engineering staff.
For your information, while the management team is perfectly happy, and the CEO is flying around in his corporate jet, the rest of the company just does barely enough to stay employed to get their next paycheck.
Sorry if my original post gave you the wrong impression.
What, that you are a deluded, narcissistic, shallow, greedy, concieted prick who enjoys putting down other people by stifling their creativity all while making sure you are surrounded by people who don't make you feel insecure and stupid?
No, that came through fine the first time.
Here is a little excercise. Get your basic finance book. Any finance book will have this info.
Look at the cost of the MBA. Now figure out the FMV of the money (it's in the finance book if you don't know). Now, take that same amount of money, and figure the FMV invested at... 8% (or some other figure that you think you could invest money at today).
Now, for the really fun part. Do the same, but figure in the salary differentials. Lower your salary for the next 2-3 years to compensate for time spent in school. But raise it for the year immediately afterward and into the future.
Take all of these things together, and see where you will be better off in 5, 10, 20 years. (ie, invest the money you would spend on education in the stock market, or spend it and get the ROI)
Having done this, you are an accountant. Decide if the money and career change are worth the time lost to family. Now you are a businessman.
go forth grasshopper...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Follow along with your slide-rule kiddies...
Since we know that
Knowlege=Power
and we know that
Time=Money
we can go back to high school to get
Work=Power/Time
Substituting variables we get
Work=Knowledge/Money
Now solving for Money we get
Money=Knowledge/Work
This tells us that the more you know, the more money you will make, but you must keep work to an absolute minimum to increase profits. As every MBA will tell you, skip the MBA and enjoy being a low-paid hard worker that knows nothing. It just means less work and more money for them!
(Shamelessly paraphrased from Dilbert's Salary Theorem)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
An MBA will teach you the basics of how to hack organisations. Little things, like whether the head of development reports to the CTO or CEO, can make a big difference to how the organisation performs. Getting hundreds of people moving in the same direction is a non-trivial challenge.
I'm taking a Masters with my employer. Its labelled an "MSc", but the content has a lot of MBA-type stuff in it as well. I keep coming across senior managers in my work who think in MBA rather than Hacker, and I need to know how to talk to them. If I could talk to the animals, learn their languages, what a neat achievement that would be... (with apologies to Rex Harrison).
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Now on to education. BA Management. BS Computer Science. And an MBA (no emphasis, but Marketing is more my focus than Finance.) I've started three businesses, have worked for three multinationals (Philips, HP, Reuters) and even worked for the United Nations for 8 years, building secure Internet infrastructure. I now own and run a small business, doing consulting and building web sites for fun and profit (http://www.lanifex.com) in Vienna, Austria.
What have I learned from my MBA? Well, lots of great stuff. Finance of course. Marketing, especially Global focus. Strategy, analysis, HR, communications, etc. And from all this stuff, I've distilled three things that matter:
- Life-long learning is an attitude.
- It's the people that matter.
- It's not all in books
Bottom line: if you're willing to put in the effort, an MBA is certainly a good thing to acquire for geeks, or even non-geeks. But remember it's the journey that matters, and what you learn and how you change along the way, and not the certificate at the end. Never, ever stop learning, until the Harrower calls time -- and even then, you might learn something new!Start learning, and never stop. It doesn't really matter whether you study for an MBA, or Origami, but keep learning. You'll improve your own life, and that of the people around you.
When you do a classroom MBA (which I did) you make a lot of great contacts. These are the people who will help you in future business. Cherish them.
You can learn some theory from the books, but the best way to learn is by trying things, and see what works for you. Leadership is innate, although you can learn a few tricks.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
If the only reason you like your management job is so you can fire passionate employees, I either say you can have your damn management job, or I hope to God I can get a management position to keep another guy like you from taking charge.
---
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
an aside: it's quite apparent that many slashdot users could really benefit from aquiring some business knowledge simply by the way marketing people are regarded by most people here. ;)
but anyhow, if you have any aspirations of getting out of a generic cubicle job, your best bet is to learn a little about business. while experience is great, ultimately you need a starting point and that's what a good MBA can provide. it'll give you the fundamental knoweldge of how finance, marketing, sales and business development work, and hopefully a base that you can apply to your learning on the job.
having a technical degree is useful, but if you can pull off both a technical degree and have an MBA you'll be absolutely golden. if you're one of those people who can be techincally-minded and yet convey your thoughts easily to others then you may really enjoy taking an MBA as well as learning a lot from the experience. engineering is great, but ultimately it takes the business infrastructure to market and sell a product. of course, to do this properly those in sales and marketing have to have a good understanding of the technology they're pushing or you get the "clueless marketroid" symptom so often discussed here slashdot. this is where techies with MBAs come in, and there's a real need for this.
from a personal perspective, if you're the type of techinical person that also love to interact with other people then ultimately you'd be very happy taking an MBA. i personally work in marketing at a semiconductor company that produces microprocessor companion chips for the embedded market. i get to work on some interesting geek projects, such as working with embedded Linux, but i also get included in the strategic product roadmap, sales, and partnership aspects of the company. personally i much prefer this to the ASIC design or coding that i was doing in previous jobs, and of course none of this would be possible without some kind of knowledge of business.
many will say that you can get into these kinds of positions without any formal business training, but i'd argue that the MBA is still extremely important. in addition to giving you basic knowledge and the piece of paper to prove it, the most important thing that many people ignore is that a lot of business is about building relationships with other people. to that end, i can't stress enough how important it is to go to a proper business school! the people you meet during your MBA may very well be some of the best business contacts you ever meet in your life.
all in all i'd say that if you think you'd enjoy the work, go get an MBA. it's an extremely useful carreer move, especially for the technically minded.
- j
The "skills" from an MBA are pretty trivial. You could pick them up from about two dozen books in less than the two years for an MBA program. A non top-tier MBA program will also teach these. You can go to the local university and learn these skills. If you want to go into business for yourself, learning accounting, etc., will be helpful.
Now, an MBA from a top program is a different animal. At those programs, you will be in the program with career executives needing the MBA for the next level, people changing careers after a reasonable degree of success, and people coming from well-known companies out of a pre-MBA job (the grunts in consulting firms, investment banking, etc).
Can you learn this all from business by paying attention? Probably not. Say you spend 5 years in business, you have your experiences. At an MBA program, you are involved with other people with DIFFERENT experiences. You exchange knowledge and learn as a result.
MBA programs aren't like engineering schools. Sleeping through classes and reading the book (my approach, sadly, as an undergrad) won't help you get anything out of the program. If you want the "degree" this may be all you need, but you won't have benefited from it.
These programs focus on networking and shared experiences. When you go out for drinks with your classmates at HBS (Harvard Business School), Sloan (MIT's b-school), Wharton (Penn's), etc., you are also meeting people with a wide range of connections. If you do a good job of keeping in touch (which is a prerequisite for business in general) you have a varied group of people to contact.
Someone that codes all day in the company they joined at 15 and dropped out of high school for won't have these advantages. I know plenty of people that can code circles around MIT CS grads that don't have a high school degree. However, if they need to find someone that knows about the steel industry for a proposal for a contract job, they don't have their friend in Pittsburgh that is a VP at a large Steel company to pick their brains.
An MBA is very different from more traditional educational experiences. If you want it, you should know what you are investing time in. If you want to take accounting and finance classes, go take four classes locally and save a fortune.
Regards,
Alex
I think anybody who goes into something like this specifically trying to be a "more desireable" employee is going to be disappointed.
There is a guy here at work who wants to get his MBA. He's not the most technical person, although he thinks differently (don't they always) and he feels that getting an MBA will make him a more sought after person. What he doesn't realize is that he could get all the degrees in the world, pass all the certifications, etc...as long as he's a dumbass, it doesn't change the fact that he's going to get passed up for better jobs.
I rank people who goto get MBAs just so they can put it on their resume at about the same level as the MCSE people who never touch NT, etc...
Of course, i may be biased, i've seen "high and mighty" certified MBA-having techies come in and not know shit. And then i've seen people come in without a college diploma and blow those people away.
I guess what it comes down to is that if you're using the MBA to complement an already kickass skill-set, then more power to you. If you're using the MBA as a cover-up of piss-poor technical skills, then i suggest finding another area to work in.
Yes, my girlfriend is a BitchX
I graduated from a top notch college with a degree in business, and I was going to worka few years, then go get my MBA from Harvard, but when I found what pay and work conditions were like for developers, I scuttled my plans to get my MBA. The non-IT degree is very useful though, because I think I have a much more well-rounded background than most strict techie geeks. An MBA, though, is probably overkill, unless you want to be a top-level exec. But if you don't mind cranking out code, or doing project management, or being freelance, an MBA is not really helpful.
It's a two-edged sword - an MBA is, indeed, a great way to move into management, where your personal communications skills will be stressed more than your technical ability. The hours in tech management are generally longer, but you won't be making more per hour worked in general, although your stress level will go up.
If you're a good manager, you'll be doing all the shielding for your techies to keep the other PHBs and Users from driving them crazy or distracting them from cranking out good code.
Some places offer tech MBAs (e.g. University of Washington), which are probably more rewarding for most techies.
And, yes, you may have to deposit your soul in a safe deposit box until you retire, but that's up to you.
If you want to stay techie, but get more into theoretical stuff, you should consider the PhD route in a tech field - this may be just as rewarding and the hours aren't quite as bad.
Note I say this knowing a number of MBAs who are great people, and my brother's a lawyer (many many hours, pay about the same per hour as mine but I have a life), so it's not just theoretical.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
My mother, who had a CIS degree, felt she was going nowhere and missing out on promotion in her government job because she 'wasn't qualified' to manage other individuals or the business aspects of her field of expertise.
Since she got her MBA, she has lost or quit most of her tech duties and now manages projects, works on software budgets, etc...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Again, Thanks to all.
I am going nuts trying to read EVERY post, I see firsthand now the dedication of the moderators!
You are all echoing a lot of the same ideas I've had of late. Yes, it is obvious that persuing a buisness degree will shift me away from 'Pure Tech' and I'm quite comfortable with this adjustment. I LOVED computers when I was in High School, and then some time during college, it sort of faded. When I started engineering school, I wanted to know EVERYTHING about how my 486 worked. Then after Digital Design II, a crapload of Calc and enough Assembler code to make me tear my hair out, I decided I knew enough.
There are things I love more than computers now. Beer, video games, cars.. the real Purpose of getting an MBA would be to getting a big house with a Pool, and maybe a camero. I see this as the path of least resistance to my coveted 6 digit salary.
I know that as techies, we have a monopoly on many of the useful skills out there. However, most of the developers and engineers I have met out there (and I met many when I was a sword for hire) never step up to earn high salaries. Hope this Helps! -Ken (the Engineer)
I'm a developer with degrees in sociology, library science, and law. I'm convinced that the extra education outside of cs gives me significant insight that cs-only developers sometimes lack. I don't know if it avails me much when I'm job hunting, but on the job it helps me model business rules and work with clients. (Whether the performance gain was worth the cost is another question. :-)
However, I'm not convinced that an MBA in particular is any better than any other humanities degree.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
Well, an MBA won't make you a better coder, but it will give you a better understanding of business process. It all depends on the career path you want. If you want to be a hard-core techie, an MBA is not likely to be of value. But if you aspire to be a pointy-haired boss, it would be a wise move...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I'm considering an MBA or equivalent form of buisness education myself. Why? Because, as any truly aspring techie does, I want to work for -myself-, Not some Pointy-Haired-Boss at PointyCorp. Many techies dream of having their own "Really l33t Hardware/Software Inc." type company; and you'll never get there without a buisness education. Now, if you want to keep working for PHBs, and you don't aspire to management, then don't bother.
- Turq - "That's TRON, he fights for the users."
Not a Dumb question.
What it comes down to is what you want to do, and what size company you work for.
If you are looking to make the jump to management from Engineering then an MBA will most certainly help you out in a large company.
In a small company that is a very company specific question. In the place I work an MBA would be of no use, because we are all engineers, though some of us do more administration then others. In a case like I am in an MSEE would be better then an MBA by far.
If you work for a medium to large size company an MBA could help greatly. Because everyone likes a manager that understands the technical side of things as well, especially if they have been on the technical side of things before. I know I would rather report to an x-engineer with administration skills then some idiot in a suit that knows nothing about how I do what I do or what it requires...aka the Dilbert complex
I started out writing code with a four year degree, and while it was a good living, I had one problem with that career path: lack of control. My projects could be scrapped without warning, or sent in directions by Marketing that were totally without technological merit. That's why I went back to school - I got my MBA from Johns Hopkins through their three-year night school program. I was able to work my way through the experience, and I feel that it was totally the right way to go for me personally.
It's not the right path for everyone. If you have bad social skills, don't like to make command decisions, or don't feel that you're a pro-active person, you should probably just keep on writing code. But if you feel that you can combine your technical expertise with leadership abilites, an MBA is a great stepping stone.
Managing a technical project is very stressful work (I've heard the task of managing developers compared to "herding cats") but it can be very rewarding. Last year I finally had the opportunity to fire the office "Open Source Zealot" - the guy who wasted everyone's time complaining how "Outlook is insecure" and "I only use Linux on my notebook computer". The things you can do as a good manager:
- Refining your working unit only to productive, focused people,
- Refining your product definition to a technologically innovative, easy-to-use product
- Keeping your team in touch with the latest advancements in the marketplace
... can be part of the most rewarding career experience you will ever undergo.
For more information, Sharon is the man (so to speak).
Good luck!
The best part about an MBA is that you'll learn about how to do cost/benefit analysis and evaluate good business plans.
Umm, Nico, all the busted dot-coms with poor business plans were lead by legions of MBA's. And ironically, the most successful computer businesses are being run by those who never even received their undergraduate degree.
Oh, umm, nevermind.