Advanced Business Education for Developers?

DreamTheater asks: "With what I consider a battery of solid technical skills, I find myself increasingly interested in business skills to match. I am looking at MBA programs in either Technology Management or Operations Management. Has anyone pursued an MBA to enhance their career as a developer? If so, how has it affected you?"

Comments

Go for it

[tengwar]

I took an MBA, specialising in New Ventures. I didn't take it to be a better developer, and I doubt that it would help with that. I work on design and implementation of large-scale international telecoms programmes(*), which means that my job is more IT and system integration, with a fairly small part of custom development which I outsource with the exception of proof of concept demos. The MBA gives me some clout in arguing over what should go into the product, and helps in running the programmes - project management, finance etc.

Frankly, I'm probably too old to keep my edge as a C++ programmer (and the older I get, the better I was), but this way I can use my technical experience for something useful. Of course I now have to rely more on other people's technical judgement and sometimes they'll get it wrong where I'd get it right - that can be a bit frustrating.

The course itself can be a lot of fun. There's a lot more analytical work than you might expert. I found the most interesting bit to be the strategy case studies. Sometimes it's possible to come up with a solution which is demonstrably better than the "standard" one.

(*) "programme" in the sense of a group of related projects