what many people don't realize about an MBA is the fact that it's a gateway into certain big-company jobs (e.g., those in select Wall Street firms) ... the degree and school name are what people pay for. obviously, they can always learn the technical material from books or even online.
this post is basically like one that's claiming "I'll save you the time of getting a driver's license" and simply telling you the local driving rules ... the LICENSE itself is what people need to get if they want to legally drive. an MBA is a 'license' to work in certain types of firms (probably those that HNers probably don't want to work at)
An MBA is a strange, multipurpose animal. While it is a gateway into Wall Street firms, it is also a gateway into various consumer product companies, large conglomerates, management consulting companies, and many others.
Having an MBA has proven to be valuable for many people, and I have seen it open doors. As you point out, the school does matter, as companies typically target recruiting efforts to a few select schools, and getting in at these companies outside of the school recruiting channels is much more difficult. Whether an MBA is applicable to you depends on your goals. The goals of the YC community member are likely not aligned with what an MBA can offer.
Why is it that school is so important for an MBA? School is certainly important regardless of career but there seems to be a strong emphasis when it comes to MBA degrees. In Engineering or Computer Science, if you go to MIT that is going to be awesome. But if you go to a state college you will still be able to get almost any job that an MIT guy can get. Besides, skill is far more important in these fields, as per my experience. Any comments?
Among other things it's a form of validation/filtering. If you're hiring you want to filter down the applications to a measurable amount, and one of the best ways to do this is by seeing if they've done something in the past which requires high ability.
In CS this could be having gained entry to MIT or having worked at Google. In these cases you have an institute that you respect saying "we've evaluated this person previously and they've met our high standards". So regardless of the fact that went to MIT or worked at Google, the very fact they got in conveys valuable information to the future employer.
I'm willing to bet that if you applied to hundred companies with two applications both otherwise identical but one having a MIT degree and one having a state college degree, the MIT degree application would get you far more interviews.
Also there's the fact that schools are different. There are plenty of college which are essentially "java schools" which have very minimal coverage of CS beyond programming, which is significantly different from what you'd get at somewhere like MIT. The same applies to MBA schools, but even more, there's no standardised curriculum and the quality of the teachers varies far more, you could be taught by the person who invented in industry the business practices he teaches, or alternatively by a teacher with no real interest in the subject and no industry experience.
There's a lot that can be learnt from books, but there's a huge amount of knowledge that can only be learnt from people with industry experience and that's a rare thing.
Because what matters is not what you learn there, but your rolodex. As they say, it's not what you know, but who you know.
If you go to one of the top MBA programs then you'll meet some of the people that will be hired by other big corporations and you will be either competing against them or negotiating with them.
sure, if you have the skill and you can show the boss you have the skill, you can get the (technical) job... that's what really matters.
However, assuming you don't have (or can't show me that you have) the skill or experience I'm looking for yet (this applies to everyone who is just out of college, who didn't do significant work as an intern or significant project work, e.g. most recent grads.) I'll take a programmer from MIT over a programmer from woodland community college.
key is "can you show me how good you are" if you can overcome that hurdle, yes. you are right, where you came from no longer matters.
However, this is different from just getting your first job. Lots of people under perform. Sure, if I'm hiring sysadmins, I have a pretty good idea who's good and who's not. But if I'm hiring outside my area? I can't tell a good physicist from a bad one. hell, I can evaluate basic C proficiency, and I can search for kernel patches, but if I was hiring a kernel dev, while I could probably filter off the completely unqualified, I wouldn't know the really good from the mediocre. In those cases your school still counts, especially during the early parts of your career. (in the later parts of your career, the prestige of previous companies you have worked for takes some of that.)
Generally, hiring outside of your area is a bad idea and best avoided, but it happens. Some of that is necessary. I mean, I /need/ an accountant for all the same reasons why I'd be bad at evaluating an accountant.
Now, even then, school isn't the be-all and end-all... I chose my accountant because she ran a free question-and-answer blog[1], and seemed to know what she was talking about, and as far as I can tell, I chose well.
Still, I think that if you are going to school for the 'accreditation' value of a diploma, a diploma from a top tier school is worth rather a lot more than a diploma from a place I have not heard of.
First, there are an awful lot of schools that offer semi-worthless MBA degrees as a profitable business. Much more so than in engineering or CS.
Then, it's because business expertise and talent is hard to verify. Programming or engineering ability is easy to prove, even at entry level. You can't prove you can manage a large group until you're already in charge of a large group. This means a company is taking a big risk on hiring MBAs versus CS grads, and needs to look for some clear, objective signals before going ahead.
Finally, executives like hiring managers who went to the same school they did. I don't know exactly why this is the case -- reciprocity, maybe, or some notion of a shared vision of how to run a business.
OTOH some colleges are easer to get degrees from than others.
I'd be more impressed with a CS degree from MIT than pretty much anywhere else.
For starters you were no mug to accepted there in the first place. While there you would have benefited from interaction with a high achieving peer group.
And the teaching would probably be pretty good as well.
Actually if you were from MIT and you wanted to work for me I'd be wondering what's wrong with you!
well I was speaking from experience. Two Stanford comp sci grads, were hired based on that (I didn't hire them, but I did have to manage them). Both turned out to be net negatives to our team. Big learning experience to look beyond the school and degree (I even remember a comment from somebody when I started the process to dismiss one of these people - 'how bad can he/she be, he/she has a degree from Stanford').
On the other hand there was another group of 4 guys who all either dropped out of school or never went, and they are all some of the best devs I have ever worked with.
Finance, accounting, strategy, legal, HR, time management, sales, marketing, management...
The list is endless. I don't have an MBA. I have many friends who do and are spectacular entrepreneurs. I've acquired most of what they know over a decade of being an entrepreneur but another way to do it would have been to drop everything and dedicate 2 years to learning.
Here's an example of what you don't know because you don't have an MBA: Out of all of your sales prospects, the customers most likely to buy from you are those who just bought something from you.
Perhaps that comment on Reddit invalidates many viable businesses that could have sold an $100 loss leader to those prospects and then up-sold them on a $10,000 product a few months later.
Whoa, I never noticed it was a year old! It just started doing well on Reddit today and seemed HN relevant so I posted it here too. I should pay more attention ;-)
Just read the comment you made re: RescueTime. I guess that's the MVP/dry testing tactic. I recently learned about it and am fascinated as well. Getting customers before writing code - a simple, yet brilliant idea that a lot of hackers aren't used to, myself included. The dry testing approach can even be applied to free consumer apps. "Launch" with mockups and screenshots and invite users to sign up for a beta test.
The biggest question I'm struggling with these days is how to even drive users to your barebones landing page in the first place. For pay-to-use consumer apps or B2B apps, you can often seek out direct leads or use advertisments. For general consumer apps, it's much harder to generate a buzz. How do you even get started on driving traffic to something like that?
I'll save you the time of reading that comment: due-diligence.
But seriously, an MBA is a little different from those couple paragraphs (though they do contain valuable advice). An MBA is often a way to get your foot in the door for Fortune 500 companies, or, in my case, as sweet way to get a cushy, low-involvement TA/GA/RA position while I work on my own startups and build a resume. That comment does not accomplish the same thing (clearly).
Worth reading because of this phrase:
This is a bit like writing some code, and then not testing it because you really don't want to discover that its buggy.
Getting an MBA is not getting a degree in entrepreneurship, although there are schools who have tracks for entrepreneurship. Often times, you are learning other things that are not terribly related to a pre-revenue software startup.
In my opinion, it is much like law school. You should have a pretty good idea of what you want to get out of it before you go, otherwise, when you finish you still won't know what you want to do with the degree.
If you want to jump from your current engineering job to a different field, getting an MBA can be a good transitioning point. If you want to go into quantitative finance, getting an MBA can also be very useful.
Just don't confuse getting and MBA with figuring out how to get your startup off the ground.
* I recently finished a "mini-MBA" at Kellogg. While I very much enjoyed the experience, and I do say that certain things we learned added some foundational theory to things such as pricing and strategy (ever wonder where tiered pricing comes from?), the experience has not given me some "magic key" to turning any idea into startup gold. Everyone here should already know that there is no silver bullet for that. If you don't know that, I don't think an MBA will help you.
What's sad is that the longest comment thread in that post was about Java vs other languages. Not getting into analysis paralysis about technology is probably another lesson to insert into that post.
This post does not discuss the fact that, any idea, with a bit of adaptation, could be attractive to other types of customers.
Sometimes, simply throwing it out there for people to try, will raise interest. Many great company started with people inventing things they had no plan to sell.
The statement made in this post is naive at best. The strategy consisting of aiming at a potential customer, loading and shooting has created many monster failures too. Things are not that systematic.
It is obvious the writer does not know much about strategy courses delivered in MBA's...
I nearly didn't give the guy the upvote he deserves when I saw the comment sitting at 666 karma. Sad to be #667. :-(
I've heard LOIs discussed before, but primarily in the context of building & selling big-ticket systems. Do investors care at all about that kind of thing for smaller systems (say along the lines of GitHub/BaseCamp/Freckle/etc)?
The market probing should be done wisely. If the business idea strikes gold, pitching about it may blow the advantage to be first on it. The probing should than be done in a way that does not disclose the business idea. Probing is definitely required.
this post is basically like one that's claiming "I'll save you the time of getting a driver's license" and simply telling you the local driving rules ... the LICENSE itself is what people need to get if they want to legally drive. an MBA is a 'license' to work in certain types of firms (probably those that HNers probably don't want to work at)