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Thanks for your post. I about to graduate college and am already in a 5th year program working on my MBA. I subscribe to the hacker lifestyle even though I don't program and I really value this community. It's sad to see educated people make logic defying statements like: I can't think of an MBA who started one of Silicon Valleys innovative companies, hence MBA's can't start innovative companies.

> People aren't successful because they have an MBA,

This much is supported by the evidence, which is why it is so remarkable that MBAs typically attract orders of magnitude higher salaries than the average staffer, and having an MBA seems to be considered an advantage when applying for senior management positions in large businesses.

> but getting an MBA certainly doesn't make them less likely to succeed.

This much is not supported by any evidence I've seen so far in this discussion, so those of us who have only ever encountered MBAs who are walking stereotypes right out of this presentation find it a bit hard to believe.

Do you honestly think that there MBA education made them like that, or maybe in fact it was their general attitude and disposition?

Do you honestly think that MBA graduates attract high salaries for no reason? We live in a free market economy. Surely this must indicate to you that they generally provide more value than non-MBA graduates.

Do you realize that most MBA graduates have 5-7 years work experience before they even go to school? Then, after enhancing their own experiences with a framework provided by a business school and with the experiences of the other students, don't you think they are more developed for senior positions than someone without that extra educaton? It's so obvious to me why they would have an advantage to applying for senior management positions in large businesses. They are more qualified, in general!

For some reason, I feel like all the people here think that the only smart people in business are hackers that started a tech startup in their garage. This is not the only way to gain valuable experience and practical skills in business.

There is no doubt that doing an MBA at somewhere like Harvard is a great networking tool. The question is how much of the benefit someone doing the course gains has anything to do with the MBA training, and how much is just a combination of confirmation bias (as you say, many people entering the course are already successful and somewhat experienced) and the networking effect (people tend to like other people like themselves, including bosses at big companies). How do we know the good people from any given year's MBA intake wouldn't have been just as successful without the MBA, had they found other means to network?

> This might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen

Maybe because you don't never observed it's rather easy to teach business to a scientist or an engineer, but it's nearly impossible to teach engineering or science to an MBA.

This is the second dumbest thing I've ever seen. Anybody can learn anything if they want to, whether its an MBA who wants to program software or a programmer who wants to run a business.

The top MBA programs nurture extreme arrogance in a way that is really bad for the country. They create a set of "high priests" that often believe themselves superior to the rest of us. This is why, for example, entrepreneurs pay legal fees in VC deals; because the "business people" are just so great that you should pay them for existing.

We need people who are skilled in business, but what we don't need is an echo chamber that encourages many of them to become arrogant, unethical, short-sighted fucks.

I completely disagree. This is just another selection bias. The loudest, most obnoxious MBAs are the ones you are most likely to hear about.

Saying that MBA programs nurture extreme arrogance, bad ethics and short sightedness is like saying that CS programs nurture introversion, poor social skills and an inability to communicate effectively.

There are tens of thousands of highly successful MBAs running or working in small businesses you've never heard of, not generating any noise, and contributing a great deal to society. To lump them all together as a bunch of frat boy lunatics is ignorant.

Any hacker that has a terrible experience with an MBA is going to write a blog post about how awful it was and how MBAs need to be cut out of the process. The truth is, there are plenty that provide a lot of value and insight, but no one writes about them because no one wants to read it.

Saying that MBA programs nurture extreme arrogance, bad ethics and short sightedness is like saying that CS programs nurture introversion, poor social skills and an inability to communicate effectively.

I actually would say this, not about CS programs per se, but about academia.

There are tens of thousands of highly successful MBAs running or working in small businesses you've never heard of, not generating any noise, and contributing a great deal to society. To lump them all together as a bunch of frat boy lunatics is ignorant.

The same goes about PhDs and ex-academics. A lot of them are socially normal, but people tend to notice the aggregate tendencies and turn them into stereotypes. As for MBAs, I don't think the stereotype is remotely true of each individual, but it is true of a certain culture that exists in MBA programs. To be fair, I doubt it has much to do with programs themselves; the students track it in from investment banks and corporate boardrooms. So, even though the programs are designed with great intentions, a certain set of people get in and feed off each other. This is much like how prisons are supposed to reform criminals, but some of them just use the exposure to others to learn how to become better at crime.

Is Hacker News a realm of modesty? It seems to me that there is an implicit assumption here that the world is organized in descending order by programming mastery, something like Lisp/Erland/Haskell -> Ruby -> Python -> Perl -> Java -> VB -> the entirely unwashed.

That's an excellent order of language quality, but:

1. There are more good Java hackers than good Lisp hackers, although the proportion of good programmers is much higher in the Lisp camp.

2. At this point, I'd put Java ahead of Perl for most purposes.

3. There are a lot of smart people who program but, for whatever reason, never become good programmers. Examples would be traders who use VB because it interfaces well with spreadsheets and scientists using Fortran. This shouldn't be terribly surprising; everyone speaks and writes but not all smart people are articulate and good writers.