Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

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    It never ceases to amaze me why we give power
    over to those who do not themselves produce

Given the context, "those who do not themselves produce" means MBAs? I've got an MBA (and an MSEE) and am a CTO, and I think people think I can produce. Of course, there are useless people who graduate with every degree imaginable. MBAs happen to have graduated too many people and have gotten a bunch of focus over the past decade, so are rightly getting their ration of shit, but that's not about the notion of an MBA being useless; it's about oversupply and under-quality.

Also, I assume you meant "those who did not themselves produce" because one of the most frustrating things about management is that you don't get to produce much. That sucks, but it's part of the job (I hate leaving work when my big accomplishment for the day was to talk to a bunch of co-workers, but it's my job...).

    Actually, why do we view 'business' as its own separate
    field when it doesn't mean anything in a vacuum?

Because running a business is something people do and is has very specific rules, regulations, mechanics, knowledge, etc. Accounting and finance do matter (a lot) and products, people and ideas do fail because they neglect to understand these things. But business studies are cross-functional/domain: I took the "core" stuff, but I also took great classes on control system theory for business ("system dynamics"), industrial economics, strategy, technology strategy, organizational processes, finance (NPV, capital structure anyone?). These types of knowledge give you a very different (and, hopefully, more effective) perspective on what businesses are and how they operate.

Computer science doesn't mean anything in a vacuum either. What if you wrote a program and you couldn't market, sell or support it?

I respect your MBA skills, but ... back in the early 90's I did a multi-year consulting gig at Eli Lilly (pharmaceuticals, if you didn't know: Prozac, among others) and they've got the MBA disease bad.

The MBA disease - and this is what the article is about, obliquely - is thinking you don't need to know anything about the business itself to manage it, because business as a whole is a uniform set of actions. At Lilly this was endemic to the point that people were advised - I kid you not - to avoid learning any technical information or anything too specific about their areas, because it would harm their careers. Lilly people were discouraged from associating too much with contractors, because contractors were hired to do specific domain-knowledge things like, oh, develop key software that governed their manufacturing procedures, including generating all expiration dates for the company. (God forbid anybody at Lilly should sully themselves with learning how expiration dating works - I sure enjoyed it, though.)

So you're right, business administration is an essential set of skills, but the point here is that without knowledge of the business you're administrating, you can't make valid decisions - except on the basis of short-term financial goals that ultimately result in the downfall of society.

(Lilly was unreal. They don't have fountains in the courtyard, they have water features. The whole place reeks of pretentiousness. Corporate headquarters rocks, though; long, long ago, Eli Lilly himself ended up buying the whole street of old brick buildings, which are now perfectly preserved under a common roof. Architecturally fantastic! The Lilly people hate it; it's too old and has weird corners. They are all idiots.)

Nice point. And, as you noted, I might have missed the real point of TFA, but it was so generally written it was difficult to see the point of it (wasn't the point kinda: listen to the customer ?). And I completely agree about the "MBA disease", but ...

    that without knowledge of the business you're [XYZing], 
    you can't make valid decisions

Agreed, but this is true of all disciplines (XYZ). How often have you seen random software or features because the product, dev, QA, whatever group didn't understand the business or were wrapped up in politics? The biggest difference between the "MBA disease" and the "computer science disease" was that we identified the "computer science disease" and proposed a number of cures (e.g. waterfall, agile, scrum, nom du jour). "Business" is less well-defined, so we're just discovering and looking to cure the "MBA disease".

That said, we got too damn many MBAs...

Well, but the CS disease may be suffered by individuals and - occasionally, you're right - groups or even the IT department as a whole. The MBA disease is currently suffered by top management of huge multinational conglomerates, because its vector is in fact the people within companies who allocate all the money.

It's like the difference between the flu and AIDS - if the disease targets the immune system you're dead.

Regarding discovering it, though, speak for yourself about the just-nowness. When the corporate raider became front magazine cover hero in the 80's, that's when it became endemic. Since then, America has been eating its seed corn.

I was in high school and college at the time, so I didn't know what was going on, but looking back, it should have been obvious. And like I say, I figured it out in the early 90's. I've been self-employed since that job and never regretted it.

  What if you wrote a program and you couldn't market, sell or support it?

People do this all the time, it's called open-source software and people come upon it by merit of the quality of the code. It doesn't need buzzwords, jargon, sales, and demographics numbers. It's the closest we've got to a vacuum sometimes and I'm proud of this.

Note: I use and support open-source software.

    People do this all the time, it's called open-source software
    and people come upon it by merit of the quality of the code.

Name one piece of interesting open-source software you've heard of that hasn't been marketed (e.g. they didn't write a good README and everyone "came upon it" somehow).

You've also dismissed all of the activities of Business because they're done in Business, but some activities are done in almost all groups-of-people.

    It doesn't need buzzwords, jargon, sales, and demographics numbers.

So you'd say that NodeJS, Rails, Django, etc do not have any buzzwords, jargon, sales or demographics numbers? It seems unpossible to read DHH or anything about Clojure and maintain that opinion.

You are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Instructions on how to use something, i.e. README, don't really qualify as marketing. Since it is not what is doing the marketing and it is part of the product. Word of mouth and a site announcing the product would be marketing. You do have to let somebody know about your product of course if you want them to use it but you can hardly call that marketing.

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