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Comment by MarcelOlsz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not joking when I say this, I have no idea how business works. I get it in theory, hell I even sold one. But I still don't know. One of my space-cadet day dreams is trying to figure out just what someone could possibly learn in business school and I can't come up with anything.

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Accounting (for example the poster in the link states marketing does not make up COGS, which to someone who studied accounting is obvious). Simple economics (poster reveals "secret" that Price*Quantity can equal higher total revenue when price/quantity change disproportionately). Consumer behaviour (Dr. Dre can lead people to believe crap from pile A is better than crap from pile B). This is apparent insider-knowledge from someone who spent several years in industry - or you can go to school for the first 1.5 years of a business undergrad program and learn it that way across many more industries. In the final years of business school once you've chosen a specialization, you may learn advanced corporate finance (stocks, bonds, weighted cost of capital, different types of break-even measurement like economic break-even vs accounting break-even). Or you may specialize in accounting, operations, marketing, yada yada. Then an MBA is apparently much of what is taught in a good business undergrad but perhaps faster-paced and you get a shit ton of networking value.

Apparently I've absorbed this knowledge via osmosis working in management at Tech Companies. All of what you said just seems mostly common sense to me. Even stocks, bonds, cost of capital and other "advanced" topics don't really seem very advanced.

I doubt it's uncommon for people with long careers in management to gain the equivalent experience of a degree in a field so diverse and therefore generalized as "business."

22 year olds know this stuff when they leave school, right?

For sure, I shouldn’t have called them advanced, they’re by definition broad enough to be industry agnostic and are typically taught in lower years. But if it were common sense it wouldn’t take a degree or years of experience to acquire that knowledge.

Mostly how to make certain types of spreadsheets, some finance stuff and how to talk business crap with other business people.

It’s not rocket science.

A good business school teaches organizational dynamics, change management, and leadership skills. Not rocket science, but potentially just as hard.

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