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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

When/Where did you go to school?

When I did my MBA at Fisher (Ohio State 2018-2020) this definitely wasn't the case. We actually spent considerable time talking about how to get the most out of your team and how dumb of an idea it was/is to treat employees poorly. Many of our in-class discussions that revolved around this topic focused much more on treating employees well and how dangerous bad corporate culture and out of touch leadership was. Many of my classmates came from prior working backgrounds in various fields, however, so perhaps that leads to a different culture at the b-school.

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I got both. Managing a low complexity worker and a high complexity worker requires vastly different styles. Managing a factory production line is very different (down to Left Hand and Right Hand specific tasks!) than managing infinitely configurable software.

Netflix is not a McDonalds, and a McDonalds isn't a Ford assembly plant.

The problem I see is that morons apply the wrong methodology to a business. Typically former 19 year old McDonald's Managers (TM) apply authoritative control to a scrum shop which should be decentralized and delegated by design.

It's so damn hard to look at someone's resume, see an MBA on there, and have me consider them for hiring. How can I even tell if they went to a school like yours versus something like what OP mentioned? I kind of just see that on a resume instead of a bunch of actual experience managing tech teams and immediately mark it for less consideration.

I can definitely see where the kind of education you got would be an asset, it's just like how can I tell when the whole field is so incredibly polluted with people I want nothing to do with?

I have one friend who I've learned a ton about business from who got his MBA and it kind of sounded like he didn't receive the kind of bad ideas you get from the infamous reputation of MBAs. He runs his own businesses and does incredibly well for himself, though, and isn't trying to manage some highly technical team with that degree (Seems like the wrong thing entirely for that position), which is funny because I don't remember him technically even passing high school back in the day.

I’m biased but look for less known programs from reputable universities or part-time working programs. You’ll typically get down to earth, nice people in my experience.

I went for an MBA because I wanted to continue university education and it worked out well for me. I would have loved to have done in-person night courses for a different degree program too but nobody offers those for stats or engineering courses, unfortunately.

yah, that was my experience at b-school as well, via core courses in leadership and OB (organizational behavior) that taught us how to build effective teams, set up humane incentive structures, effect organizational change (which happens through people, not process or technology), and more. i'm sure a number of my classmates glossed over that part, but it is taught and even emphasized.

the MBA degree simply teaches you the various aspects and phases of managing businesses, and about leadership (but doesn't create leaders). selfishness and greed, the basis of bad management, is in all of us, so it's misplaced to vilify the degree rather than the bad management itself.

I went to a state school with a highly-regarded (at least locally) business program, graduated 2013

If you learnt about cost centers, you know what OP is talking about.

Knowing what parts of your operation are cost centers vs profit centers does not require you to treat employees in any particular way.

If you’re confused about how your company sustains itself, that might even lead you to treat your employees worse over time.

Obviously it helps to know where are your costs and your profits, but every company i worked for that used these terms operationally was a bad place to work. Heavy hierarchy and excessive focus on management. Call it how you want but I prefer to not work for people with this mindset.

Then you have idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.

>...idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.

Very good point. "Tell the truth, shame the devil!"

There are other variations of your observation, but it often comes down to not having a holistic and long term view of where the company is going and the culture is should perpetuate.

> ...long term view of where the company is going...

IBGYBG

I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone.

Currently, shareholders of large and even medium companies do not recognize that there is so much embedded capital of all sorts in these organizations that all sorts of business anti-patterns can get away with gaming the incentivization metrics so much and for so long before it becomes apparent at the shareholder level, even if someone were scrutinizing every SEC filing by the organization assuming it is a publicly-held company.

As much as business and engineering types fetishize data-driven decisions (and younger me was definitely guilty of that!), above a certain complexity level it really comes down to a judgement of character. The only reliable formula to find good candidates I have found for that is one-on-one interaction over a long period (7+ years) of time, and knowing yourself really well.

> As much as business and engineering types fetishize data-driven decisions

My counter argument to data driven decisions is Microsoft in 2007.

Microsoft had a large number of user studies, done by Very Professional Firms, that American customers would never pay for phones, everyone in America was too addicted to free phones through 2 year plan lock-ins. Making consumer smart phones was a silly idea!

So anyway iPhone comes out, and internal memos are sent out reminding us all that we have Really Good Data showing how foolish the iPhone is.

Turns out data does an excellent job of repressing innovation. If the data says "don't bother making an amazing product people want to buy", your data might suck. I mean, you may be making the wrong product sure, wrong price point, too small an audience, but if the data just flat out says "don't do cool shit", throw the data away.

> My counter argument...

That is cool to know, thank you for sharing that!

> ...you may be making the wrong product sure, wrong price point, too small an audience...

Interestingly, the original iPhone had various small degrees of those factors. Wrong product: no app store. Wrong price point: debuted at a high-end price point. Too small an audience: function of the high-end positioning. But it was still amazing.

Even amazing products need rapid iteration to stay amazing.

Without the cost centre, there would be no profit. Financialisation is a dangerous rabbit hole to run down whose profit accrues to those that promote and enforce it.

Yep. There is no such thing as a “cost center”. It either is needed to generate a profit or shouldn’t be there at all.

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