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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I've worked at many top big tech firms. Encountered very few "American MBAs", at this point it feels like a mythical unicorn. Alot/Most of tech companies are ran by ex-engineer H1Bs

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Most managers I encountered sooner or later would get an MBA, particularly as they made it further up the corporate ladder. Yes, it makes sense to get the specialized training being management needs, but an MBA almost never is that training.

And re ex-engineer H1Bs: just because you used to be an individual contributor before becoming management does not imply you retain your individual contributor skills nor that you'll be a good manager.

Most people across my career that became managers did so because the pay was better, workload was lower and promotion ladder more straightforward. Worst managers were usually the type that expected and demanded to be management after X years as an individual contributor; this is particularly true of people from some countries, where it is culturally expected that you'll be a manager within at most 10 years of starting.

Most companies do treat moving to the management ladder as a promotion, which create all sorts of perverse incentives for many to become managers. Reminds me of a blog from a few years back:

https://charity.wtf/2020/09/06/if-management-isnt-a-promotio...

I've said this for a while: the solution to the management hell that we currently have is to bring back secretarial roles. The introduction of the personal computer into the workplace basically killed off the secretary, and spread ~50% that work over everybody else, especially management. So we bloated management to cover that. The problem is that when your secretarial work is being done by the people with the power to fire the ICs, you end up putting excess value on the secretarial and organizational work.

So instead, bring back the secretaries. A separate org vertical (i.e., they don't have hiring/firing power over ICs), which handles the secretarial half of your current managers' jobs, and isn't paid more than your engineers. The engineering decision-making half of the job (along with hire/fire power) should be handed over to one or two senior engineers, who are now the actually powerful ones in the engineering branch of your org chart. This keeps your technically talented people working in technical roles. Basically, instead of

       C-suite             C-Suite 
       /      \              /  \
      M        M            EM   SM
     / \      / \          / \  / \
    M   M    M   M        E   ES   S
   / \ / \  / \ / \
  E  EE   EE   EE  E

This is a good direction. To boot, I think ES is the best way to remove administrative work from EM's and IC's plates.

Further, I also think that EMs need to then become more technical aka a real "leader" of the services they are responsible for. So hiring, firing, perf, BS meetings becomes only 5% of their job. 95% of their job is to ensure that services keep running and projects get delivered - like a true leader. ES can help them and ICs with administrative tasks like HR follow ups, OKR tracking, meeting scribing etc.

I can't believe how much work is being done by low level EMs and ICs in tech companies. It is almost exploitative in one way.

What tasks should this secretary handle in a software company?

They are relatively rare in big tech, and the culture of being nominally “anti MBA” is pretty aggressive in big tech, but there are a lot of them still there. I think there is some bias to not notice them because usually middle and upper management at big tech are the movers and shakers of 20 years ago during dotcom and such when the companies were growing rapidly and SV was a lot less corporate. And if you’re a peon, you probably don’t interact with management much beyond your director, which IMO tends to be a soft ceiling for advancement for technical non-mba types these days.

It’s pretty common ATM for product managers to not have direct programming or software backgrounds and instead have a career like “MBB consultant -> MBA -> product manager”. Big tech companies also insource a lot of “strategy consulting” which are MBA types. And marketing/biz dev have plenty of MBAs too.

While someone like a “director of engineering” probably doesn’t have an MBA, there’s a good chance their boss does (especially since these days VPs seem to mostly be former product managers rather than former software engineers).

By the way, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Andrew Jassy, and Cheryl Sandberg all have American MBAs.

I wonder how many of those went to get an MBA. That's the point of this masters, giving management knowledge to people with non-management degree. Like engineering + MBA -> promotion. I've worked for companies who pay MBAs for employees who are on-track to management.

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