is investment banking good enough for top MBAs?

sakky
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:52:37 +0000

So while I agree that most of the full-timers, such as myself, do not return to engineering, I would suggest that this is at least in part a self-fulfilling prophecy for these self-selected individuals based on their own particular career situations. and does not necessarily suggest any blanket superiority of MBA jobs vs engineering jobs, for all individuals.



I agree with this, but I would proffer another snippet of data, something that I talked about before. Simply put, a lot of the top engineering students in the world do not want to work as engineers. For example, take the EECS department at MIT, which is the largest and probably most prestigious department at MIT. 25% of the undergrads from MIT EECS will end up not taking engineering jobs, but rather taking jobs in consulting or banking. And that’s just talking about those who actually ended up in those jobs. I’m sure there were others in EECS who wanted to get into consulting/banking, but didn’t get an offer.

Hence, what that means is that you have a large subset of the best engineering students in the world (MIT EECS students are indisputably top-notch engineering students) not wanting to work as engineers. Whether we like it or not, it seems to me that, for whatever reason, consulting and banking seem to be offering better opportunities than engineering jobs are. If that were not true, then there would be no reason for the top engineering students to want to take those jobs.

What I think really needs to happen is that engineering companies need to make engineering jobs more appealing. Either increase salaries, or offer more interesting work, or a better ladder to management, or positions at more better locations, or so forth. You gotta do something. Otherwise, you are going to continue to see the best talent migrating to other fields.

By no means am I saying that a blanket superiority exists of consulting/banking jobs over engineering. I am well aware that there are some crappy consutling/banking jobs and some excellent engineering jobs. For example, I would rather work as an engineer for Google than as an analyst at some no-name low-level consultancy. In fact, I personally might choose to be an engineer for Google over even McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. But I think the general trends indicate that consulting and banking are, on average, more desirable than engineering jobs, if for no other reason, for the fact that there truly are a lot of crappy engineering jobs out there - jobs that are basically deadend positions with little real chance for advancement and little excitement.

{I’ll give you one example - maintaining software code of decades-old legacy enterprise software systems for large bureaucracies like the Social Security office or a state government. Not only is that, in my opinion, a obscenely boring job, but it is also a job that, frankly, has no future. Nobody is building out new legacy systems and you’re not building any new modern skills, so in these jobs, you are basically just “waiting to die”}.



So the question is: does the analyst job per se offer enhanced MBA admissions chances? Versus whatever else the same highly capable individual might be doing?



I think the answer to this varies. Ibanking seems to offer far more ‘headroom’ than normal jobs do. For example, the top Ibanker is almost certainly better off than the top engineer in terms of chances of getting into B-school, similarly to how the #1 student at Harvard is clearly better off than the #1 student at a no-name school.

However, I agree that a middling Ibanker may have actually been better off doing something else, just like the mediocre Harvard student may have been better off going to some no-name school where he could have excelled.