Opinion of the MBA

UCLAri · April 7, 2011, 10:58am

hyeonjlee,

I know Berkeley, UCLA, and NYU have part-time night/weekend programs. Do you think that those are good enough, or is it best to just aim for the top 5 only?

To be clear, I’m not thinking of entering now. Or even a year from now. This is a two years out sort of plan, but even if I do that, I need to start putting together a portfolio for admission and really start thinking about how to fit in GMAT prep.

I agree that the MBA is a feather in the cap and networking, but given that my cap is pretty empty of feathers (I mean, let’s face it, my undergrad and grad aren’t all that impressive), I’m asking whether I need that feather to move past the middle-management level.

simba · April 7, 2011, 11:07am

hyeonjlee: Thanks for a wonderful insight and comparison. But at the risk of branded as sexist and pardon me when I say that the current land scape in tech or engineering companies is such that equivalent females have much different and better career trajectories than equivalent males. I liked your analytic comparison, but I will take your personal experiences with grain of salt.

UCLAri · April 7, 2011, 11:10am

simba,

This is my concern, to be honest. I’m neither an engineer nor an MBA, and most of my work is in-house consulting/market research, where I know the MBA is often helpful.

I know one can do quite well without the feathers, but I just wonder how well and how challenging it may be without them.

simba · April 7, 2011, 11:38am

well UCLAri: I see following happening (no I was never in management).

Let us consider this scenario: If you are in management in technical field than perhaps MBA may not do you that good if you want to maintain your field i.e climb the same branch of a tree.

If you want to change your field then MBA may not lend you a job (e.g. moving from tech field to managing pension portfolio). You are old and make too much money as compared to fresh MBA’s.

In this scenario company sponsored eMBA might be a better choice. Better yet, all big name schools offer summer or few weeks long ‘junkets’ on specific topics. You can internalize those thing in your current field to your advantage and build your network. Also, if your company pays you are getting the signal that they like you.

As you have mentioned, Quitting your job and getting full time MBA may not be worth.

Just as a data point, my son has a classmate who after BS worked for 2 years got MBA from Harvard worked as an IB and after 6-7 years wants to do Ph. D (less pressure career). Then I also know few kids whose companies sponsored full time MBAs at Harvard (I think one was drawing almost full salary and one was getting paid about half) and they have very flourishing career with their old companies.

It is a tough choice though.

Moving up in corporate world can be summarized as follows (Of course you have to be good). Have a boss that is going some place and you feed him peanuts (make him look good) then once in a while he will throw a peanut back at you.

arabrab · April 7, 2011, 11:49am

UCLARi – yes, the fully-employed MBA is what I was referring to.

One of the comments I heard from someone in the fully-employed MBA was that it was difficult/awkward to take advantage of some of the career and networking opportunities, especially if the company you were currently working for actively recruited at the school of management. Those of us in the full-time program had a lot more luxury that way (though obviously not the income – a lot easier to deal with when tuition and fees were $400 a quarter.)

I never encountered people in the Executive MBA program other than seeing them on weekends or when they were on campus for some of the periodic Friday meetings, but they seemed to be largely people in very responsible management positions, often in their mid to late 30’s or 40’s.

hyeonjlee · April 7, 2011, 2:26pm

whoa, where is this gender thing coming from?

I was not talking about my case when I said that in the tech industry, MBA, unless it’s from truly tippy top upper tier, does not buy you much at all. It has nothing to do with gender. I hired and fired, mostly men, and in most cases, that decision has nothing to do with whether the person (mostly men) has MBA or not.

OK. if a job candidate has an MBA, on top of all other usual qualifications, from say, Wharton or Harvard, at least, his resume gets a second look, and more likely than not increases the odds of being invited for an interview. That’s about as far as it ever went. Once on the job, nobody talked about who has an MBA. Tech industry, at least as it is the case with top tier companies, is very meritocratic. Simply the fact that the resume has Wharton MBA written on it does not make it more likely that you will get promoted. I remember putting someone with Rugters undergraduate degree over someone with Harvard MBA on a fast track promotion route, because he was so much better than the other guy. Harvard MBA degree was a great indicator for a quality control baseline, but when his actual work did not live up to that potential, he did not have a chance to compete with other people who actually demonstrated on the job competence.

that said, I will admit, there is ONE exceptional case I can think of. Sometimes, some C level executives decide to create a small internal consulting organization. WHen they do that, they want the same kind of caliber as the likes of McKinsey and Boston Consulting partners. Since people who work in the elite consulting firms tend to have a spiffy MBA degree or a Ph.D. from uber elite schools, they tend to choose those with pedigreed MBA degrees. Truthfully, though, nothing really productive is ever accomplished in an internal consulting organization. The people there end up doing more or less the work of a glorified executive assistants of the C level officers: beautiful power point files for the executives’ speeches at major industry conferences or a discussion with government figures, foreign dignitaries, investor community, etc. Some of them do reap the benefit of riding on a well positioned executive’s coat tail. However, you see, this is an exceptional example. If you are interested in becoming a solid business leader in the tech industry, your own hard work, industry insight, technical competency take you much farther than any MBA degree will.

So, you might wonder why I bothered to get an EMBA. Well why not? Company paid for everything and gave me time to be a student, which I just love. And, I got a pretty nice feather on the cap, so it was a great deal.

So, whatever it is worth, it’s my personal opinion that if you have to pay out of your pocket and take time off from the active career to get an MBA degree from a program outside of the tippy top uber elite program, it’s not worth it, at least in the tech industry.

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have any expert opinion on other industries.

I also do not agree with this view. This may be the case in Proctor & Gamble or Phillip Morris. This is NOT the case in well managed elite tech companies, where things are way too dynamic and terrific people with good options constantly move around within the company and in the industry. I know someone in the marketing field, who joined a top tier elite tech company (he was from outside of the tech industry). He was shocked that nobody in Silicon valley played golf. His time honored career success tools, till then, included countless weekends of playing gold with the hot shots. In his new company, he realized that he has nobody to play golf with. You see, elite tech companies are a very different breed.

simba · April 7, 2011, 3:40pm

hyeonjlee: Again thanks for your insight, and for my son’s sake I hope you are correct and I want you to be correct about top tier high tech companies. In the next few years he will end up there.

intparent · April 7, 2011, 4:01pm

OP, I am not clear on whether you have been at the same company and in the same type of technology for your whole career so far. IT certainly is a meritocracy, as hyeonjlee noted.

Do you expect to stay with your current company longer term? Do you already have some variety in your background in the types of areas you have managed? Do you have any experience with international projects (eg, managing offshore resources)? That is another thing to consider, whether rather than going back to school, should you attempt to broaden your experiences while continuing to work.

UCLAri · April 7, 2011, 4:16pm

intparent,

I’m actually still really junior in this career, having left a shortish career in journalism.

I expect to stay at the current company at least 3-5 years, hopefully longer.

My background includes team management, contract negotiations, and international projects (bringing product from the US to the home country). I’m less on business development than I’d like, though, and more on the strategy side.

simba · April 7, 2011, 4:26pm

^ Oh I see that you are at the soft side of the business. In that case MBA could be helpful.

scualum · April 7, 2011, 5:01pm

hyeonjlee:

I suppose it is a matter of personal experience.

By way of background, I currently work at one of the world’s largest software companies - and prior to this worked at one of the most successful software startups of all time. Prior to that I was in the computer networking field - at a start up which IPO’d and then bought by Cisco. I’ve, to quote you, “hired and fired” for more than 25 years now.

In all three companies, clearly merit was the deciding factor - particularly once inside the company when promotions and increases were being considered. I can also say that race and gender were completely ignored.

But I can tell you that in hiring from the outside - particularly for positions outside of engineering such as corporate development (M&A), marketing, and Finance, MBAs have a clear advantage.

As one example from the early 2000s, and it may have been a part of where I was working since it was a very hot startup - but we got 2,000+ resumes for one corp dev job. The first sort - before any other consideration - was to throw out all the resumes that didn’t have an MBA.

I completely agree with you on the technical side of the house. Being technically excellent will go much further in an engineering department than any business degree. I also agree with you that the traditional corporate games get you nowhere in tech. It’s all about doing your job in an outstanding manner not playing golf or fetching coffee.

hyeonjlee · April 7, 2011, 5:36pm

In elite tech companies, there is no such thing as a non-techy job. Even if you are working on the business side of the company, if you can’t hold your own with a fairly good understanding of the technology, you are greatly disadvantaged.

OP is at the same age group as the mentees I took under my wing. If I were his mentor, I would rather advise him to spend a lot of time learning about the technology since it seems he does not have the tech related undergraduate degree than worry about the MBA degree.

Even if you do corporate development work, you MUST understand the underlying technology. Just the humanities/MBA types who don’t understand the technology simply can’t perform at the highest level when it comes to exercising judgment on which company to acquire, which company to partner with, which technology to license from which company and to, and which direction the company’s strategies must take. Unlike, say, a diaper business or frozen food business for example, if you don’t understand the tech stuff, you simply can’t use your common sense or wing it with MBA speak-BS.

Look at who are the industry stars in elite tech companies. Almost all of them originally had tech degrees or tech background. (I am not talking about AT&T and Verizon, etc: they still have remnants of the government regulated monopoly past manning some of the top posts - but this shall pass too, and the next generation will be different).

In elite tech companies any business manager or corporate development director will be eaten alive if s/he can’t speak sufficient tech stuff. This is FAR more important than an MBA degree and gets you far further and far more respect from your peers and the industry.

I also would like to advise OP to transition into the core of the business, rather than staying for a long time on the in house consulting side of the business. In the end, those who stay on the “production” side of the business (that is, money making core business) rather than corporate staff organization (internal consulting, etc) have a lot more currency. You are still young. Your career is at a very early stage. If you actually learn the “real stuff” (the basic technology, tech marketing, tech sales, etc), that’s convertible currency that you can take anywhere: it’s yours to keep. If you stay on the periphery of the main mission, whatever you accumulate is often not a convertible currency: it can lose its value very fast outside of the current company.

In my career, I have seen way too many people whose whole experience really did not have convertible, hard currency, and when the down time comes, there people have much harder time to find the next opportunities.

These are the kind of issues the OP should be far more concerned about now, rather than a feather on the cap with an MBA degree that does not really teach you any real stuff. Again, if you manage to talk your company into paying for the degree, then, I would say, go for it. But if not, this is the time for you to focus on “REAL KNOWLEDGE in the tech field”. Once you build that, you can have an icing on the cake called MBA in the mid thirties (paid by the company) and you will be a hot commodity.

UCLAri · April 7, 2011, 6:04pm

Hyeonjlee,

I’m getting off my train now, but suffice it to say that I easily keep up on the tech. I’m in wireless, and I’m always reading up on the new technology, learning new standards, and keeping up. In a sense, even though I do have a social science undergrad background with a weird management grad background, I’m very technical on my own.

I’m not bragging, just stating this. I will never walk into an interview and sound ignorant of underlying technologies. I’m fortunate that way. However, because I am self-taught, I do know I have hurdles to overcome. Hence the MBA.

Put another way, one of my last reads was a technical guide to LTE and its applications.

barrons · April 7, 2011, 6:17pm

I think the best boost from an MBA is when you want to switch careers or the focus of that career and are less than 10 years out from undergrad. Generally you can substantially boost both your pay and get into a better career path doing the normal 2 year FT MBA at a Top 50 school. I don’t see much value at all in on-line and lower ranked MBAs.

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