[HN Gopher] Managers with a business degree reduce employees' wa...
___________________________________________________________________
Managers with a business degree reduce employees' wages, do not
increase profit
Author : jstx1
Score : 539 points
Date : 2022-10-07 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nber.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nber.org)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I have often wondered if there is like a secret Stupid Manager
| Tricks indoctrination session that happens when someone is
| promoted. Perfectly reasonable people, upon org chart elevation,
| will suddenly think that they can make FTEs appear for nothing by
| screaming about multitasking hard enough.
| nelsondev wrote:
| People respond to incentives in generally predictable ways.
|
| If you are told you will get a substantial raise if your
| subordinates work harder, guess what, you are going to get your
| subordinates to work harder.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| You're going to _try_ to get your subordinates to work
| harder.
|
| But previous experience, as a grunt, ought to suggest that --
| completely in line with almost all of the established
| research -- task-switching _decreases_ performance. There 's
| just so much overhead associated with it.
|
| So it is as if elevation has caused someone to forget their
| experience.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Read the Gervais principle
| altell wrote:
| There is a good episode(ep 517) of freakonomics radio about that
| fuzzmuzzy wrote:
| Almost certainly the inspiration for this submission.
| Definitely worth a listen, a lot of points in these comments
| that were addressed in the episode
| altell wrote:
| thought the same,and yes it is really a good episode worth
| listen to
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Well, isn't that fucking obvious? If they are doing their job
| right, at least.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| A corporation is a capitalist device that consumes raw resources,
| turns them into something else of value, and earns profit for
| doing so - or at least promises to. It doesn't have feelings or
| care about anyone or anything other than earning profit. Anything
| else that you see is just a means to an end, period.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| grayscaleadam wrote:
| clavalle wrote:
| They have one lever, and it isn't innovation.
| [deleted]
| pella wrote:
| Intel has had several CEOs with non-technology educational
| background. ( ~ MBA )
| Entinel wrote:
| Intel is also reverting back to CEOs with technical
| backgrounds because having CEOs with non-technical
| backgrounds led to them getting overtaken by several
| competitors such as AMD who they had lapped several times
| over.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Intel had one CEO without a technical background who came
| in after the previous guy, who started off as a process
| engineer, ran their fab division into the ground and caused
| them to lose their technological lead due to dumb
| decisions. The MBA guy turned the fab division around and
| then stepped down for a tech guy to take over for rebound
| on the technology side.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And VW was almost completely engineering led, including
| Piech whom you could somehow consider at least the god
| father of Audi and VW if not a founder type, when the
| emissions scandal happened.
| nalaz wrote:
| Nothing wrong with what he did. It was a political thing.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Courts all over the world, including VWs home country,
| disagree with you here.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I agree with this, I feel the regulations at the time
| they were cheating were unjust, as the technology didn't
| exist to meet them yet. Most of their competitors simply
| pulled diesels from the market, but the VW TDIs were
| still the most efficient cars on the market in terms of
| CO2, a more important environmental issue than the things
| they were cheating on (NOx).
|
| Ironically, my thoughts are that what they chose to do
| was the most responsible course of action environmentally
| and ethically, because the alternative outcome (people
| driving less efficient vehicles) was worse.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Are you trying to imply that engineers are less ethical
| than MBAs?
| hef19898 wrote:
| No, I'm emplying that above a certain hierachical level
| ethics don't matter. And that your professional
| background influences, at most, the way you cheat and act
| unethical. Engineers, which software developers and CS
| grads are only in a loose sense, arw by no means better
| than MBAs, or worse.
| mrits wrote:
| I'm not sure the group that thinks an MBA is worthless for a
| CEO is as large as the group that thinks an MBA is worthless
| for anyone but a CEO.
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| Sadly, there are probably businesses out there that would see
| this study as a argument for hiring business managers over
| operational business units.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Owned and operated by business executives.
| alecfreudenberg wrote:
| Fire all the managers
| Lendal wrote:
| No, teach them better. Management is still needed. A manager
| should be able to increase revenue, or at least productivity.
| If all they can do is reduce wages, that's a pretty low bar.
| Any asshole could do that.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Yes but could they _take the blame_ for that? A good portion
| of business decisions and activity is legal liability
| firewall engineering and maintenance. So promote someone you
| don 't like to a manager and make them make cuts. Then
| resultant turnover and performance issues are their fault,
| not yours.
| krageon wrote:
| More than two layers of management = a company that is
| bleeding money. More than one layer generally already means
| idiotic decisions are being made. I sort of hunger for an
| example of zero layers.
| alecfreudenberg wrote:
| Management is an often toxic mix between
| Strategy/SME/HR/Teacher/Therapist/Consultant/Punisher
|
| Separate the functions out explicitly, as needed.
|
| Often they're just corporate prison guards in organizations
| with bloated structures and antagonistic views of staff from
| an executive perspective.
|
| Flatten your structures so the highest-level strategy is
| connected to your lowest paid staff. If you can't do this,
| then you have a toxic company that resembles prison labor and
| the whole thing deserves to fail.
| goodpoint wrote:
| In my experience less than 1 manager in 10 has some teacher
| / therapist qualities.
|
| Oh, you forgot Politician.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I used to hold that belief. Then I went to an organization with
| no managers, where nothing management related got done except
| by people who were already doing 40 hours a week as ICs. Now I
| have slightly updated my beliefs: fire all the bad managers,
| throw parades for the good ones.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Strawman much?
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I read over the explanation of the IV strategy to try to capture
| whether appointment of a business manager was endogenous (we need
| to cut costs) or exogenous (the predecessor died or retired). I
| think there's still something missing.
|
| Business managers seem to be more common in older businesses that
| have saturated their market share. If my observation is true it
| would confound the finding that revenue does not increase when a
| business manager is appointed. They may be more likely to be
| appointed to a role where revenue cannot be increased.
|
| Maybe the authors could use a factor like company age normalized
| by the median tenure of a company in the S&P 500 at that time to
| identify younger, more dynamic companies?
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| As I want to scream at the top of my lungs every time this kind
| of junk gets posted, the true and accurate headline would be
| post-pended with "...claims a single study that has not been
| replicated".
| themitigating wrote:
| It's a post of study, isn't that assumed?
| boh wrote:
| What is the point of this study? If we don't hire managers with
| business degrees we'd see increases in employee wages and
| profits?. A person with a business degree is hired because the
| business hired them, and they're likely doing the job they've
| been hired to do (cut costs). If a company is cutting costs it
| may be due to decreasing profitability.
|
| Research like this just feels like tenure bait (the academia
| version of click bait).
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because the goal isn't to cut costs, the goal is to make money.
| If hiring someone to cut costs doesn't make money, then it has
| resulted in nothing but the suffering of your employees and
| vendors, and possibly the quality of your product as you
| switched to shittier vendors and lost your best employees.
|
| So the owners get no profit, the employees lose, the vendors
| lose, and the customers lose. Worth considering when deciding
| to hire consultants?
| boh wrote:
| So if you hire people without business degrees none of what
| you described will happen? If you hire a person to cut costs,
| you're looking for a person who will cut costs. That's what's
| being avoided conceptually in how this study is being
| interpreted. Going to a cancer doctor doesn't increase your
| chances of having cancer, it makes the likelihood of you
| having cancer to begin with more likely (ie I'm a company
| that's no longer growing and I need help to die slower).
| entropi wrote:
| This point is actually addressed in the introduction of the
| study.
|
| > These checks notwithstanding, an obvious concern with our
| estimates is the endogeneity of the decision to appoint a
| business manager--perhaps firms turn to business managers when
| they need to cut labor costs. To bolster the argument that our
| results capture causal effects of business managers on wages
| and the labor share, we use two strategies. First, we obtain
| very similar estimates when we focus on manager retirements and
| deaths, which are arguably less endogenous than other switches
| from non-business to business managers. Second, we develop an
| instrumental variable (IV) strategy (...)
| boh wrote:
| Just having any methodology doesn't count, it has to actually
| serve to legitimize the model (which it doesn't). Pretty much
| every publicly traded firm has had MBA managers for the past
| fifty years, and yet somehow they still make a profit.
|
| This report may arouse people's ingrained dislike of the
| business managers they've had to deal with but it doesn't
| actually offer any insight that can survive the least bit of
| scrutiny.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Pretty much every publicly traded firm has had MBA
| managers for the past fifty years, and yet somehow they
| still make a profit.
|
| Does the paper make a claim that's falsified by this
| observation?
| pdntspa wrote:
| When I was in b-school, it was like they were trying to train us
| to have contempt for employees, especially the jobs where wages
| were low. They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable
| cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle
| debate with servers.
|
| I got my degree but left utterly disgusted with management and
| MBA types. I am of the opinion that business degrees and business
| school are a toxic influence on most companies and that, with a
| few exceptions, they would be better served by hiring management
| types from other parts of the business and giving them some light
| compliance training instead.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| That's because bureaucrats are threatened by people who
| actually know how to make things.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Isn't that the business model with low skill workers though?
| Figure out how to employ them in a way that they don't need
| training and all is well.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It's an incredibly shitty model for everyone but
| shareholders. Why do we have to institutionalize abuse?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| My high level analysis is that this is because of
| institutionalized 'dispersion of responsibility' stemming
| from the pure capitalistic doctrine we all have supposedly
| signed up for. Essentially you have individual entities
| whose responsibility (& only one) to maximize the profit.
| so anything that is measurable ends up getting projected on
| one dimension of 'capital'. There is a lot of talk about
| social responsibility but most 'don't be evil' lasts until
| a few bad quarters and then its back to same story.
|
| No supposedly the govt/unions are supposed to provide a
| counterbalance to this but for some incredible reason folks
| here in America are convinced that any collective action is
| basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. So
| what we are left with is this dispersion of responsibility
| to do social good but no one actually in charge of it. And
| don't even get me started on the Senate
| composition/electoral college & institutionalized
| gerrymandering (so you can actually fix it with simple
| majority you need a special kind of majority).
| willturman wrote:
| I would argue that a "low skill worker" doesn't exist as
| anything but a pejorative stereotype for large swaths of
| people who form and perform functions that create the
| foundation on which an economy runs.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well I mean c'mon... are you seriously trying to suggest
| that every job takes the same level of skill as every other
| job? There are people who _don 't want_ to spend years of
| their lives working math problems to get to the point where
| they can become highly specialized and are happy being "low
| skilled" because they get more time to themselves.
| danaris wrote:
| This is painting it as black and white: either _there are
| jobs that require no skill_ or _all jobs require the same
| amount of skill_.
|
| Neither of these are the case: Some jobs require
| significantly more skill and training than others, but no
| job is _unskilled_.
|
| And, as others note, the idea that jobs that require less
| training give you _more time to yourself_ is just
| ludicrously out of touch with reality. Not only are they
| more likely to be jobs that expect you to work grueling
| hours, they also pay so little that many people who work
| them must work more than one every day just to pay the
| bills.
| triceratops wrote:
| Music, nursing, game development, animation, art, school
| teaching are all highly-skilled professions. They aren't
| particularly highly-paid.
|
| We should maybe talk about high-supply and low-supply
| skills instead.
| Jensson wrote:
| Those jobs are paid way higher than low skill jobs
| though, and nobody calls them low skill, so I don't see
| the problem.
| triceratops wrote:
| Because the common rejoinder to the low pay of "low
| skill" jobs is to tell those people to become "high
| skill". When in fact, "high" and "low" skill is only one
| factor, and not even the major one, in whether you're
| going to be well paid.
|
| Another reply said nurses are "highly paid" because they
| make an average of $70-100k. That is laughable. I made
| more than that at my first job, at a no-name tech
| company, when all I knew was jQuery and 4 HTTP verbs. Or
| compare the valuation of any medical tech, or biochem, or
| materials sciences company compared to the latest photo
| sharing phenomenon slapped together by some hungover
| Stanford grads. How much do experienced chemical, or
| mechanical, or civil engineers make compared to new grad
| software devs? Who's more "skilled"?
|
| Supply and demand is where it's at. It's pretty easy to
| increase the supply of janitors or line cooks, so their
| pay sucks, even though demand is always strong and the
| work isn't particularly easy or pleasant. There are
| countless musicians and actors in the world, far more
| than there could ever be demand for. So their pay, on
| average, also sucks.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Music / Art - highly paid at the extremes. Probably
| because music and art are currently infinitely
| reproducible and so a small number of highly paid, high
| "talent" content creators can create content for billions
| of people.
|
| Nursing - highly paid
| (https://nursinglicensemap.com/resources/nurse-salary/).
|
| Game development - highly paid
| (https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/game-
| developer)
|
| School teaching - low/medium pay - mostly for political
| reasons (i.e most are state employees).
| triceratops wrote:
| Yeah no nursing and game development are not "highly
| paid". They pay a middle-class wage.
|
| Music and art paid like shit even when it wasn't
| infinitely reproducible.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| How many software developers do you think can work in a
| kitchen? Or clean houses? Or work on construction?
| N1H1L wrote:
| Absolutely true. This is where the privilege shows. I
| have helped friends run restaurants, and it's brutal and
| draining. And there is an enormous amount of pretty
| unique skills required to _succesfully_ run a restaurant.
| And I am saying this as a scientist with a Ph.D. and
| multiple publications - the very definition of today 's
| "skilled worker."
|
| The weird thing that has happened is the
| "collegification" of skills. Unless the job requires an
| undergrad or, even better, a graduate degree, it's
| apparently not skillful.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Probably almost all of them right?
| [deleted]
| tonnydourado wrote:
| Not even in the same city of right.
| danaris wrote:
| Work in a kitchen: Maybe. Actually do a good job, walking
| in off the street? Nope. There are dozens of things you
| need to know and be able to do to work _well_ in a
| kitchen--and those things change depending on what kind
| of kitchen it is, but one of them that doesn 't change is
| clear, fast, in-person communication, including doing
| what you're told instantly. A software developer going
| into a kitchen job and thinking they're hot shit because
| they're coming from a "skilled job" and this is an
| "unskilled job" is going to get themselves or someone
| else badly injured very quickly.
|
| Clean a house: Yeah, probably. Clean houses well enough
| to be _paid_ for it: Probably not. Clean houses, well
| enough to be paid for it, 40 hours a week, for years:
| Very unlikely. That takes not just the skills to actually
| get each house _professionally_ clean, but the mindset to
| be able to handle that sort of work for long periods.
|
| Work construction: Almost certainly not. While not all
| construction requires heavy lifting, most does, and most
| software developers are not in good enough physical shape
| to do that on a regular basis without doing serious
| damage to their bodies. Not to mention the care and
| precision required to build things that will both look
| good and last.
|
| Because "be able to do this job" doesn't just mean "has
| the basic understanding of how the mechanics of it work."
| It means understanding the details and nuances, being
| _willing_ as well as able to do it for long periods of
| time, and being able to do it to a _professional_
| standard, not just "good enough for me".
| orwin wrote:
| You are right, but tbh, the first and the third are
| considered skilled jobs. My sister had a work visa
| opportunity to the US with her cooking skills (she chose
| another path in the end), and it was easier for her than
| it is for most SWE.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Low skill is about whether you expect any experience or
| qualifications when filling positions.
|
| Some businesses are built around the fact that most of
| their workforce will be composed of untrained people with
| 0 qualifications and very high turnover. See Amazon
| warehouse jobs, most fast food places. Lots of retail
| jobs.
| danaris wrote:
| Sure; that's the reasonable way to talk about what "low
| skill" means.
|
| The problem is that too many people are still stuck in
| classist, neofeudal mindsets and equate "working in a low
| skill job" with "being an inferior person, not worthy of
| respect/dignity/decent wages/a comfortable life/etc".
| vinceguidry wrote:
| > most software developers are not in good enough
| physical shape to do that on a regular basis without
| doing serious damage to their bodies
|
| That's reaching a bit. I worked construction for years
| before starting a software career. There's lots of
| construction jobs that don't require a whole lot of heavy
| lifting. In fact, there are probably more of them that
| don't than do. And you probably overestimate the lack of
| health of office workers.
| uncletaco wrote:
| I don't feel like driving a UPS truck gives me more time
| to myself. Between driving around all day with no AC and
| hitting the gym so that I can continue to lift and run
| around with mystery boxes I just don't see all this extra
| time materializing.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There is (almost) no such thing as unskilled labor. If you've
| ever tried to move your furniture to a new place and also
| paid people to move your stuff you'll see that movers are
| like 5x more efficient, yet it would be considered an
| "unskilled" job.
| bluGill wrote:
| McDonald's is considered a low skill job, but in reality it
| is high skill, but they have done very well into breaking
| those skills down so that with just half an hour of "class
| room training" (on a video), and a couple hours with a
| trainer you can be productive. Repeat this for a new area a
| few shifts latter, soon you have a lot of skills with
| minimal investment.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >There is (almost) no such thing as unskilled labor.
|
| That is arguing against a strawman created by an argument
| that isn't fully specified.
|
| Even walking takes skill. What is meant when people talk
| about the skill involved in work is how hard is it to train
| someone to do the job, generally someone with the knowledge
| and physical skills an adult is expected to have but
| without any special training beyond that.
|
| Some jobs can be picked up in under a week of training.
| Other jobs require years of training. Some require physical
| skills that are quite common among the population even if
| the average adult doesn't have them (say something like a
| fitness level 1/3 of adults have).
|
| Discussions of skilled vs. unskilled labor rarely if ever
| get into where exactly the line is drawn at, but there is a
| common understanding that jobs can generally be classified
| as either something an average adult could be taught how to
| do on the job or not.
|
| Why this matters is that it determines competition for
| jobs. The more people able to do the job, the less one has
| to offer to find someone willing to accept. If you can
| train the average adult to do the job on the job, then you
| are competing with working adults at large. If you can't,
| at least reasonably, train someone on the job, then you are
| competing with far fewer individuals.
| version_five wrote:
| I think your point could be rephrased around the business
| model being to turn jobs into low skill jobs (basically by
| removing any human agency) so that labor becomes a pure
| commodity. Uber is the closest I've seen to that I'm
| practice. I suspect some warehouse jobs are like that too.
| Most of the time it doesn't work, which is why Uber for X
| never really caught on, because you can't commodify e.g. a
| handyman the way you can a car ride
| ghaff wrote:
| Driving at least in the same universe as competent is
| something that most adults need to be able to do for other
| reasons so Uber (sort of) works. And the product is pretty
| standardized--get me from A to B which is so far/so long.
|
| Most handyman--much less general contractor--tasks are a
| lot more variable and I even have some issues with my lawn
| guy once I get beyond the contracted every two week mow.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The newer goal seems to be employing them in a way that
| doesn't need training, but then claiming that "flipping a
| burger" is a business secret and making them sign a broad
| non-compete anyway.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Khurana, Rakesh. "From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social
| Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled
| Promise of Management as a Profession." From Higher Aims to
| Hired Hands, Princeton Univ. Press, 2007
|
| I'm reading this book which talks about how business schools
| lost their purpose and shareholder primacy upended attempts to
| add professionalism to management. The success of shareholder
| primacy fed back into the business schools and displaced any
| broader social missions that exist in the professional fields
| such as engineering, medicine, and law. Instead, fiduciary
| responsibility blasts through the greater good. It's very dense
| and full of jargon so it takes time to unpack, but it appears
| to be a very well researched book.
| godelski wrote:
| This is just classical first order thinking gone wrong. It
| seems "obvious" that if all things equal, you reduce costs (by
| reducing wages, your highest cost) that you should get more
| profit. This is true. But the premise is false that affecting
| this one variable will allow "all things equal."
|
| What I've noticed is that the standard businessman MBA type
| believes the first order thinking and gloats about how
| "obvious" things are (always be wary of those that claim common
| sense). But the really effective ones understand the coupled
| nature of many elements and the complexities involved. Which
| there's some irony because the standard MBA types also talk
| about Google and companies that make their employees happy with
| high salaries and free food. Working with humans is a
| complicated solution space and should be treated as such. There
| are certainly no universal answers and no solution works
| forever because the environment is constantly changing.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| It is very evident that most MBA "managers" don't understand
| a fundamental concept that just reducing cost doesn't
| necessarily mean profitability. You have people requesting
| small, reasonable increments to their wages as their tenure
| grows. Instead of giving them that, most managers would
| instead prefer letting them go, spend time and money hiring
| someone new, who most likely will be paid the same or even
| more (because usually your wages stay lower if you stay in a
| job than if you jump around), spend time training them and
| still not get the same level of productivity as the person
| who left.
|
| Ultimately they may end up reducing wages or saving some
| money on paper, but it comes at a huge cost to the company in
| terms of productivity and profitability.
| godelski wrote:
| Yeah, I don't understand why wage renormalization is such a
| "radical" idea. Retraining people (even if it is just to
| your style of work) takes time and is expensive. It is far
| cheaper to renormalize a current worker than to have them
| leave and train someone new (assuming the worker is
| competent). Experience, especially experience in your
| work's framework and culture, is valuable. Wage
| renormalization is also an essential practice if one wants
| to avoid wage discrimination.
|
| What's odd though is that it seems MBA types understand
| that people leave jobs because of managers and not money,
| but don't see how the two correlate. Wage differentials
| between old hires and new hires are always seen as personal
| attacks from managers and I think this is perfectly
| reasonable. It is a signal of how you are valued. Employees
| are also not naive and do understand an (average) inflation
| of 2-3% per year and that a matching raise is equivalent to
| a wage reduction (more so in times like these). Wage
| renormalization (especially with back pay) is often a
| relatively cheap means of garnering employee satisfaction
| and increasing productivity. It can turn burned out low
| productive workers into hard workers. Asymmetric pay
| information surprisingly can (not always) cause employees
| to think they are being treated unfairly. Especially if
| they find this to be true.
|
| But I think there is so much more and really what it comes
| down to is "humans are complicated. There is no universal
| solution within all businesses, a single type of business,
| a single department, or even a single team. If nuance is
| not actively demonstrated then malice/naivety is." The
| "simple solution" is that you need to recognize there is no
| simple solution.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Most managers I know just want to grow their headcount and
| are not too critical of their hires.
| gmadsen wrote:
| Not that I disagree with the complicated nature, but there is
| a discernible difference between the amount of business value
| google can extract from an employee, versus someone changing
| a tire. I'm sure there has been analysis done that shows the
| extravagant benefits gets google more ROI from their employee
| hires. That would most likely not be true for other types of
| labor
| Terr_ wrote:
| That reminds me of a Pratchett quote, an exchange between a
| respected local witch and a visiting priest:
|
| > "[...] And sin, young man, is when you treat people like
| things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
|
| > "It's a lot more complicated than that--"
|
| > "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more
| complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that
| they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it
| starts."
|
| > "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
|
| > "But they _starts_ with thinking about people as things... "
|
| -- _Carpe Jugulum_ , by Terry Pratchett
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| | They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in
| the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate
| with servers.
|
| I have found that when communicating with "business degree"
| people, I will often use this as a common starting point but
| then add "but you'll spend far more replacing the knowledge
| that people take when they leave"
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Institutional knowledge isn't in their metrics so it
| obviously doesn't exist.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| My opinion is undergraduate MBA's should be banned. And you
| should need an degree in another field and 5000 hours of
| management experience to be accepted at business graduate
| school.
| version_five wrote:
| I did an MBA and what opened my eyes was the contempt for
| customers, treating them as an annuity, which maybe works if
| they come back because of good service, but in practice turns
| every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more
| lock-in.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract
| more money and get more lock-in.
|
| Which we see causing all the major problems of the world
| right now. I'm glad people are waking up to this. Post-covid,
| I see many people that work at these jobs choosing not to
| support institutions that are turning the human part into
| resource extraction.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Why do you think this is not a reflection of the macro level
| system? You make it sound like it's an aberration to be
| remedied and set industry back on course
| mindtricks wrote:
| When I was in business school for my MBA, the human component
| was absolutely covered, and I suspect that is the case with
| many of them. Part of the problem may be though that there are
| subjects (finance, operations), where I can see the concept of
| a human resource becomes a bit abstract in order to focus on
| other concepts. In this regard, schools can certainly do better
| to connect the people element across disciplines.
|
| For those with a complete disdain for "business types", I'd
| encourage you to read Peter Drucker. Some of his opinions may
| feel a bit outdated, but he speaks quite a bit to the knowledge
| worker and their needs.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| "Human component", "human resource", and "replaceable cogs in
| the machine" sound the same to me.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| George Carlin was on it 30 years ago. Read or watch his bit
| "Euphemisms"
| yunwal wrote:
| I've recently been hearing "human capital" thrown around by
| MBAs
| scruple wrote:
| I genuinely hate how MBA-speak has been adopted seemingly
| everywhere. I truly, truly hate it. I understand and
| appreciate that we need a concise set of terminology and
| jargon to have conversations about these things but these
| words seem specifically chosen to abstract away the human
| quality of the humans being discussed.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Fake-smart business language is a plague. "Per" (worse:
| "as per"), "utilize" where "use" is more correct. All
| sorts of absurd euphemisms for "chat" or "meeting" or
| "talk". It's gross.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Well let's take this conversation offline and circle back
| on this topic.
| pjscott wrote:
| That one has an actual useful definition in economics:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
| alistairSH wrote:
| Sure, and it's use should remain academic. If a manager
| is using "human capital" as a replacement for their
| actual team, there's a problem.
| function_seven wrote:
| We've all been using the term "Human Resources" for what,
| like 20 years now? 30?
|
| It's always rubbed me the wrong way. What was wrong with
| "Personnel"?
| yunwal wrote:
| Yeah, to be clear, I have no issue with it's use in
| macro-Econ, my issue is a C-Suite calling their employees
| and their specialized knowledge human capital to their
| faces.
| krageon wrote:
| The term is dehumanising and has no place in adult
| conversations.
| fullshark wrote:
| The human component i.e. how to get the human to do what you
| want them to do? That doesn't seem at odds with OP's point
| and may even be supporting it.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It's quite possible that my school wasn't that great. I am
| glad to hear examples highlighting these issues, but I walked
| out with a class of over a thousand that year and I don't
| think any of those folks got the perspective you speak of,
| and I think it's reasonable to assume lots of other folks
| around the world aren't getting that perspective either.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It could very well depend on the school, but also the
| students who enroll. Where I went (top-10, but not top-3),
| there was nothing in the curriculum about contempt for
| employees, and I don't think any previously well adjusted
| student came out of the program with such contempt. We did
| have our share of "elite" trust fund snobs and Jack Welch
| cosplayers, but they brought that into the class from
| somewhere else, probably their previous jobs at investment
| banks and consultancies.
|
| I think if you go to a MBA to add financial modeling to
| your toolbox, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go
| to get your paper stamped so you can move on to banking
| Associate, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go
| thinking you're learning how to become Gordon Gecko, well
| you might get something out of it. Most of my classmates
| were actually ex-engineers with 5-10 years experience
| looking to escape from their "senior software engineer"
| career plateau.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Basically the entire time I was getting a business degree the
| word "employee" was never even used! Just different forms of
| "human resources" or "workers".
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| IMO "worker" has some dignity but "human resource" implies
| I'm on a spreadsheet somewhere alongside the depreciation
| schedule of the physical plant.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| We're all on a spreadsheet or database elsewhere.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Absolutely, so "human resource" has at least the benefit
| of being true even if it is baldly insulting to us.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Worker" in the economic context is a socialist term. It
| doesn't sounds dignified to me. Employee is a better word.
| sokoloff wrote:
| "Human" being an _adjective_ in that phrase, rather than a
| noun...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| At my company they lately talk about hiring "resources", not
| "people". This really bugs me. They really seem to be
| hellbent taking any humanity out of work.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Exactly. It seems that the current trend is to dehumanize
| folks as much as possible. Nevermind the fact that businesses
| are made of people, and they SERVE people, and not just their
| shareholders.
|
| In fact, if anything, shareholders need to take a back seat
| on the list of priorities.
| ezconnect wrote:
| The problem is the investors, they don't like companies
| that has zero growth rate even if it is profitable.
| Profitable companies that has zero growth rate are used as
| collateral for loans to buy growing companies with negative
| profits and this bankrupts the profitable company because
| of debt burden. It seems greed is too much in the capital
| markets.
| FredPret wrote:
| What you described is stupidity, not greed. Stupid
| investors get their capital taken away.
| FredPret wrote:
| Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all
| the strings.
|
| Your point regarding business = people stands though
| atq2119 wrote:
| > Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold
| all the strings.
|
| This implication doesn't have to be true though - it's a
| political choice.
|
| There are (well developed) countries in which worker
| representatives have a significant amount of board vote
| shares by law, usually applicable to companies beyond a
| certain size.
| FredPret wrote:
| As a shareholder, I'd never vote to continue employee-
| unfriendly policies in a knowledge work company. There
| are too many shareholders that merely rubberstamp the
| decisions that come up at AGMs.
| rmah wrote:
| My understanding is that in those nations, non-
| shareholders have board _representation_ , not voting
| control. I.e. they have people on the board to hear
| what's discussed and give them a voice in deliberations,
| but no actual control. Is my understanding incorrect?
| kube-system wrote:
| And it may be technically correct depending on the topic. Not
| all workers are employees.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| "Worker" is not exactly a pejorative term. In some circles it
| would even be considered a mark of pride. Although "human
| resource" is ironically dehumanizing.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Neither were ever used in a pejorative sense exactly, more
| with a sense of apathy and an even clinical sense that an
| employee is thought of the same as a widget or a building
| or a piece of machinery.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I'd rather be called worker than the currently fashionable
| "individual contributor", the latter just seems so
| condescending.
|
| Just call me what I am, don't try to sugarcoat it.
| ericmay wrote:
| 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.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| 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.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| If you learnt about cost centers, you know what OP is talking
| about.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| 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.
| Tozen wrote:
| >...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.
| anotheracctfo wrote:
| 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.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I went to a state school with a highly-regarded (at least
| locally) business program, graduated 2013
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| naikrovek wrote:
| 100% agree. every good technical colleague I've ever had who
| got an MBA completely ignores technical considerations when
| making technical decisions, and in general, they really seem to
| be on their own planet afterwards. they are no longer a part of
| reality.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| but are _they_ making more money now?
| trinsic2 wrote:
| This is the way I see academia, which has been thoroughly
| institutionalized by the industrial era. I know that you only
| mentioned the technical aspect education (which has been
| impacted as well), but this is a existential problem with
| humanity. The system attempts to divorce human beings from
| true knowledge that is based on experience to create
| artificial and theoretical constraints on human value. This
| is done to create a power differential by separating people
| into classes. This is why studying for specific fields are
| largely theoretical and not experiential. When we allow
| ourselves to be removed from experiential knowledge, we
| become automatons that are easy to control.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| (upvote) with caveat .. specialization among advanced
| training groups is divergent from "whole systems" approach
| yes, agree.. but careful with undiluted use of the
| 'control' keyword there.. Discipline among
| troops/specialists is not exactly the same as extended
| specialist knowledge, and the means to imbue/acquire
| specialist knowledge.
|
| This post strikes a nerve here.. considering historical
| shifts of agrarian or nomadic people being conquered by
| militaries with advanced supply chains and technology, for
| example logistics, medicine, personal gear and weapons.
| Absolutely yes specialization empowered societies to
| conquer, but also civilian advancements. (the PRC mocks
| Tibetans as 'stone age people' for example, since they lack
| most of modern industrial products for transportation and
| medicine).
|
| Intelligence may rebel against rote indoctrination (paths
| towards behavioral discipline) yet Intelligence seeks
| specialist knowledge like a kind of gravity. Lots of
| patience on this topic, please, its crucial !
| bulatb wrote:
| By their own metrics, are they successful? Do they accomplish
| their goals?
| KvanteKat wrote:
| Yes, but not by "growing the pie"; MBAs increase profits in
| the sense that they reduce the share of profits going to
| workers (at least according to this paper; I'm not familiar
| with the rest of the literature on this subject).
|
| From the abstract of the paper: "...Exploiting exogenous
| export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers
| share profits with their workers, whereas business managers
| do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these
| business managers show no greater ability to increase sales
| or profits in response to exporting opportunities..."
| [deleted]
| naikrovek wrote:
| yes on planet manager they do quite well. they get paid a
| lot more and they laugh a lot.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with
| servers
|
| What am I missing here? Those are in no way whatsoever related.
| One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines,
| the rules/expectations are 100% different. You should not treat
| humans are replaceable cogs for moral reasons and the very real
| reason that they simply aren't. Humans are not 1 to 1
| comparable (not that it would be ok to dehumanize them if they
| weren't) so that way of thinking is not only gross but it's
| silly/short sighted/wrong. I've seen companies treat employees
| as cogs then be all surprised when they fire/layoff one of
| those "cogs" which causes a mass exodus (sometimes resulting in
| literal decades of experience walking out the door in the span
| of months).
|
| Servers/computers are a whole different ball game. For all
| intents and purposes a server is a server is a server (blah,
| blah, same instance size, disk, etc).
| jahsome wrote:
| Are you arguing or reiterating?
|
| What am _I_ missing here?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| My interpretation was "at least we treat servers like living
| things, can't say the same for how business managers treat
| employees"
| x86x87 wrote:
| That was the point. You should not treat humans like you
| treat machines but this happens all the time.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Hmm, I read it as "just they wanted to treat humans as
| 'fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine' it's stupid
| that some people want to do the same things with server". I
| think the "stupid" modifier is what really pushed me to
| think that was the case as I don't think the pets-vs-cattle
| debate for servers is stupid, it makes a lot of sense.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I think that both mentalities with regards to servers
| have their place, but right now it is very fashionable to
| bash servers as "pets". Like Windows vs Mac or
| Playstation vs Xbox, the debate itself is stupid. For
| either humans or servers, everyone wants to commoditize
| them.
|
| Maybe stupid isnt the best word but I feel strongly in
| both cases.
| huimang wrote:
| It's not "fashionable", as that would imply it's merely
| based on subjective taste. It's not like console or
| distro debates at all, which depend on the situation and
| user preferences/taste.
|
| A system where you can blow away the server and
| automatically have a new instance recreated is
| objectively better than a bespoke server that needs
| someone to recreate everything. The less time I need to
| spend manually configuring and tending to systems, the
| better. This is objectively a better model for software
| infrastructure and deployment. These are literally
| machines, not cattle or pets or whatever.
| pdntspa wrote:
| We engineers are absolutely fantastic at rationalizing
| subjective tastes.
|
| Stay at this game long enough and you start to see the
| yada yada about cycles (fashions) repeating themselves.
| Is this debate one? I don't know, but I suspect it to be
| so. Personally I don't think all the extra moving parts
| of having "cattle" are worth it unless you're trying to
| be like Youtube, and the reality is lots of folks think
| they are when they shouldn't. I'm also not OK with a pay-
| for-compute model, but I also understand that the
| accountants and bean counters love it.
|
| In my homelab and in every organization I've ever been a
| part of, there is a mix of both pets and cattle (servers)
| depending on need. (Although, maybe that applies to
| people too?) But drift too far in one direction or the
| other and you're going to be pissing a lot of people off
| that you don't need to be.
|
| In any case I think this tangent is bikeshedding. Which
| is another thing we engineers are great at. I should have
| realized how much one word could nerd-snipe
| krageon wrote:
| If it were better to the degree you pretend, we'd all use
| that. That is not the reality, as such we can expect the
| amount of better to be marginal at best.
| lolinder wrote:
| The difference is that servers _are_ cogs in a machine.
| It 's often desirable to treat them as fungible and
| interchangeable, and there are no ethical problems with
| doing so.
| brianwawok wrote:
| What if the server has AI and a name?
| lioeters wrote:
| When it starts to have memory, develops a personality and
| identity - I can see some people might care for certain
| instances of AI as pets. Like that Japanese guy who
| married a robot (or was it a hologram), then the company
| deprecated the software and it stopped working (or
| disappeared).
|
| The fact that humans can develop emotional bonds with
| machines and objects is strange and fascinating.
| Jensson wrote:
| Current AI are cattle, it doesn't matter if you shut it
| down or put it up on 100 different servers, it behaves
| the same.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you think "treat servers as cattle" is stupid or has
| no merit, I question your credentials.
|
| Decoupling config, app state and the app itself has a lot
| of upside in certain cases.
| mc32 wrote:
| For some people servers have their individual
| "servernalities".
| ghaff wrote:
| Like all metaphors, the pets vs. cattle one started to
| break down if you poked at it too hard. But it came from
| a place where individual servers were highly valued and
| were often at least somewhat unique. Standard operating
| environments had been around for a while but the "monitor
| the server's health and nurse it back to health if
| something's wrong" sentiment was still pretty widespread.
|
| Even redundancy tended to be hardware-based to a
| significant degree. How much did the IT industry put into
| things like failover Unix clusters (and VAX/VMS etc.
| before that) over the years?
| KvanteKat wrote:
| Aren't you just agreeing with the post you're replying to
| here, or am _I_ missing something? Both of you make the
| central point that humans and servers are fundamentally
| different and that descisions that involve humans must
| invariably have a moral dimaneion as far as I can see.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Maybe I did misinterpret, see my reply here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122403
| lolinder wrote:
| I took OP the same way, probably because of the use of the
| word "stupid" to describe the pets-vs-cattle debate. It
| felt to me that OP was drawing an analogy between said
| "stupid" debate and the way MBAs discuss employees, rather
| than drawing a contrast between the two.
| peteradio wrote:
| Treating servers as cattle is the same black and white
| thinking as treating humans as resources. Servers require
| considered care and if you outsource that you get what
| you get at some operational expense.
| tjr225 wrote:
| If someone calls your idiom of choice stupid and this makes
| you feel any type of way at all it might be time for a
| breather.
| lkrubner wrote:
| "One is a group of humans and the other is a group of
| machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different."
|
| This is exactly what they were saying in the comment you are
| replying to.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is
| fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper",
| that nearly destroyed the entire set of advanced societies and
| still threatens to destroy democracy -- that is a strategic
| blunder of historic proportions. Not only have the US and EU
| shipped off much (and in some industries effectively all) of
| the R&D and manufacturing know-how required to lead an
| industry, but we have put ourselves in a militarily weak
| position by relying on manufacturing in adversary nations and
| even subjected to espionage from uncontrolled manufacturing.
|
| The MBA schools focusing solely on short-term optimization to
| extract greater superficial profits are truly toxic for
| society.
|
| Worse yet, they are toxic for the businesses that rely on their
| "expertise". Everything is optimized away, including R&D
| investmentand market development, and the numbers look better
| and better. Until they don't. At that point, the company has
| zero capability to recover, because it has lost all the
| internal talent that knows how to develop products and markets,
| and the death spiral begins.
|
| My company was once invited to bid on a large software project
| for GE, very cool document management system. Later in the
| process, we were given some astonishing terms -- this was
| developing new-at-the-time technology, and we were to be both
| paying our software developers something like 3rd-world rates,
| and exposing all our books to GE, and could not have more than
| iirc 10% profit on any hour of labor. Basically, they were
| hiring us only to run a software sweatshop, and showed zero
| interest in state-of-the art development. I passed and decided
| that with that attitude, GE was on the road to failure. It took
| over another decade of the stock rising nearly 10x, and then
| some before all the chickens came home to roost, but it really
| was a true sign of MBAs rotting the company from the inside
| out.
| FredPret wrote:
| And that is why the "house that Jack (Welch) built" came
| tumbling down.
|
| Decisions were made on spreadsheets instead of between ears -
| among other things, they did stack ranking of employees and
| they seemed to take pride in being oh-so-tough and hard-
| nosed. It worked great until it didn't.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> ...that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions..._
|
| That's putting it lightly. No one who made these decisions
| actually understood the sophisticated interlocking nature of
| technology and interplay of knowledge innovation.
|
| And now that advanced techniques in weaving have to be
| rebuilt at the operational floor practically from the
| foundations on up to be re-purposed to advanced laminate
| manufacturing, do we realize that wholesale offshoring and
| dismantling our "low-margin" textile industry was perhaps a
| little premature...
|
| One of but countless examples where Western financialization
| interests not only shot themselves in the foot, but the shot
| the EMT's that came to try to help them.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I dropped out of a MBA after they had us learning that managers
| and employees are separate classes of people. It's just not in my
| character to ever think like this.
|
| I personally believe the best managers are those who have been at
| the front line and work their way up. They know the business from
| bottom-up and know how to treat people at each layer.
|
| Also got super turned off when everyone just compared where they
| went to get their MBA at. Those who spent like 200k to go to
| Wharton and do the same job as me always felt weird. Those same
| types can get a job just about anywhere with that credential
| alone but also may reduce wages & profits.
| importantbrian wrote:
| > I personally believe the best managers are those who have
| been at the front line and work their way up. They know the
| business from bottom-up and know how to treat people at each
| layer.
|
| I've seen good and bad managers come from both paths. The
| problem with the MBA and no experience path has been well tread
| in this thread, so I'll touch on the other a bit. The problem
| there is that often people who work their way up are promoted
| into management for reasons that are completely ancillary to
| their potential skill as a manager. Management is it's own
| skill and just because you were a really high performer as an
| individual contributor doesn't mean you'll be good at
| management. These are actually some of the worst managers I've
| ever seen. They also tend to lack the sort of broader business
| and strategy knowledge needed to really succeed in upper level
| management.
|
| As an example, I have worked with hospitals a lot as an analyst
| and my wife is a nurse. Hospitals are almost without exception
| the most poorly administered organizations I've ever
| experienced. Part of this is there are a lot of MHA and MPHs in
| upper management who've never spent a single day on the floor,
| but it's also because a lot of the management are people who
| got promoted not because they might be good managers but
| because they were outstanding nurses or Doctors or whatever
| else, and these people often make really bad managers.
|
| What organizations really should do is similar to what the
| military does. Have your potential managers take on small
| assignments and then if they show promise you send them for
| additional training and education, have them serve on the staff
| of higher level officers, etc. But this is expensive and it's
| an investment in training that most businesses are unwilling to
| make.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is that because the military knows they can invest in
| employees without worrying they'll take the training and
| leave? This would be due to both their relative monopsony
| position, and the fact that many employees are on years-long
| contracts.
| [deleted]
| zerr wrote:
| > work their way up
|
| Or their way beside? I mean it's getting more and more expected
| that management and IC are parallel tracks with the same level
| of compensations.
| lm28469 wrote:
| When you put bead counters in charge, they count beads
| HyperSane wrote:
| The expression is bean counters.
| lm28469 wrote:
| When I wrote the comment I had abacuses in mind. I'm not a
| native speaker so I didn't know about the bean counter idiom
| loonster wrote:
| As a native English speaker, I adore your version.
| triceratops wrote:
| GP is still technically correct. Why would a bead counter
| count beans?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Everyone has to start somewhere
| dktoao wrote:
| The "beans" way of thinking is outdated! If any company is to
| be successful in today's environment they need to be counting
| beads!
| dzink wrote:
| A degree is an education, it doesn't turn you inhumane unless you
| were one already.
|
| I was a part of a family business for years before working in a
| corporate environment and then getting an MBA from a great
| school. The MBA helps those who have not seen the big picture do
| so - if you've build a business that means knowing when it
| becomes unsustainable and how to refactor it to keep it alive. If
| you've been a part of a business, that means knowing how the
| other parts work. As an employee you vote with your feet and as a
| manager you trade your social capital with most of the people you
| work with to steer your team in whatever direction your bosses
| desire. An MBA helps you figure out directions at times, or at
| least gives you a hint that you need a compass.
| SSJPython wrote:
| Business Schools specialize in churning out graduates with boomer
| ideology despite graduates being far removed from actual boomers.
| It's one of the reasons they detest WFH so much. Old school
| boomer mentality that still runs rampant in MBA programs.
| [deleted]
| resters wrote:
| Back in the early 2000s when startups were not cool, it was much
| less likely to find people with business degrees working in a
| startup. They preferred Wall St companies and big companies in
| general.
|
| But once startups started to seem cool we got shows like Shark
| Tank and Silicon Valley is full of people for whom traditional
| definitions of status and hierarchy are a big part of their self
| identity and aspirational posture. Those who would otherwise have
| gone to work at Goldman or Deloitte are now bringing their
| status-seeking worldview to startups. While not all have business
| degrees, many have the same kind of high achiever / status focus.
| They want an impressive title and they want a team under them,
| etc.
|
| The VC world is poor at discerning the correct signals, because
| many such employees have impressive educational pedigrees which
| we all know helps to sell "the team" to the next round of
| investors, and they are usually pretty good at making decks, etc.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| There are plenty of homes for the status-hungry, be they
| startups or FAANGs. I'd hoped they'd get bored of tech and
| leave, but there's too much money around, and status doesn't
| really leave professions very quickly. I do think they've
| changed the culture though. Primarily thinking about the weird
| way devs treat the FAANGs of the world: devs from there are
| seen as uber-geniuses without even saying anything. It's like
| we all need to believe that is true to ensure that those places
| remain high status in our mind.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I think the financial crisis was also a big part of it. Goldman
| et al were no longer hiring, or if they were it wasn't with the
| big bonuses and people hated bankers (more than usual I mean)
| so there was an additional incentive not to go to NYC and
| instead head west.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is just the pay to quality of life ratio. Apple,
| Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and even Amazon offered much
| better pay to quality of life at work ratios than finance and
| law. And still do, because they have been and continue to be
| far more profitable than Goldman and the other banks.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Bad MBAs suck, good MBAs are valuable. Bad software engineers
| suck, good software engineers are valuable. Bad lawyers suck,
| good lawyers are valuable.
|
| Every field has good and bad. Painting everyone in a field as bad
| or good isn't great thinking.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Definitely need more Jack Welch types.
|
| Oh wait.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Reducing wages by definition increases profits and the title
| doesn't match what the linked abstract says.
|
| I get what the study is saying, but the crucial piece of info is
| whether the non-business degree managers create an increase in
| profits greater than the increase in profits from wage
| cuts/suppression.
| peteradio wrote:
| You have quite a few things backwards here, if reducing wages
| reduces REVENUE by more than the reduction in wages then you
| have a net loss. Your second sentence only continues this
| confusion when you compare two different definitions of profits
| when surely you mean comparisons of expenditures to revenue.
| bobro wrote:
| if you reduce your wages to 0, you'll probably lose some
| profit.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Not necessarily. Are workers going to work as hard while
| earning less or will they just coast along doing just the
| minimum equilibrium to stay employed? Likewise are workers
| earning more going to feel more pressure to do more less they
| lose their position to someone who will be more motivated.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| It also a strong signal that you have no idea, no longterm plan
| and strategy and just want to micromanage and premature
| optimize the status quo to death.
|
| Its a warning light going off, signaling to any competent
| person with a longterm career in mind to abandon ship.
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| I took the study to imply sales / revenue went down as much as
| salaries.
| socialismisok wrote:
| It does only in a vacuum. Real world is not so simple.
| Productivity can be impacted by wages, morale too, retention.
| donquichotte wrote:
| The time horizon is crucial here. Will it increase profit in
| the current fiscal year? Likely. Will it drive away the
| employees that have other options, which are often the ones who
| help building valuable products? Also likely.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| This is the part I don't understand. Are shareholders really
| that short-term minded? I agree with everything you've said
| btw.
|
| I've come to the realization that most companies have a very
| small percentage of people doing the heavy lifting and
| important work. Somehow they're never compensated in a way to
| reflect that. Brain drain will eventually catch up to you.
| talideon wrote:
| Only if you assume that reducing wages has no secondary
| effects. But that's never the case. You might get a momentary
| bump in your balance sheet, but then you have to deal with
| employee morale issue, deadline slippages, &c., which eat away
| at that bump and then some.
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like your statement is kinda like random business drone
| would argue.
|
| 1. Lowers wadges.
|
| 2. Adjusts spreadsheet.
|
| 3. Declares increased profit!
|
| But that's too simple / not how things play out and then you
| ask for a great deal more analysis. Kinda a weird angle to
| approach it from.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm not arguing any point except that the study data is
| incomplete.
| mhuffman wrote:
| The key part is the assumption that in between step 1 and
| step 2 that productivity and everything related to it remains
| stable. This is almost certainly never true.
| whywhywhydude wrote:
| Do you know how much it costs to hire a single developer? You
| need a team of recruiters and waste countless employee-hours on
| interviews. Retention is a big deal. You can probably provide a
| real monetary value to retention.
| dboreham wrote:
| Long ago someone described this to me as the "putting the price
| of the works cafeteria chips|fries up by 2p|$0.02 syndrome".
| duxup wrote:
| I always wonder what business schools actually teach.
|
| I worked at a company where it was decided that the tech support
| department had a bunch of college drop outs and nobody had a
| business degree so they had to hire some. A few MBA guys were
| hired. These guys had MBAs straight out of school with no
| experience outside some internships... and man it showed.
|
| Their first job was dealing with managing a schedule for about 25
| people who manned the the tech support line 24/7.
|
| They just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that on the
| spreadsheet if you schedule someone on Friday until Midnight...
| starting them at Midnight on Saturday doesn't make a lot of sense
| / they would be working 20 hours in a row.
|
| It's was horrible working with these guys. They embodied the "I'm
| business guy and I made my decision for business reasons and you
| should follow them."
|
| Eventually I (worker drone) took over the schedule because what
| became known as "the MBA team" couldn't handle it / had no idea
| how to balance priorities and etc.
|
| I'm sure there's some great schools for business / MBAs but I
| really wonder what they teach at those schools if just
| understanding simple hours, math, responding to emails in a
| timely / professional manner isn't it. It was almost like the old
| FedEx advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA
|
| Perhaps they should all be required to go manage a McDonalds for
| a year or something?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| In general, business types seem to think that all requirements
| are flexible. Granted, there can be benefits to that thinking
| but they apply it to laws and physics too.
| llampx wrote:
| Except when they come up with a deadline or their own
| requirements.
| spoiler wrote:
| > They just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that on
| the spreadsheet if you schedule someone on Friday until
| Midnight... starting them at Midnight on Saturday doesn't make
| a lot of sense / they would be working 20 hours in a row.
|
| I started my career as tech support back in highschool. My boss
| told me this is illegal and stupid for my health when I said
| I'd like to work a shift similar to this once. I'm not sure of
| it's actually illegal, though.
|
| > Perhaps they should all be required to go manage a McDonalds
| for a year or something?
|
| Alas, I think McDonalds employees have enough to deal with;
| adding horrendous managers into the mix would just make their
| jobs more stressful lol
| NeoTar wrote:
| I think it would be illegal in the UK/EU - you are required
| to have at least 11 hours rest in any 24 hour period, and
| only 8 hours of night work in any 24 hour period.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| In the UK is basically standard to sign away your rights
| from the working time directive with 99% of office jobs
| NeoTar wrote:
| When I worked in the UK (3 jobs over eight years) I was
| never asked to do that; the closest was that I was ask to
| sign as to whether the 48h/week limit would apply week-
| by-week, or averaged out over 17 weeks (as per the
| regulations).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Perhaps they should all be required to go manage a
| McDonalds for a year or something?
|
| I'm a middle aged man and I wish I could do a 3 month
| internship at a McDonalds. I'd probably learn a lot and RUN
| back to my current job.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Honestly based on a lot of the information I have gathered
| and problems I have seen the problem is that the managers are
| subpar at managing and running things, as well as lacking
| leadership capabilities and that's what leads to a lot of the
| horrendous stories from employees.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I have an undergraduate business degree. My favorite classes
| were:
|
| - accounting. Seems like double entry accounting is posted here
| from time to time as something that would interest the
| readership here.
|
| - linear programming - didn't actually get this as part of my
| CS curriculum.
|
| - game theory and Bayesian statistics - staples of HN
| readership
|
| - entrepreneurship - taught how to fundraise and manage a
| startup. Probably like a theoretical YC
|
| - marketing - an evergreen class that comes in handy no matter
| what I'm doing; selling yourself and your work is a life skill
|
| - operations management and logistics - dovetails with linear
| programming
|
| In all, I'm more than happy with the school I went to. It
| definitely fleshed out my more technical education in CS. I
| know not all programs are the same, and maybe many aren't like
| the one I attended, but I wouldn't write off all "business
| types" based on the (in many cases earned) stereotypes.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Yes, I have an undergrad that hit financial markets and
| financial statement accounting analysis and an advanced
| degree in CS.
|
| The dual experience is invaluable, especially for maintaining
| a base level of sanity in a business as a technical employee.
| Why things work how they do will make a lot more sense.
| matwood wrote:
| Spot on. I have a CS undergrad and masters, and if I wanted
| to stay another semester would also have a minor in business.
| Accounting, finance, marketing, and economics have paid
| dividends in my career over and over.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > - linear programming - didn't actually get this as part of
| my CS curriculum.
|
| Isn't this part of a standard Linear Algebra course?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Linear algebra was more like theory, while linear
| programming was more like applications. It involved
| teamwork, projects, case studies, and gaining competency
| using software solvers; whereas my linear algebra course
| was lecture/exam based, had no teamwork, and wasn't framed
| with a practical lens with an eye toward real-world
| applications and scenarios. I had a lot more to learn in
| linear programming after linear algebra.
| dogman144 wrote:
| A mentor of mine who made MD (very senior) at a know place and
| a good MBA at a known school told me this:
|
| Bob's Business School of the South and Harvard teach basically
| the same thing.
|
| You pay for the network of classmates largely.
| arein3 wrote:
| Are there any hard skills a manager should have that are not
| included in common sense?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| You would be shocked how many people lack what one would
| _hope_ is common sense when it comes, especially, to things
| like shift scheduling. Even ones who 've been on the other
| side of it and get promoted!
|
| It seems it is not common sense after all. And no, most of
| it's not happening because of reasonable business trade-offs
| or tension between business and human needs, people are just
| _weirdly_ bad at making sensible schedules. They 'll produce
| these completely fucked-up schedules that someone with a
| little empathy and that aforementioned common-sense can fix
| in five minutes flat. It's baffling.
| duxup wrote:
| I think for me the question is how these guys get out of
| these schools, with a masters, for a role that includes some
| consequential decisions, without common sense.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Obligatory Deadpool/Bill Murray reference: http://qahipster
| .weebly.com/uploads/8/1/4/4/8144013/common-s...
| N1H1L wrote:
| I think the conceit that exists in business schools today,
| and what riles up people too, _is that managing people could
| be taught_. This is why many case studies are performed in
| B-schools, so students can imbibe successful habits. But I
| have worked with successful and unsuccessful managers, and
| successful ones combine experience with creativity. You need
| both. And experience, or even creativity, cannot really be
| taught.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > we show that non-business managers share profits with their
| workers, whereas business managers do not
|
| I wonder why that is.
| ozim wrote:
| You go to have a fancy title on your diploma - and still they
| don't teach about "penny wise, pound foolish" - I am not even
| native speaker but I picked it up somewhere along the way.
|
| I don't need MBA then.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| If this is true, that means that any "savings" to the company by
| reducing employee wages is eaten by management and/or ends up
| costing the company due to their reduction of labor or
| mismanagement thereof.
| pella wrote:
| https://mbaoath.org/ "A voluntary pledge by MBAs to create value
| responsibly and ethically"
| sesellis wrote:
| My brother often jokes that MBAs are the reason the world has
| gone to garbage, they're always "optimizing" everything to get
| the 10% return they had burned into their heads. Anything less is
| insufferable.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| This is not the title of the working paper and (slightly)
| incorrectly editorializes it. They don't increase profit growth
| but they do increase profit (by taking it away from wages). A
| previous version of this work by the same authors was discussed
| here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836059
| sacrosancty wrote:
| atty wrote:
| This is pretty tangential, but my company just rolled out a new
| HR system. I don't like the term Human Resources very much,
| because it implies a level of fungibity that isn't really true,
| but the new one is simply astounding - they call it the "human
| capital management system". I was awe struck that anyone thought
| calling employees "human capital" was at all acceptable, going
| from implied fungibility to full on "you are a replaceable cog in
| the machine". I imagine the PM on that one got an MBA from a
| place that taught that management and labor need to be in a
| constant struggle because workers are greedy and lazy.
| dudul wrote:
| Give it a few more iterations and we'll get "soylent green is
| people".
| chris-orgmenta wrote:
| 'HR' used to be known as 'Personnel' in my neck of the woods.
|
| I don't know why the switch occurred - Perhaps a zeitgeist /
| subconscious conspiracy on a culture level.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| It's a strange one, because... while we actually have many
| physical resources - physical plants, physical equipment,
| etc. - I don't think 'Computer Resources' or 'Engineering
| Resources' or 'Cleaning Resources' are terms anyone uses. The
| actual equivalencing(?) of Humans with Resources is reserved
| just for the "HR" label, and it's ... dehumanizing.
| nelsondev wrote:
| At Amazon, engineers are frequently referred to as
| "resources" and "head count".
|
| For example, "Hi Priya, how much are you resourcing project
| z" translates to, "how many of the engineers you manage
| will you tell to work on project z".
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I think I meant 'engineering' like... physical
| engineering equipment. Perhaps poor choice of words. The
| people who manage a physical location don't use the term
| 'visibility resources' to talk about lighting and
| windows.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I feel the same. The phrase "human capital" is one of the most
| loathsome I've ever encountered.
| notaslave wrote:
| I see any one who refers to people as 'resources' or any
| similar terms as just a parasite. Unfortunately, I had the
| misfortune for working with so many of these parasitic slave
| traders.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Wow. AFAIK, that's as strong a paper as you will get on the
| social sciences. With also as strong claims as you will get.
|
| The title is not the same as the paper's (for obvious reasons),
| and it's also wrong. The paper finds that the business people
| increase profits. More precisely, they are able to turn about
| half of the salary cuts into profits in a 5 years window. (There
| is no analysis of anything long term, except that employee
| turnover skyrockets.)
|
| Of course, the always present disclaimer applies, that this is a
| single work, and any kind of certainty requires replication. But
| well, the claims aren't any extraordinary.
| dbingham wrote:
| Can't read the paper, but the abstract seems to claim profits
| _don 't_ increase:
|
| > But consistent with our first set of results, these business
| managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits
| in response to exporting opportunities.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Profits do not increase _in response to exporting
| opportunities_. Business people don 't bring any market
| opportunity on average. Instead, they do increase solely as a
| consequence of salary cuts.
|
| (It's also not clear where the other half of the salary cuts
| ends up.)
| Arrath wrote:
| > More precisely, they are able to turn about half of the
| salary cuts into profits in a 5 years window.
|
| Isn't that just...how it works? If you now pay $x less, that $x
| doesn't leave the company accounts and is counted as pure
| profits?
|
| I've not yet had a chance to get into the article, but will
| soon.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Isn't that just...how it works?
|
| Hum... No. They are saving $x, and getting $x/2 as extra
| profits.
|
| But anyway, management is supposed to impact a company's
| revenue. As a rule, profits and salary should be correlated.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Cutting salaries or jobs can incur other costs. Lost
| productivity (worse morale, you fired the person who knew the
| thing and now everyone else has to try to figure it out,
| whatever), overtime pay for those who remain, that kind of
| thing.
|
| It's like if you're spending money on ineffective ads that
| only produce a return of 50% of what you put in. You notice
| this and stop the spending. You're only saving half your
| spending, because the other half was offset by the extra
| sales already.
|
| [EDIT] Point is, it's _conceivable_ that cutting spending
| could, even, _reduce_ profit--it 's not a given that spending
| less means greater profit, and certainly not that it means
| greater profit in the amount of the cut spending.
| Arrath wrote:
| Right, yeah, duh. I was thinking too abstractly as in "the
| perfect spherical cow salesman in a frictionless vacuum"
| sheepybloke wrote:
| Got to plug the associated Freakanomics episode that discusses
| the paper with the author: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-
| m-b-a-s-to-blame-for-wa...
| kragen wrote:
| This is a surprisingly strong argument.
|
| Unfortunately, considering the three groups of people involved --
| managers, investors, and workers -- the only group with the
| incentive and ability to act on this argument are the managers.
| Investors don't care, it doesn't affect their profits. Workers
| care but usually the only action they can take is to go work at a
| company whose managers don't have business school degrees yet;
| they can't tell the investors which managers to hire, and it's
| ulikely that a union could negotiate this as part of collective
| bargaining. The managers' incentive to make more money can be
| satisfied by either getting a business school degree or, more
| easily, going to work at a company whose managers do have
| business school degrees.
| cardosof wrote:
| I took some business classes at NYU eons ago (2013) and most of
| the time we were discussing human conflicts and incentives. I
| think yes, many business schools, even "top" ones, may very well
| suck, but 90% of anything is crap anyway and there are good
| lessons in business classes if you know how to find them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The best way to increase profit is to find ways to align the
| employees' selfish interests with the success of the company.
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