Sheryl Sandberg Says an MBA Doesn't Matter in Tech

That's going to be heavily weighted based on your personal background and the quality of the specific class.

I agree. Veering slightly off on a tangent but another major (and oft-forgotten and undervalued, I think) advantage of the degree path is that a good course will lead you down the best and possibly most efficient paths of discovery for the important things, and also give you a bit of a kick in directions you maybe wouldn't naturally go on your own, but which turn out to be very valuable after some uphill struggling.

These are things you can figure out, and discipline yourself into, but on your own time and with a fair probability you won't do a great job, when self-learning. With a degree much of that work is outsourced to specialists who have a lot more context and ability to iterate on experience, and that gives you a much smoother path to just focusing on your main job - learning.

So, a good compromise, and the reason I ask this question, is to get recommendations on what to learn, then decide myself how I will do it and on what schedule, etc.

I'm a chemical engineer and self taught programmer who turned strategy consultant. Graduated from my MBA a few weeks ago, so I might be a bit biased :)

I've found that different people find different things valuable in their MBA. We had an entrepreneurship prof who was also an investor who took us yoking from term sheets to buy outs. Found that super valuable, but yes, no doubt could read up more on this online as well. Same for finance, which was a topic that I didn't know that well before. From a course perspective also got more out of strategy than I expected, but that seems to be very dependent on the prof teaching. (Read 'profit or growth' by bala if you want a book, but more suited for large corporates)

Above all though, i think you get more out of the MBA in personal development (leadership in group work, dealing with pressure, being confident with new material, etc.) and network (after 1-2 years you are at least well connected to a group of people that have high business ambitions, plus alumni). In that sense it's difficult to replace the full MBA experience with a set of MOOCs.

Finally, I've always found it powerful if someone in a room full of technical people knows more about business than any other tech guy in that room (or vice versa, being the only biz guy who understands tech or can program in a room full of biz guys). The MBA is one way for technical people to make that step.

realizing that I didn't answer the question... Here are some things I think would also be interesting, regardless of the paper for more tech oriented people:

- time value of money (finance)

- basics of accounting (p&l vs cash flow, you'd be amazed how many startups die by running out of cash even though their p&l is positive)

- understanding competitive advantage & successful market entry (strategy)

- basic operations: the difference between efficient and market responsive supply chains (right supply chain for right product, i.e. Don't typically airfreight toilet paper); and the newsfeed or model if you make real products

- lots around marketing (pricing, channels, etc.)

- some stuff on more executive lvl management (do executives have most impact by the decisions they make themselves, or by the premises they set for others in the organization within which they make decisions? If the latter, how do you work best as an exec?)

- negotiation 101: there are some great HBS cases available online, it's even fun as a Friday afternoon to negotiate between people and see what works best.

- governance and boards

- basics of investing, leveraged buyouts, private equity/VC

Accounting is really important, but if you have the basics getting to the point you can see though accounting tricks has limited value and takes a lot of work.

It's like an extreme version of the 80:20 rule. You can get some basic c functions to compile in a few hours, but seeing though the winner of an obfuscated c contest on your own might take years.

Just remember, your not a specialist and becoming one takes a lot more effort than a few MBA classes.

Well, when you quantify your opinion like that, there's not much of an opinion left to even debate.

"Different people get an education for different reasons" is a nice statement, and I would even agree that it's true. But nothing follows from that. It's not a statement that one can draw conclusions from.

In your original statement you're saying "MBAs are useless now, but it's because of HR, and it sucks that MBAs are useless but it didn't always use to be like that". Now you're saying "no, they aren't useless, in fact they're better than engineers".

Oh, how easy it is to claim a strong point when you're unconstrained by the truth.