If MBAs are useless, we’re all in big trouble

I agree and I disagree. The MBA itself is pointless without considerable effort of the student to learn things related to startups.

MBAs teach you to be good middle to upper management in an organization with some structure. It teaches you how to navigate and mold an existing structure as needed for the course of business. It doesn't teach you how to build a company from scratch.

I would argue that a skilled business professional is useless for some startups and necessary for others. Want to tackle enterprise software? A few of those MBAs can provide insight and credibility.

Web guys are useless in a native world. Cocoa guys are useless in a Windows world. XAML guys are worthless in an Cocoa world. Right tool. Right job.

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First, an aside.

Paul Graham was wrong about something. He wrote "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" (still a great essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). He was mostly right:

Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Ok. Reading on...

Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. [...] But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult.

Agree so far...

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. [...] Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

Holy shit! This is right on. Go nerds!

I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. [...] An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

[T]eenagers are always on duty as conformists.

Wow. This is some deep insight. Always on-duty as conformists... what does that seem like? (Hint: corporate work.) I'll get hack to that.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. [...] Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

So far, Paul Graham is batting 1.000.

In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Yes, this is true. I was somewhere around the 30th percentile of my HS pecking order and completely fine with that. I wasn't "cool" bit I wasn't unpopular, people respected me, I never got beat up. But if you wanted to be 98th, you really had to put a lot into it.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. [...] [T]hat's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen.

Yes. Go on...

Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

This is where Paul Graham is wrong. Yes, high school is horrible for the least popular couple percent. For most of us, even the nerds, it was fine. You don't lose your income if you're at the 30th percentile of the pecking order, and you have other things to focus on. You have things (e.g. college) to look forward to.

The Work World is more like high school than college or academia. Actually, it's worse than high school. In corporate Work, the popular kids are actually evil (in HS, most of them weren't; perhaps selfish and immature but not evil) and you lose huge amounts of money when they fuck you over. Also, there is no external definition of merit. In HS, you can work hard and get good grades and that gives you a signal that even though you're not popular, you're doing well in society's eyes. There is nothing like that at Work. Your grades (performance reviews, job titles) are given by the popular kids who have no desire to be fair and who will be as unfair as they can get away with if it helps them get ahead.

Adults don't normally persecute nerds.

Well, this is just not the case. Not in VC-istan, not in 99% of jobs even at "tech companies". The popular kids rule with an iron fist. They dress it up with a pseudo-meritocracy and "performance" rhetoric and credibility metrics and job titles, but it's just high school popularity, this time played for keeps. And yes, if you're one of those nerds who puts his head down and tries to be as good as possible at his job (instead of playing politics) you will be attacked in most environments. Why? Because an actual high-performer scares the shit out of the popular kids.

[Y]ou can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

This is exactly how corporate Work works.

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another [...]

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. [...] Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

Office politics, right there. Managers (like HS teachers) are powerless to prevent it, because the information they get is filtered through the most intimidating/extortive subset of the people below them (who silence everyone else and become the real authority on "performance").

The inhabitants of all those worlds [e.g. high school] are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

Great insight. I agree. I disagree that Work is different for the vast majority of people. How do you get promotions? Or venture funding? Or just not fired when a "low-performer" witch hunt happens? Or get real projects where there's actual high-impact work available? Oh, right. Popularity.

Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

99% of office jobs. High school work isn't "pointless". It just has no impact on the outside world because it's evaluative by design. That's how bottom-rung corporate work is, too. They aren't giving you work because it's important. They give you undesirable and unimportant stuff, for a dues-paying period of a few years, in order to evaluate you for eligibility for real work. Getting out is based on popularity, not merit.

It's worse at Work because, in high school, real effort is made to make the work at least marginally engaging and educating. At Work, no one cares. The Work is supposed to be dogshit. It wouldn't be a test if you were learning something from it.

Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.

This is where Paul Graham gets it wrong. The high school popularity game is the more "real world"-like game, not the nerd be-smart-and-do-great-work game. Who is going to get the boss job, the well-connected idiot or the hard worker? The former, even in "tech". Your boss gets to tell you what to do because he has more credibility (popularity) with the organization.

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Okay. I'm not dissecting this to pick on Paul Graham. His essays are insightful, inspiring, and extremely well-written. He gets a lot more right than he gets wrong. He also wrote this 10 years ago, before the Social Media Douchepocalypse was even on the radar. I just think that he had a very unusual set of experiences that led him to conclusions closer to how the world should be than what it is actually like. Now, I'm just as biased. Remember that I'm the Hacker News anti-Christ. I think of Paul Graham as someone very like me with a radically opposite set of experiences. In his world, brilliant hard-working people are rewarded. In my world, base about 20 years later after "the cool kids" had set up permanent camp in something (Silicon Valley) that was originally by us and for us, such high-quality people are exploited, and often treated very badly by people who see them as a threat. He and I are both right, over what we've seen. We just have small data sets. Unfortunately, and I hate that this is true, I think my conclusions are more representative of what people face today.

What could this have to do with MBAs? It's a euphemism for "the popular kids". I know some great people with MBAs, but when disparage "MBAs" as a class, we're talking about the well-connected talentless smiling idiots who are competing with us for venture capital, managerial position and favor, and visibility. Even on our fucking territory (software and technology) they are fucking demolishing us. It's not even a fight. We're just getting trampled because we don't know how to fight.

When we gripe about MBAs, we're not talking about something that has anything to do with the coursework. It's the attitude of entitlement that comes with having a globally visible and permanent "I'm One of the Cool Kids" credential, and the connections that come with it. You have to be smart to get into a good PhD or JD or MD program. To get into a top MBA program? Family connections or work experience (read: high-status jobs, meaning popularity) will suffice. It's not what people learn in MBA programs that we have a problem with. We just don't like these fucking invaders. And we shouldn't like them. Technology is our fucking turf, fuckers. Get off our territory or I, for one, am ready to attack.

Maybe this kind of phraseology is part of the reason you keep getting passed over for promotion.