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Bulldoze the business school

theguardian.com

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Re: Bulldoze the business school

#141

Post by diminoten »

gaius wrote: post #65
baybal2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. Unfortunately, it looks that more than a half of big name universities are happy to admit people without such, or even no undergraduate studies background.

No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. All the top US MBA programmes are stuffed with people with 2-3 years investment banking or management consulting as their sole experience. The concept of a management consultant is possibly even more ridiculous to begin with

At least the school my fiancée is currently attending (Kellogg) is decidedly not stuffed with people 2-3 years in investment banking. A lot of people here are exactly the same graduating class (2011) because of the almost mandatory 5 years. There are exceptions, but a large portion of the people I've met during these past two years are exactly my fiancée's age.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#142

Post by diminoten »

mdorazio wrote: post #133
speleding wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may not all list it as a hard requirement, but a school like MIT sloan says on their site applicants have an average of 5 years of work experience [1]. You can maybe get accepted with less than 4 but you would need relevant other life experience. (I'm pretty sure HBS listed 4 years when I applied decades ago, but I cannot find a reference) [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/career-development-office/employment...

Ah, that explains it. The business school cohort average age has dropped considerably since you applied. These days it's typical to apply with 2-4 years of real-world experience (acceptance & start add a year to that) and uncommon to apply/be accepted if you're over 30. Keep in mind that average experience statements like the sloan one are heavily skewed by the few old-timers in the programs who have been working for…

I think you're overstating the effect. Most people I meet at Kellogg (I'm not attending, but my fiancée is) are here with 4-5 years of experience.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#143

Post by flyingcircus3 »

watwut wrote: post #113
ItsMe000001 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to me a bold claim to me - don't actually teach anything, just demand stuff! And behold, by pure magic (and LOTS of selection) we get a handful of successful students who manage to pass, validating this "teaching" style. Is that really what you have in mind? I'm actually someone who did and does not have a problem with that style. It suits me very well. At university I mostly learned from non-university so…

> don't actually teach anything, just demand stuff! That is not all that bad pedagogy assuming you have reasonable demands that escalate over time. It is to extreme if you never explain anything, but if your teaching style consist primary of forcing students to learn by themselves and explaining only minimum necessary, then I strongly approve. Giving students everything directly is more incompetent, because it imo re…

The strawman that makes your argument so brittle is that there are only two positions on the spectrum. The school of technology at Purdue has some of the brightest people I've ever encountered. What makes them extra luminous is their ability to spot common pitfalls novices run into. They learned this by being engineers in industry. Thus, those educators are supremely positioned to find the struggling adulthood novices that are good at fundamental academic skills, and keep them on the path.

Just like Ford Motors tried to convince everyone that they were the best, they eventually believed their own ad copy, and got entrenched in making cars the way that had always made them. And then all of Ford's competitors reverse engineered his logistics, and said "if your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, for the times, they are a changing".

It worked for Bob Dylan pretty well too, when popular music was dominated by Elvis Presley.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#144

Post by flyingcircus3 »

infinite8s wrote: post #138
Meegul wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had to write a scheduling algorithm for our home-grown operating system. I was running into some very difficult to debug issues, so I asked my TA for help. They had no clue and told me to consult the professor. The professor wouldn't help. Our textbook offered no guidance. We're not allowed to discuss projects whatsoever with other students. So after north of 5 hours spread over a few days of trying to fig…

Who's going to help you in real life when no one has the answer?

Stack Overflow. The key to debugging is to not be so arrogant as to assume you are working on a problem for the first time. In fact, this is the underlying premise of rubber duck debugging. You tell an inanimate object what you did to get where you are now, and as you enumerate and elucidate, your faulty assumption is often laid bare.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#145

Post by gaius »

cjalmeida wrote: post #135
gaius wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

either the CEO is stupid He or she might be; plenty get those kinds of jobs on their personal connections rather than their track records. But a more usual scenario is that the CEO wants to fund their next bonus by slashing jobs, and paying management consultants - with the company's money - to facilitate that is, to that sort of person, a shrewd move.

>He or she might be; plenty get those kinds of jobs on their personal connections rather than their track records. I'm yet to see a stupid person as the CEO of a large corp. Sociopath maybe, but hardly stupid. Now an unpopular opinion: maybe the slashed jobs were no longer necessary and letting people go was needed for the company to remain competitive?

Those people were hired for a reason; if the CEO literally cannot think of anything useful for them to do then they have utterly failed as leaders. But they are lavishly rewarded nonetheless.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#146

Post by jaredklewis »

theyinwhy wrote: post #108
jaredklewis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone has bad ideas (or ideas you disagree with) in one area, why would that mean all their ideas are bad? To take an extreme example, Bobby Fischer is easily in the running for best chess player of all time. He was also an anti-semite. Does that somehow make his chess less good? Should we ignore that he was an anti-Semite? No! But should we cut all his games from chess books because of it? Indeed, if…

Why promote a chess player who is anti semite if you could promote another one who is not?

Why stick our heads in the sand and pretend he didn’t exist? It’s like refusing to teach American history because it involves slavery.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#147

Post by pcmoney »

zrobotics wrote: post #63
pcmoney wrote: post #26

1. He makes a good point 2. Its not the point he thinks he makes 3. Full disclosure one of my degrees is a B.S in finance but I work as an engineer. He makes a point that "At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks." But isn't that true of most degrees? I would argue even most STEM grads end up in the cubicle…

"How about people who know a field and are in the field are more likely to commit a crime in it? I am sure the number of blue collar embezzlement is dominated by plumbers/electricians etc." I think you entirely missed what the article said. The claim was not that most white-collar crime is committed by managers, but that the individuals most likely to commit a crime were either b-school grads or veterans. In your exa…

Fair point, I wonder if union electricians do commit more fraud since they feel more secure/less touchable etc a clearer version of the point I was trying to make is saying a correlation between business school grads and white collar crime does not imply that business school is the cause. Could have many kinds of selection bias there. I shoulda just stuck with the ol correlation doesn’t imply causation bit.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#148

Post by mbesto »

anu7df wrote: post #129
arbitrary_name wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a management consultant. My work is not ridiculous. What is ridiculous is the level of damage caused by the utter apathy and incompetence that exists in many organisations. Just because someone is technichally skilled and highly intelligent, does not necessarily make them a capable leader, or a good manager, or even a productive employee. I have met managers, engineers and architects and other technical folks cos…

I am sure you believe management consultants provide value and drive changes that shore up flailing organizations. That might even be objectively true for a minority of cases. But having seen a few MBB engagements "deliver value" my take on it is that consulting business survives by delivering one service (only). A backstop for the executive leadership to justify their agenda. MBB said so! Sice they are expensive as…

> But the typical management consulting bashing is about the strategy kind.

I technically do strategy consulting. Generally speaking, yes there is a lot of fluff to industry (if you want to call it that), but that's not because the role itself is flawed, it's because the individuals who are employed in it are. Note - I also do not have an MBA.

- People who are in their early 20's with 2-3 years of experience can offer great insight to strategy work, but their lack of experience really limits the amount of value they can provide. Clients frankly do not want to pay for them (they do anyway, but you get my point). So how do you get new talent into this area if you're not willing to pay for it? (I have no solution btw). Truly talented people move on elsewhere.

- I personally do not sell strategy services that cannot add value, but that's because my firm is a boutique provider and that's part of my value proposition. The big boys (McKinsey, Bain, etc) will literally sell you anything their price tag can justify, even if they don't genuinely believe the price tag is justify. That's not a knock of those firms, it's just the "Way it is"...I would do the same thing if I were in there shoes (there's a reason I'm not).

- Corporate profits continually grow at all time highs (despite relatively slow top growth outside of tech). Management/strategy consultants are VERY good at increasing profits, but are horribly matched for helping grow revenues/sales.

- Many companies have good internal strategic people within their exec teams, but need an external voice of reason to justify their position. I often claim my work consists of "Using Email, Excel, and Powerpoint to convince people to act". Sometimes it is very valid to have someone else with a different perspective to provide advice about something that you may be biased about. Again, my value proposition is that I'm not afraid to say what needs to be said, free from any incentives. Unfortunately many firms in this space like their follow-on services opportunity too much (class example is a Accenture/PwC/Deloitte/etc firm telling a client in a strategy session that they need to do an ERP implementation, oh and by the way, they sell that implementation too...THAT is bad strategy advice)

- I have first hand seen the result of good strategy work that has made individuals incredibly wealthy. I've also seen strategy fees hurt the bottom line because execs are unwilling to act on the advice they need. It's not a foolproof service offering - this is absolutely true.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#149

Post by bsder »

Meegul wrote: post #86
bsder wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to discuss your project with other students in an operating systems class is insane . You need to get input for the subtle bugs that are going to occur. There is a reason why operating systems and compiler classes are notorious. However, if 5 hours debugging is too much, I'd get out of the field now. Try debugging something for MONTHS while your bosses are all hanging over your shoulder. In addition, 5…

I agree - 5 hours really isn't that much. I've spent much more time than that on single issues in the past, and it's by no means something that's scaring me out of the field. I should've spent more time in a single session hunting down the issue, but I didn't quite have the time (or motivation after seemingly making no progress) when it was only one of a few things I had to work on that week. One of my issues with th…

> Seeing someone's thought process when debugging something like a kernel would've been really useful.

The first thing when doing a kernel is don't be clever. Suboptimal isn't just good--it's preferred. Linear searches are fine. Shell sorts are fine. Arrays are fine even if you have to recopy them a lot. Hashes are too complicated. Trees are too complicated. Randomizing things is too complicated. Until your kernel needs to scale, the "suboptimal" ways are more understandable, and, as a bonus, they sometimes are more optimal as they require less up front overhead.

The second thing is "replace pieces". Because you weren't clever, you can rip out and change chunks with relative ease. It's not "proper", but, if you're on a deadline, sometimes swapping some component and having the bug go away is good enough. Just realize that, if a bug goes away randomly rather than because you understood it and killed it, you have planted a time bomb likely to blow up in your face at the worst moment. :{

The third thing is "hypothesize and THEN test". This drives me crazy with junior folks. If I had a nickel for every time I got the response "I dunno" in reply to "Okay, why did you think doing X would fix things?" I would be a rich man. This is the piece that makes debugging a kernel hard. You have multiple layers of abstraction, and the bug is probably 3 layers away from the thing that triggers it.

Something which I tend to use more for things like kernels than "normal" programming (whatever that means) is that I religiously check and assert on my data structures even at great performance penalty. Having a data structure blow up immediately is far better than soldiering on and getting the malfunction after everything is scrambled.

Something which I am becoming increasingly religious about is that time is an input to my functions that operate on "external" inputs (button presses, RF events, USB events, network packets, etc.). It's a pain sometimes, but when you need to debug something subtle, it is really nice to be able to replay things exactly.

And, a final piece of advice, learn your tools. GDB, for example, is amazingly powerful. Unfortunately, I only seem to learn more about it after the fact. :( I do something really stupid and someone asks "Why didn't you just do in gdb?" and my response is always "Because I didn't know about it."

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