alt Hacker NewsI object to your essentialism. Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is just as false as presuming them from someone’s skin color, race, sex, gender, occupation, age, or other observable characteristics.
I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies.
The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
Replies
> The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
Oh there absolutely are cabals at work. The infamous "Paypal mafia" [1] where multiple members eventually infiltrated the US government comes to my mind, and Ivy League universities in general are even more infamous for very close knit alumni networks.
[dead]
> Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is
You didn't get my point (or you were looking for a way to nitpick). When I said "the MBAs", I did not mean "the human beings in possession of a paper saying that they passed the exam required to say that they have an MBA on their CV". It was a shortcut to design a kind of people who may join at that point.
> I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking
I'm sure you meant no harm, but think you can try to understand the meaning of a message. I try to express an idea with words. What matters is the idea. If you nitpick on the words, you may never get the idea.
> arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs
Nope, but all of them became as big as they did by becoming the toxic entities they are, for the sake of money and power.
MBAs are like mold. They appear when the conditions are right.
[dead]
> arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs
The parent commenter didn't say anything about founders, that was your addition.
A reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that these companies were in fact fun places to work until the MBAs arrived. Personally I don't take offense using MBA as a shorthand for "individuals more focused on profitability than purpose" even though I recognize that doesn't describe everyone with that degree, although admittedly, part of that is because I don't have a better term for it. It's a bit like my own handle; I don't in fact think every corporation is inherently evil, but when I say "anticorporate" there is a common understanding that I'm opposed to many of the shitty behavior of modern corporations, and not that I'm nitpicking that LLCs or sole proprietorships are somehow better forms of legal entity.