Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA 343
New submitter ElSergio writes "In a two-part interview with the American Physical Society, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, talks about how important it is to be able to think in terms of first principles, a tool learned as a physics student. Later in the interview, he recommends against obtaining an MBA, claiming, 'It teaches people all sorts of wrong things' and 'They don't teach people to think in MBA schools.' In fact. if you are in business and want to work for SpaceX, you will have a better chance getting hired if you do not have one. According to Musk, 'I hire people in spite of an MBA'. He goes on to point out that if you look at the senior managers in his companies, you will not find very many MBAs there."
couldnt agree more (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally agree with this, Its should be same in IT companies as well
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Funny)
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Funny)
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
Well, I consulted with the IT department and the facilities department. Facilities says that, since it's a leased space, it would be pretty expensive to pull out all the cubes and make the necessary wiring changes.
IT said that all the PCs already have mics and built in speakers, and they can get the work-experience kid to hack together a system that samples background noise from all over the office, mixes it, and plays in continuously from all PCs (with the process running in a security context high enough that the peons can't turn it off) by next week for no money.
In light of that, we've decided that a simulation of the open-plan experience is the best way to go. Plus, those worthless non-team-players who "work from home" will love it when we roll it out to them.
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But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
I don't understand why open-floor layouts get a bad rap. I work in one now, and it's great. I never want to see the inside of another cube.
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Informative)
In my case it's because my job is to talk to computers, not people. I don't need or want to hear every co workers phone call, every impromptu in the middle of the hall way meeting, etc. It's only a distraction and absolutely destroys productivity.
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:4, Funny)
There's a balance between open collaborative environments and solitary confinement cubes.
Someone here will disagree with any configuration you suggest because their particular slice of the autism spectrum doesn't allow them to work in their own special snowflake way.
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:4, Informative)
I don't understand why open-floor layouts get a bad rap. I work in one now, and it's great. I never want to see the inside of another cube.
You assume that cubicle is the starting point. It's probably true for many, but I've seen people moved out of individual offices to open floor layout for the sake of "collaboration".
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Funny)
(removes headphones) Huh? Did you just say something?
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*taps headphone wearing developer on shoulder* "Are you busy?
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Insightful)
*FREAKS THE FUCK OUT* OHJESUSCHRISTWHATTHEFUckman are you trying to give me a heart attack?
Awwww crap, I had 7 threads from 3 tickets, the spec, the SRD, and the SDD weaving in my head into something something that was going to go into production code. Can't remember what it was now... Whelp, that's about 2 hours lost and 2 hours I'll have to spend diving into this clusfterfuck again.
So what did you want?
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Informative)
" When people started taking MBA seriously, that was the beginning of the ruination of the American industrial society. When all decisions are based on an MBA's concept of numerical reality, you're in deep shit, because the only thing that can be judged as real is that which can be proved by a column of figures. And when all aesthetic decisions are turned over to these kinds of people, who use these criteria to make steering decisions for a company with no regard for people and no regard for what the product really is, and the only thing that matters is maximizing your profit, you have a problem. Because you can't have quality then; you cannot have excellence. Quality's expensive. I think most of these people that come from business schools have the desire to make sure everything is cheesy. That's what happens when you do things that way." - FZ
http://home.online.no/~corneliu/mother1.htm [online.no]
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree 100%. An MBA is not bad. The problem with people who have MBAs is the bar is relatively low to get into an MBA program compared to say getting into a graduate Physics program. However, there are idiots in Physics just as there are idiots with MBAs, you just don't hear about the idiots with Physics degrees because they don't get very far, whereas with MBAs I think companies still don't quite understand how to gauge and apply them.
I have an MBA. I manage people too. There were a LOT of idiots in my MBA program too, and I work with several idiots with MBAs. But my MBA also taught me some useful skills. Marketing is an art and a science; things like knowing how your customers buy things, positioning your product correctly, where/how/when to communicate to your customers through advertising that your product is available and can solve their problem is not intuitive. Operations planning and Supply Chain Management are critical to every company, and yet there are many ways to do things, and often the ways that people think are the right ways are actually the most expensive ways.
I work in operations and supply chain. In my company, I have obsoleted two jobs and am working on my third, and all of them were my own. In every case we had different people in those positions, and in every case I was able to improve it so it required fewer, less educated people or was entirely automated; once complete they put me in another area. All the people around those processes had their busy-work reduced and they could focus on money-making decisions, which improves profitability. Not a single person was laid off, we just got more out of everyone. That's the value of an MBA.
Automating away jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."
But the unstated part is "...in your company".
If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid [slashdot.org]
Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html [pdfernhout.net]
A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html [slate.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html [nytimes.com]
The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs [slashdot.org]
MBA is NOT supposed to make you an expert... (Score:3)
Worked for 10 years in IT support for a top-10 MBA school (thus posting anonymously). Can attest, in spite of my school's technical cred, that the MBA is mostly worthless. Two years (four semesters) is not enough time to truly learn anything. But the biggest problem is the idea that both students and employers buy into: that those four little semesters make one skilled to make executive decisions in any business, regardless of what it is.
You don't seem to really understand what an MBA is. A modern MBA program is NOT about becoming an expert in any particular field, its quite different from other graduate degrees in this respect. An MBA program is an OVERVIEW of the entire organization. Leadership, law, economics, strategy, product development, operations, information technology, accounting, marketing, etc. An MBA teaches you enough about the various parts of an organization so that you can see things from their perspective. So that you can
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Now, with that background laid, I can say from experience with MBA students that I would not hire 99% of those I
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Coca Cola. A beverage. Quality is mistaken for consistency. Penfold's Grange. A beverage (Australian Shiraz for all those not willing to do the footwork) Quality places it at the top of the market for beverages.
Nike. "Everybody wears Nike" until you actually look at people who take their sport seriously. And then there are a plethora of shoe makers who offer custom fit shoes. Then it comes down to "Nike is worn by newbies, and people who are sponsored by Nike"
Ford. You buy Ford if you can't afford
Common Ground (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally, something Musk and I actually agree on.
MBA == waste of time and money.
Re:Common Ground (Score:4, Insightful)
News flash: highly successful engineer who did not go to business school thinks business school is a waste.
Shocking update: highly successful businessperson who went to business school thinks engineers don't know what they're talking about.
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
Re:Common Ground (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you one thing:
If a businessperson ever doubts an engineer, they are most certainly not highly successful.
Re:Common Ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineers make things. Businesspeople hoard money. Of course they both think they are right... but one of them is.
Re:Common Ground (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
I quite agree with you. However, there's a subtle irony to including "business" majors here.
A century ago, there really were no "business majors" in college. If you went to college, but you were a rich kid who hoped to work in your father's business someday or whatever, you might be a history major or an English lit major, or maybe even something that sounds more exotic today, like classics or art history. If you were inclined toward the sciences, you might even concentrate in biology or chemistry, while getting your overall "liberal arts" perspective.
Nowadays, many universities see the largest number of undergraduates majoring in "business." At some schools, nearly half or more undergraduates are primarily instructed in "business," rather than one out of many disciplines that was traditionally part of the "liberal arts" perspective in college.
I'm not arguing that we should get rid of business majors or reinstitute some old-school liberal arts curriculum. But, it's very clear that the modern "business major" has actually done more than just about any other discipline in reducing the number and variety of "specialities and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints" that you might encounter among college-educated people.
The sheer dominance of the business major actually has tended to reduce the very thing that the parent poster says we should value.
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Of course he learned a lot of that business management stuff, and afterwards did well. But you're kidding yourself if you think the same Steve Jobs that saved Apple in 97 was the one who brought on John Sculley in 83.
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But, if Tesla fails and SpaceX succeeds, I think that will be a solid proof that MBA challenges are actually more significant than "rocket science" physics.
Even without the success/failure results of either company, the challenges Elon has faced in Tesla are a clear demonstration of what MBAs (and Lawyers and Lobbyists) are good for - success in the real world.
OTOH, we need a Lawyer / Lobbyist / Broker tax now, and we need it badly. There are too damn many parasites in this world, and precious few of us ac
Re:Common Ground (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is true, I suspect that what he sees (and dislikes) about the fact is that MBAs (and especially lawyers and lobbyists) are necessary tools in much the same way that soldiers are: they fight with the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists, laying waste to much real value in the process; because the alternative of having the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists march in unopposed is even worse.
Engineers, scientists, and the like, by contrast, get sent out to prod the obnoxiously complex and notoriously noncompliant laws of nature into enough semblance of obedience that they can be put to good use.
Obviously, there is value to having a good lawyer, or a good army, at your back; because there are others out there who have the same, and don't have your best interests at heart; but there is a certain tragedy in watching men, time, and money, get thrown into the meatgrinder in order to keep two adversaries off one another's backs; while there is a certain triumph in seeing the application of human effort bring new areas of nature within the scope of human understanding and utility.
There is not much to an MBA (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago I read a book called The 12 Hour MBA Program [amazon.com]. I have never met an MBA who knew something important about business that wasn't in that book.
Re:There is not much to an MBA (Score:5, Funny)
Years ago I read a book called The 12 Hour MBA Program [amazon.com]. I have never met an MBA who knew something important about business that wasn't in that book.
Wow!
That's twice as fast as all my programming books!
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Don't worry, the MBA has read this [amazon.com] and feels exactly the same about you. It goes so well with the law degree most /.ers have, you do know they call it the soft and hard sciences, not easy and hard sciences right? I'd call it the corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more you excel in one narrow field the more you think you could wing it in everything else. It's why professors are pretty obnoxious to relate to and a lot of IT people are the same just because they know how to command a machine around bu
Re:There is not much to an MBA (Score:4, Insightful)
You are presuming that "knowing about business" is synonymous with "having an MBA". You don't need an MBA to understand ROI. Any non-retarded engineer can understand ROI with a two minute explanation. Other business concepts can also be learned quickly by anyone trained in logical problem solving. Engineers are trained to balance energy and mass using "in - out = accumulation", and quickly "get" that the same applies to money. An astonishing number of accountants don't think that way, and just blindly apply memorized formulas where they don't apply. Companies run by CEOs with engineering degrees are more likely to be successful than companies run by CEOs with only an MBA.
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Any engineer would have spent a semester learning all about it (probably in the same project management class where he learned about engineering economics, "value engineering," Gantt charts etc.).
CS majors might not know about it, but that's because they're not engineers. (I know this because I have a CS degree and a real engineering degree.)
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Years ago I read a book called The 12 Hour MBA Program [amazon.com]. I have never met an MBA who knew something important about business that wasn't in that book.
I read a book once about the alphabet. I too have yet to meet someone that speaks English that knew something important that didn't use the pieces found in that book.
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And it took you 12 hours to finish reading the alphabet book???
The MBA Disease (Score:2)
I tend to dislike the celebrity business owners, but the more I hear Musk talk the more I like him.
Better chances if you do not have one? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a one-time worker bee who is now a part of senior management (with an MPA and not an MBA, although they are pretty similar) I understand what he is saying but I disagree that people should have a better chance of being hired because they have the three letters next to their name.
I hire for open reqs based on the PERSON and their SKILLSET, not the degree they may or may not hold. You know, the way it should be. What Musk is promoting through another one of his ridiculous soundbites is that we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Musk can be absolutely brilliant and incredibly and insanely stupid all at the same time.
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I did read the article and while I had a typo in the first line of my comment, I think it's silly that he says he would be less likely to hire someone with an MBA.
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One of the things I've learned over the years, is that an MBA does nothing except prove that a worker has jumped through a set of hoops, like a good doggie. This is useful information to a degree, meaning the person is trainable and given a set of goals is likely to attain them.
What a MBA does not prove is how successful they will be running any business, that comes from experience, which is the best education I've ever had. But my degree means nothing to me today, simply because it is not relevant at all a
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I hire for open reqs based on the PERSON and their SKILLSET, not the degree they may or may not hold.
Musk is essentially saying the same thing. However, where someone else with that philosophy would tend to think positively about an MBA (even though it wasn't an essential or bottom line requirement), he thinks negatively about it. However he did say he would hire people with MBA's anyway, if they met his other requirements.
Re:Better chances if you do not have one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Henry Mintzberg [wikipedia.org] has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.
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we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Actually he said:
So, he hires people who have the skills he needs, basically overlooking the (mis)education. I do see his point about a misallocation of resources (MBA school) but young kids might be forgiven for believing that it's worthwhile. On the other hand, I know some "I can't get
Middle-manager's Business Accreditation (Score:5, Interesting)
I have many degrees that put letters after my name, including an MBA. I still remember how one of my professors railed on the MBA because all it did was enshrine "spreadsheet thinking," ruined creative thinking, make people more susceptible to buzz-word thinking, make dumb people feel smart, make them better at smart CYAs for dumb decisions and about 5 other criticisms that currently escape me. He even called them the "Middle-manager's Business Accreditation" because people at the top cannot behave that way, or they ruin companies, so most MBAs won't make it there for long; and the people at the top love MBAs at the middle level because the top brass are not limited by the MBA's decisions and know how to control them.
Same Argument as Certifications (Score:2)
Maybe not in his mind, but definitely in mine. The 'thought-path' that ends up in a certification is not something I want to encourage. Perhaps if it were more like an RPG, and a certain amount of 'XP' resulted in a new certification rank.
Dungeons and Dragons (Score:5, Informative)
Groupthink not wanted? (Score:5, Informative)
According to Musk, 'I hire people in spite of an MBA'.
What's that, he doesn't like mindless groupthink, and the inability to understand the difference between a rule of thumb and actual thought, judgement and understanding of reality? No wonder the guy is a failure.
Take it from an MBA expert (Score:5, Interesting)
MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.
You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg [wikipedia.org] who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.
His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.
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Kinda of like computer science, it's suppose to teach a lot of useful things. Yet most people get a degree and can't write a freaking linked list from scratch, let alone implement trees. If you are lucky, they might be able to write up a simple sorting algorithm. Titles mean nothing, output is the only thing that counts in this world. MBA, CS Degree, any certification, whatever.
Breaking News.... (Score:3)
Successful business leader XXX announces that his college program (or lack thereof) is better than any other....
I've met serveral good MBAs... (Score:3)
This good ones, were excellent technically then took what they learned in MBA in terms of business functions and applied them in a way the made everyone more effective and productive. The bad ones tended to be poor performers in their chosen fields who ran to an MBA as a way to avoid working on technical details that they couldn't comprehend.
The worst were smart, but evil. They took an MBA as a fast path to management, where they gulled their peers with enough technical know how to achieve their dreams of power and influence. The more power they got, the less tolerant they became of other "smart guys." They were viewed as threats that might expose potential technical short comings in the MBA's plans.
Man has bias (Score:2)
uses bias to judge people news at 11
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uses bias to judge people news at 11
Oh, the irony of sympathizing with those who judge for profit.
Halfway through my MBA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the material has been common sense, in my opinion. The organizational leadership classes have been interesting. Right now I'm in a class that focuses on ethics and sustainability. Nothing to this point has been about cutting costs for temporary increase in profit. There is plenty of talk about efficiency, though.. but that is a necessity for a business to survive.
I plan to use my MBA to make a point in future job interviews - I am willing to take that step to continue learning. Regardless of the overall usefulness of the degree, it does take dedication to juggle my current job, school, and helping raise my 9 month old son.
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Pretty sure if MBAs were running Tesla, they would have waited for lawsuits filed for the fires before they did anything, let alone giving customers a free retrofit by mere recommendation rather than mandate from the NHTSA. It's just running the numbers, where goodwill and customer satisfaction is difficult to measure in a spreadsheet.
A MBA is about to reform a business ... (Score:4, Funny)
While he walks through the dining room of the restaurant he realizes: "this is the profit center!" ...
Now he turns to the kitchen and realizes: "this is the cost center!"
Guess which part gets closed first and who gers fired
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HA! Like an MBA would make that sort of rookie mistake.
No, no, no. The only profit centers in a business are management and possibly sales. At least, according to management and sales.
MBAs actually taught to think in delusional ways. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the MBA worldview:
1) If it doesn't exist on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist.
2) You don't have to know the details of the business to run it.
3) Productivity is what we say it is.
4) Everything is measured in money. The physical world barely matters.
MBAs seem to share this worldview with those ever accurate, johny-on-the-spot folks commonly known as "economists." They know everything too.
Re:MBAs actually taught to think in delusional way (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed by far the most important one:
If you can't easily calculate a dollar value of something, it must be 0.
This rule alone is why all MBAs refuse to see any downside exists to strategies that inevitably create more rework, or piss off key customers enough to impact future sales.
Elon Musk for President (Score:3)
"I had an existential crisis when I was 12 or 13, and [was] trying to figure out what does it all mean, why are we here, is it all meaningless, that sort of thing. I came to the conclusion that the best thing we can do is try to improve the scope and scale of consciousness and gain greater enlightenment which will in turn allow us to ask better and better questions, because obviously the universe is the answer, so what is the question? All questions, I suppose.""
"A lot of people in physics are concerned about expenditures on manned space flight because they are not sure what's the point. Generally I would agree: if we were just going to bounce around in low Earth orbit, it's questionable whether it's worth the expense. However, if one considers the objective to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, I think that physicists should support that because it increases the probable lifespan of humanity dramatically, and dramatically increases the scope and scale of civilization, which in turn is what will lead to greater enlightenment in physics and other arenas. "
Slashdot fortune: "Forty two."
This warms my heart (Score:5, Insightful)
One more reason to like the guy (Score:3)
After my physics degree I thought it would be a good idea to learn something about business so I got an MBA.
While at business school I couldn't believe the crap they teach there. Especially the believe in the efficient market hypothesis is a joke.
But it wasn't all a waste of money. Having to get everything done as part of a diverse team, while being swamped with work, did prepare me well for consulting, and according to my wife markedly improved my social skills :-)
Re:Mostly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Though it wouldn't hurt many to actually have lengthy and non-propagandist History and Geography lessons.
Re:Mostly... (Score:4, Insightful)
It will hurt the person receiving it, who then has to watch the rest of the world re-enact history.
Being able to laugh at the average level of geography knowledge doesn't make up for it.
Re:Mostly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. Post doctoral research in social sciences(which don't typically fall under STEM, in spite of that "science" there) tends to be informative and useful. Graduate level history has a ton still to uncover. I could see your argument applied to thinks like art of philosophy, but I don't really agree.
If anything the T part of STEM(and that's where my job is) is among the most suited areas for associates degree.
"I think X is mostly bullshit therefor X isn't really useful" isn't a good approach to academia.
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That's just an argument from personal incredulity, and you know it. Basic social introspection is trivially useful, and is used for more effective governance, as long as politics don't interfere. Understanding recidivism rates, for example, is an incredibly basic tool of a healthy legal system. Societies that apply data-driven understanding of how people work to their governance make for better places to live.
I'm not saying all social sciences are useful, but if that were the threshold, you'd have to pr
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Basic social introspection is trivially useful, and is used for more effective governance, as long as politics don't interfere.
When has politics not interfered with governance?
We'd be able to fly as long as gravity doesn't interfere.
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Basic social introspection is trivially useful, and is used for more effective governance, as long as politics don't interfere.
It does sometimes? I'm not sure how much quantification you're wanting here. Not every job in government is inherently political.
Also: word to the wise, we can fly, in spite of gravity. Because good designs can work around known forces. You seem to be taking a very 1 dimensional perspective on this.
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Fucking ivory tower elitists. Always spitting on the common man.
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Oh, okay. I'm sure your anonymous screed against non-specific individuals in a field is totally a valid criticism of the field in general.
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Unless you're talking homeopathy, I'm pretty sure medicine falls under the category "science".
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Unless you're talking homeopathy, I'm pretty sure medicine falls under the category "science".
Until the surgical robots finally take over, there is a nontrivial element of skilled craftsmanship in the messier areas of medicine. You wouldn't exactly call a surgeon 'blue collar' (or pay one accordingly); but the surgeon is doing something surprisingly similar to sculpture, just inside your torso, and with years of school to instruct him in what parts are 'patient' and what parts are 'pathology' so that he cuts the correct ones...
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Ask a physician if what he does is science, if (s)he is a scientist. There is a some science in medicine but mostly medicine is a field of applications.
So is Engineering.
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Ask a physician if what he does is science, if (s)he is a scientist. There is a some science in medicine but mostly medicine is a field of applications.
If my doctor doesn't think what he does is science, I'm getting a new doctor...
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Maybe you should understand what science is.
You doctor does not practice science. He practice treating. This is how it must be. Or do you wan't your doctor doing experiment on you?
Science is a process.
Most Dr. don't even know how to apply scientific findings.
This is not to say they don't read about science, and they don't apply thinking to their practice. On the its a Practice and not a Lab.
I have ran it any Dr. that are great to do their job, but move outside their expertise and they can't apply new data t
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Usually it's not considered STEM, which stands for Scientific, Technical, Engineering and Math. You could argue medicine is a technical field, but that's not how the term is generally used.
Re:Mostly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Troll much, bro?
Hardly.
Most is a waste of time. Academia offers little for most graduates in non-STEM courses that isn't obtained by going out and getting a damned job and learning what the real world is like 10 hours a day instead of spending 52 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons 9 months a year with 10 weeks off for breaks.
Oh, you got a marketing degree? Did your study group make a presentation? We'll be sure to put it up on the refrigerator with your gold star. You can look at it every day while paying off your tuition for the next 20 years.
Are there a minority of graduate-level experts in history and art who do great things who benefited from a couple more years of schooling? Sure. ...but how much of the world needs to be made up of research historians and future art professors?
MOST is a colossal waste. How many non-science degree'd folk would have been better off by just getting a damned job in their profession a couple years sooner?
Also, I see that medicine is debated below as "non-STEM," but I'd call it science, for sure.
Or, you know, I'm trolling, and getting modded down by people with useless degrees that they use to impress other people with useless degrees so they all feel better about their "accomplishments."
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You know what is ironic about this comment?
It's made by people who think the only thing worth knowing is stuff that makes you money RIGHT NOW. MBAs are in the same boat.
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If you want to be honest about it you really don't need universities for STEM degrees either. Most of it was taught as a part of apprenticeship programs by companies in the old days. Some of the best engineers I knew as an intern were non degreed and learned in the job. The problem for many companies is when they get done teaching someone that person is pretty valuable and is likely to leave if given the chance.
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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So he founded PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX. How would he have PayPal taken seriously by the global financial industry with no expertise in the financial industry? Until then, it will just remain a bit player in online transactions. If Tesla Motors and SpaceX are to become mass-market commodities, are physicists the best people to put in charge of marketing, litigation, customer service, and financing, to name a few departments?
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Haha, Very good point.
Not really - a car made of solid granite would be impossible to set on fire, if useless as a means of conveyance.
Yea, I know I'm being a pedant, but these days it seems like you almost have to if you don't want to end up buried under metric tons of bullshit.
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Not really - a car made of solid granite would be impossible to set on fire, if useless as a means of conveyance.
Not true. It was very useful in Carmageddon.
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Not really - a car made of solid granite would be impossible to set on fire, if useless as a means of conveyance.
Not true. It was very useful in Carmageddon.
As a weapon more than a conveyance, though.
Damn if that's not one of the best games ever.
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Solid granite in a 100% oxygene atmosphere burns like ... anything else.
I would wager you don't even need 100% pure oxygen, likely it burns at 60% or 75% perfectly.
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Solid granite in a 100% oxygene atmosphere burns like ... anything else.
I would wager you don't even need 100% pure oxygen, likely it burns at 60% or 75% perfectly.
Sure, but in that situation it's more like ablation than burning, isn't it?
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really... Musk recently came out with a rebuttal to the "rampant FIRE! threat of his cars." So far nobody has been hurt, and in every case I've heard of the car warned the owner that it was in distress, and allowed/assisted time to evacuate. Plus the battery pack design itself does a good job of comparmentalizing the problem.
No doubt someday someone will take a Tesla at high speed right over the vertical support for a guard rail, and rip the battery pack the length of the vehicle. But you also have to ask how survivable that kind of accident would be in a conventional vehicle.
Don't forget, lithium batteries have almost the energy density of gasoline - but not quite. Plus gasoline is a liquid, once the tank is ruptured, you don't have a lot of control over where the gas flows. I saw one mention that statistically the Tesla, even with 3 fires on its low production quantity, is ahead of gasoline fires on conventional vehicles.
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
And then the MBAs will take over, fire the physicists, hire a bunch of equally vile and sociopathic marketing types, and will find ways to cut corners, move all manufacturing to low-tax cheap-labor cess pools, hire equally vile and sociopathic IP lawyers to sue anyone who ever had an idea that even vaguely resembled the company's, rob the company of every dime it has, drive it into the ground.
Rinse and repeat.
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Comparing PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, to other companies in comparable fields: do we see financial firms moving en masse to "low-tax cheap-labor cess pools"? Do aerospace companies do this? Last I heard, there are not a lot of financial or aerospace jobs in low-tax cheap-labor cess pools.
It could be that the likes of Boeing, VISA, BofA, etc. are run by plenty of MBAs and they do a fine job.
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Start brushing up your resume, and if you own stock, start looking at getting rid of it now and be prepared for the day when you and anyone else with any skills is given the boot. You really don't want to be on this airplane when it crashes. You can be sure the MBAs won't be.
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There's a reason why the Manhattan Project needed Leslie Groves [wikipedia.org]. Few people remember him today, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was every bit as important to the success of that endeavor as the scientists. He was also the guy who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, completing it ahead of schedule and under budget.
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You must have missed the part where he got into MIT.
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
Saying you dislike MBA's is not the same as saying you don't need managers and executives. Groves was brilliant at organizing and running major projects, but he was an army officer for the Corps of Engineers, not an MBA. The degree hadn't even been invented back then, which helps explain why we aren't speaking German or Japanese.
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I know that fraud and felonies and stuff aren't enough to exclude you from contracting; but that's just deviant...
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I think we all realize that MBA programs purport to teach students how to manage these types of projects. We're just qestioning whether they act
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On the other hand, I always see and hear about MBA's who jump into a business, throw out buzz words like "streamline" and "synergy", whirl around like a tornado, weak havoc on business processes they don't understand and move on to the next project to give someone else a headache while leaving all the underlings to figure out where the cow ended up an
Physics versus MBA (Score:5, Interesting)
Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.
A quick search of Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few "quick MBA" selections. Titles like:
The One-Day MBA
MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools
The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster 2012 -Man
The 10-Day MBA
Complete MBA For Dummies
I couldn't find anything remotely similar for a degree in physics.
What else you got?
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I have a MBA from a top 25 school, but I also have 4 years towards a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and 12 years experience in academic high-performance computing, so I hope I have street cred when I say this...
Saying you can get a "12 Hour MBA" is like saying you can get Ph.D in astrophysics by reading Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". It's Dunning-Kruger made manifest.
I found my MBA to be just as challenging as my physics degree. Strategy, game theory, operations, and economics aren't exactly power-puff courses.
Re:Physics versus MBA (Score:5, Funny)
Quick MBA books probably cut to the chase and tell you how you can dismember, cook and eat competing managers, creatively shit on subordinates from great heights, and how to fool semi-conscious boards into letting you set up your stock dumping scheme.
That's the first chapter. The rest of the books is phone numbers and email addresses of lawyers who can help you bury the bodies and elude indictment on RICO charges.
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As usual, those who bash MBA most loudly are the ones that hire them:
Read more carefully: Musk said he hired people in spite of having MBA's, not that he wouldn't hire people with MBA's.
There is no such thing as a bad education, only bad students.
There are both.
I have an MBA, it was totally awesome to get, I did it while working full time, learned a lot, apply the knowledge often.
If you also have a serious technical degree, and think that about your MBA, you're the exception. I've known some very astute people with a serious technical education, who also got MBA's. They all say they did it for the credentials. They say that while they learned some useful basics in the MBA curricula, none of them were terribly impressed by it (including Wharton, etc.) an