A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I have worked at several startups where I was like employee number ten, and you can always feel the culture shift the moment they start hiring MBAs.
Yea. I can't think of a single MBA I've met that wasn't a piece of shit.
Cause theyre literally given inflated egos about "how great your business acumen is" when really theyre morally bankrupt parasites who finished (compared to real degrees) coloring books.
Jesus Christ... I've been a principal software engineer for 6 years now and my workplace is paying for a free MBA... should I just quit and say no thanks???
Do it - the macro effect comes from the scores of people who only have an MBA. Adding a business degree to an engineering degree likely won't change your understanding of reality your grounded engineering view gives you.
I reckon there are better free ways to waste your time, and many don't require moral corruption.
Depends, do you think you can hold on to your humanity? Are you looking forward to working along side some of the most soul crushing people you will ever know? Really, it's nothing more than training you to view humans as nothing more than a commodity. If you are cool with either thinking that way or operating in an environment that demands that kind of thinking...
I just wanted to add it to my resume for a pay raise... it's a nonprofit university and completely online, so the toxic networking aspect has been minimal thus far.
Do it, it's just better for your bank account. Kickbacks appreciated.
I have a PhD in research psychology, and worked with researchers in a lot of other disciplines. I have been mansplained about topics in my field (including the topic of my dissertation) by more MBAs than any other field. More often than not they are vastly oversimplifying or just getting things completely wrong. Try telling them that though and it's like talking to a wall.
I work with one on the daily. I swear, his primary expertise is in buzzwords. Tried to tell me how much better a certain format for documenting requirements is because I can let the people that require something do the documenting for me.
Never mind that this format is neither feasible outside his example case, nor even sufficient for this specific case.
I wonder if their general incompetence at most things makes them desperate to be good at something that actually matters to the point that they feel the need to act smart about shit they don’t really understand. Especially when you think about the nature of their field and how horrible their peers are/also are it really starts to be a bad feedback loop. And then there’s the extra fun part about the kind of people that MBA programs attract in the first place.
It must be awful, them constantly having to justify their existence as parasites. I’d feel bad for them if they didn’t cause huge amounts of damage at all levels while avoiding therapy.
Yeah I do think there is something to the culture of MBA programs. All the information available for current and prospective students at my university was very much of the tone that mbas change the world. The halls of the business school were filled with famous rich people who'd visited the school or gifted money along with plaques about MBA grads and the amazing things they did. It's just full of subtle reminders about how the degree is a gateway to being some big powerful person. I'm sure that makes an impact on the students' attitudes.
Businesses would not be terrible if business education is actually tempered with some humanities. In fact, I am strongly of the opinion that every field of study should have some humanities component to them. None of the fields exist in vacuum, we have to have at least, some appreciation of other fields, lest we risk creating silos in the name of organization. And that is precisely happening in this age of hyper-specialization.
100%.
Children are always told that they could become a scientist or engineer one day and that this would be a great thing to achieve. Scientists and engineers are so highly regarded, yet they are often complicit in creating the necessary technology and machinery for most of the worlds worst projects. Climate change, plastic pollution, nuclear weapons, are all created by the worlds smartest and all the while they're being told they're doing a great job and bettering the world.
Ethics needs to be mandatory in all STEM studies. Jesus at least just make them watch Oppenheimer.
Ethics is largely mandatory for engineering majors (source: am finishing my bachelor's in electrical engineering), but the first job or project you take will ask you to throw that out the window. (Source: family members who are also engineers)
There are two areas of safety considered: Operator/client safety, and regulatory compliance. All other safeguards are optional and ignoring them is encouraged.
As a civil engineer with only a tiny bit of experience cos I switched to software. That holds true. Environmental and other ethical concerns are not even an afterthought in vast majority of engineering projects.
Good, an MBA is just a degree in exploitation. I will fight you over this take like a goddamn racoon over the last piece of food in the dumpster.
Econ is for soothsayers, idiots, cultists and abusers, don't bother to change my mind.
I am glad you say soothsayers, I have been saying for decades, and even in this comment section before getting to this comment, that macro-economics is essentially astrology for MBA bros
But what if you're right and I want to join?
I'll see you there
Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can't write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It's fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.
Then there's business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, "business school" wouldn't even be an option at a university.
Not to knock college undergrad core curriculum, but that strong base ought to be acquired before graduating high school.
No can do, gotta teach students how to pass the tests that gives the school federal funding
a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics
A lot of history work is based on statistics and crunching numbers, apparently. For example, ACOUP is currently currently doing a series on the life of pre-modern peasants that involves a lot of calculating and modeling.
MBAs have destroyed the world. We used to have good paying jobs and affordable rent.
I'm sure there's probably a few good MBA's out there, using applied psychology to trick assholes into spending their money on the greater good.
I've never met one but, statistically, you know?
The world is powered by a collective STEAM engine:
Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics.
Arts is such a fundamental component for communicating advancements and inspiring the creativity that fuels further discoveries.
The real problem is believing there's an objective difference between art, science, humanities, etc. It's an artificial division under capitalism between what's directly useful for profit, control, etc. and what's not.
Regardless, yeah fuck business school. That's got no value to anybody.
Stem major checking in for an arts/humanities major to hold hands with
As a STEM graduate, I would much rather hold hands with an econ graduate than a business graduate. Economists can do real good for the world, while MBAs seem to be mostly harmful.
The ownership class and their mba lackeys have done a real bang up job not only separating the two cultures, but getting them both to think through the mental model of business and profit whenever they're pondering how to practice their profession.
Fucking finally we're talking sense.
As an econ major with a BS, please don't lump me in with the econ majors who went to business school for a MBA. I like cool math, not venture capitalism cancer.
Prove your purity
The only thing funny about the Laffer curve is how little it now matters.
It was used to justify Reagnomics, which then immediately proved we weren't nearly as high on the Laffer curve as we assumed. Because of this, we have concrete evidence that lowering taxes on the rich doesn't increase government revenues.
Yet we're still doing that 50 years later. Despite the only vaguely scientific thing behind it proving it doesn't work decades ago.
Imagine being in a catholic family, reading the Bible, and always walking away thinking that Judas did the right thing (despite everything else the Bible says). That's US economic policy for the last 50 years.
The only problem is that VIVALDI could not implement feature of 5 minutes of work which was requested many years ago. Fuck'em.
We gotta have an economy to function as a society but the rub of economics in the West is that if it acknowledged why the economy functions the way it does, it would be peeling the facade off our supposedly democratic system of governance and folks would start taking a much keener interest in why wealth is getting so concentrated. We can't have that, so instead we get increasingly elaborate versions of economic Lamarckism and the field's Darwins are ostracized as cranks. 
