If this were a Jeopardy round, the title would be: “CFA or MBA?”
purealpha Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > MBA people, useless. used a lot less words. I always meet your type when interviewing, and their attitude does not take them far. Ipso facto, educational qualifications mean not much on their own, MBA, Phd or even CFA. It is a whole different thing performing while on the job. But, to get your foot in the door - you need networks, background, social engineering, right schools or outstanding academic achievement. Good on you if you have all.
I have a moderate respect for 700+ GMAT. I have a great respect for 750+ GMAT. Quote those numbers to me and I will respect the MBA, regardless of the MBA brand name (top N, blah blah blah) or the MBA degree.
MBAs after 10 yrs experience are not useless, but my observation has been time and time again, newbie MBAs are not only useless but create huge damage. It goes like this, the company is like oh goodie we can pay six figures for this person who is supposed to be awesome, the person comes in, has no clue, does no work, takes credit for other people’s work, shouts out easy stuff from the sidelines that creates quick illusion of $ while screwing the company long-term and then leaves before they have to take responsibility for their awesome recommendations. I guess that is what they are trained to do in these programs.
The MBA is a useful curriculum for organizational management and strengthening your knowledge in strategic business concepts in various market conditions. The problem as it relates to the crisis is that MBA schools expanded their financial engineering course offerings ,recruited and encouraged students to learn about I banking as opposed to learning how to run a company. Master of Business Admin. NOT… Make-up Bull****& Aspire!
The MBA is a way of signalling that you are A) smart enough to get into whatever school, B) serious enough about business to drop a crapload of money and C) potentially connected if your school is really good. It does not in any way signify that you know how to DO anything. Unfortunately, some employers don’t seem to realize that. But hiring MBAs is not the root of this recent crisis. This crisis is one of incentives and morals. If you’re more incentivized to make short-term profits and not question the party line, then, no matter how smart you are, if you want to stay employed and compensated, you will tow the line. If you’re incentivized to get it right over the long term and you are smart enough to do so, then you will. The people who had the ethics and intelligence to see this coming and wanted to do the right thing probably didn’t stay employed for very long on the sell-side, in particular.
I saw it coming and said so, but I didn’t get fired. They just told me to change my graphs and make the default/delinquency trend look nicey so our credit risk area would stop asking questions so that my incompetent PM could keep making bank. 
It was as you say totally a problem of incentives. But I’m fine with blaming MBAs too.
Right, but you changed the graphs so that you wouldn’t get sh*t-canned. If you had stuck to your guns, you probably would’ve been let go.
so MBAs don’t add any value? Should i go back to engineering or pursue MBA? I don’t like numbers (find them boring) but I like making $$$ through whatever means, like starting a MLM.
That’s true, if I went into Angies office and had said “hey, you know they are calling cause they smell something rank, dood these loans are crap, we aren’t gonna get away with securitizing this junk and getting away free, let’s graph to emphasize the true risk”…fired. As an analyst I don’t get to choose which graph the incompetent PM uses, there was a highly relevant graph I was quite proud of, she used the other one…
I find the title of this thread offensive.
You were just a cog, purealpha. I’m sure your boss described her position the same way. Kind of the point of my post. Nobody is incentivized to do the right thing.
The movie the Corporation lays this out nicely, everyone including the CFO is a slave to making the decisions that maximize profit short-term, once you set the system up like that it just goes and goes and cannot be controlled. What they should do is make corporations directly answerable to the people, if you f-up states vote and yank your charter and it is goodbye Goldman Sachs. But then that makes a lot of sense so it will never happen.
I think it’s a little lazy to try to pin this on MBA’s, usually because fresh-faced finance MBA’s do not go into the risk mgmt or MBS structuring roles that were so central to the credit crisis. Finance MBA’s typically become investment bankers, fundamental research analysts at investment mgmt firms, or corporate finance associates at big companies. You really think the guys (mis)calculating VaR at the banks were 27 year-old MBA’s? At my school, the companies recruiting for the quant/programming roles wouldn’t even come to the business school. They would go to the general graduate career fair and the financial engineering program.