Does Silicon Valley Really Devalue MBAs?

Silicon Valley

In developing and scaling its amazing portfolio of products, Facebook and many other top companies religiously follow some version of the this mantra:

  • Observe what people (users) do.
  • Ignore what they say they do.

That same perspective should be kept in mind when reading the recent words of Silicon Valley elite downplaying the importance of an MBA in the technology industry.

While senior tech executives and investors are saying that the MBA doesn’t matter, what the industry is doing tells a very different story. And what they’re doing is hiring and promoting a whole bunch of MBAs.

Khosla Ventures General Partner Keith Rabois

Khosla Ventures General Partner Keith Rabois

MBA BASHER OF THE WEEK: KEITH RABOIS

The B-School-Basher of the Week is Khosla Ventures General Partner and PayPal mafia member, Keith Rabois, who took to Quora to chime in on the lack of value in an MBA.

In two separate questions Rabois agreed that MBAs are looked down upon in Silicon Valley, contended “most elite business schools teach directionally wrong advice,” and concluded with “MBAs … adversely attract people who value credentials.”

(Okay, he got me on that last one.)

Rabois’ comments have generated almost one million views on Quora. And with the chorus of established tech voices dismissing the MBA growing louder, one might conclude that the degree is an impediment to success in the industry.

That simply isn’t true.

TOP TECH COMPANIES ARE FALLING ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO HIRE MBAS

When you look under the hood, it becomes clear that top technology companies are falling all over themselves to hire new business school graduates and that the MBAs who are already in the industry are kicking ass.

With the chorus of established tech voices dismissing the MBA growing louder, one might conclude that the degree is an impediment to success in the industry. But that simply isn’t true.

Take Amazon for example. The Financial Times reported last year that the dominant retailer expected to hire hundreds of MBAs in 2015. These grads will work in operations, finance, product management and consumer leadership, according to the company’s director of University Services, Miriam Park who happens to be a graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management (though as an MSc, Management, not an MBA).

Indeed, Amazon is hiring MBAs aggressively for positions in the US, China, Japan and Europe where they recruit from London Business School, Insead, Iese, Esade IMD and Oxford Saïd.

FOUR OF MIT SLOAN’S TOP MBA EMPLOYERS THIS YEAR WERE TECH FIRMS

Back here in the States, they cast their net even wider, beyond usual suspects like HBS, Stanford and Kellogg. Last year Amazon hired 13 graduates from Vanderbilt’s Owen School and was the top employer at Michigan’s Ross School of Business, picking up 27 Wolverine MBAs.  This year, Amazon hired a record 59 of the 455 MBA graduates of Michigan’s Class of 2015.

At MIT Sloan this year, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft were among the top eight employers of MBA grads, with Amazon hiring 22 Sloanies, the second bigger hirer at the school behind only McKinsey & Co.

Amazon is hardly the only tech behemoth competing against McKinsey, Goldman and Deloitte for these new grads. Joining them in Ross’ top 10 hiring companies were Microsoft at #6 and Dell at #10.

Similar scenarios are taking place across the board at the top business schools. At UCLA’s Anderson, Google, Amazon and Microsoft each hired more than ten new grads last year, with Adobe, Apple, Ebay, Samsung, Symantec, and VMWare hiring at least five each.

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