BossTalks.com Tag: it

aliraza on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

aliraza — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:25:09 +0000

as we know MBA is a globally recognized degree and MBA IT is a good task to do if someone really wants to get enough of IT
But it is not necessary or compulsory there are some other post graduate degree e.g. MS IT or some others
i am a Pakistani and being a Pakistani i must say worth of degree is actually the rank and goodwill of university

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kaushik on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

kaushik — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:01:55 +0000

Hi, i have completed my MCA and want to do MBA. Should i do MBA IT or Marketing or some specialzation.pls guide me?

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Trivani on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

Trivani — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:05:44 +0000

It depends, An additional qualification will only boost your career, It will give you an opportunity to other options when there is a crisis in your career.

Network Marketing – Social Networking, Social Entrepreneurship, Internet Marketing, Social Network Marketing. Humanitarian Business

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green on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

green — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:19:58 +0000

Everybody has different goals. Personally I think MBA as a helpful, but not necessary knowledge. It does cost a lot - and before investing that much you need to calculate your ROI. Sometimes you can better ROI by gaining by specific knowledge - project management, finances, law, etc. - but not the "whole" MBA package. I would say we can think of MBA as some kind of "all-stuff-need-to-know-crash-course", but again - it's all about personal goals and ROI :-)

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susanvarghese2007 on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

susanvarghese2007 — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:30:57 +0000

Are you kidding me? MBA's rock! The experience of being part of a B-school is what makes an MBA an MBA. Classes at odd hours...tight deadlines...assignments to be submitted on a daily basis...group work (?) and managing free riders?? And not to mention creating those classy ppt's at 4:00 in the morning and sharing a pot of coffee with folks you just don't want to work with. (Forget sharing coffee with) That's management dude!

Till I went to a B- school- I never realized what all the glam was about the so called MBA's. When I was there- I thought it was all about learning- googling to be precise and of course learning how to effectively "plagiarize". Each day is hard work- but at the end of it all- I realize that the process of getting the MBA was the "actual learning" in itself as against all the OD, OB, T &D, or Management Concepts...

Now does an IT professional need an M.B.A?? Having worked in the IT sector for a few years now- I can certainly tell you this- if you want to climb up the ladder- you gotta have those 3 letters next to your name...If you are in a managerial role- you'll do better with an M.B.A. But if you are a born, natural leader- trust me, you'll still do better with an M.B.A!!

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green on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

green — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:38:53 +0000

MBA is helpful in case if you want to "organize" all your knowledge and put everything in "proper order" in your head. It helps to get closer to alumni which eventually is a vital moment for networking.
Other than that - as I mentioned before on this forum -- even nowadays there are companies who prefer entrepreneurial skills and previous startup experience to "cold books of MBA student".

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leninkster on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

leninkster — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:05:45 +0000

I have written quite extensively in blogs about this very subject. I keep coming back to the same question "Who actually benefits from an MBA?"
Obviously, the individual who has spent large amounts of irretrievable hours and vast sums of money, believes it to be the case, or they wouldn't do it. Equally as obvious, the companies that mandate an MBA be part of the pre-requisite for a job believe it, but actually can't give concrete evidence as to why it helps. The Colleges and Universities definitely think its a good idea, as they would stand to lose millions of dollars if the MBA was debunked.
But if everyone is mandating MBA, and more companies are having MBAs run their organisations, why are so many companies in difficulty?
I think it was Paul Getty who said, if you have two executives that think alike in the same room, one of them is redundant.
Is the current MBA fanaticism putting out clones of people all thinking the same way?
I agree with the statement, “If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got”. Maybe it's time for companies to start to invest in self-taught entrepreneurial spirit, and actually go forward, rather than rely on managing things so much that they just stay still, or worse go backwards. I don't know, only time and perhaps the collapse of a few more companies run by MBAs will tell I guess.

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green on "Does an IT professional need MBA?"

green — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:34:21 +0000

Saying "IT professional" I mean somebody, who is looking forward building career or business in IT. IT tech entrepreneur, business owner, CIO/CTO, etc.

Guy Kawasaki (an entrepreneur, author and the CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture-capital investment bank for tech firms) thinks the following:

I don't think an M.B.A. matters very much for starting a company. A much better educational background is an engineering degree. You can always hire MBA's, but if you don't have the ability to conceptualize and deliver a product, you've got nothing.

However, he does have an MBA himself. Even if he mentions that the value of an MBA for company starters is a negative $250,000.

Brad Feld (managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital) has his own thoughts.

If you want a two year break from life, go to business school. If you want to meet a bunch of new, generally smart, and always interesting people, go to business school. If you are a techie but like the business side of things, want to get an intellectual (and functional grounding) in business stuff, want a two year break from life, and want to meet interesting people, go to business school.
...
If you are an investment banker or a management consultant, it’ll help. If you are looking to be a VC, it might help, but it probably won’t, as the population of people being recruited into the VC business continues to be very small.

Sounds like he agrees that MBA doesn't really help for entrepreneur who is going to do business -> VCs way, but still he insists that MBA does help for the personal growth at least.

But let's think for a second. If you are interested in being entrepreneur only, and you do not want to run the business yourself -- MBA really could be an option not to pursue, but to hire somebody with MBA. But isn't the best part of the whole entrepreneurship is running your own business? Of course, many people see startups as something to start it, get funding, cash out and repeat once and once again. Frankly speaking, I never thought this way about them - this is how "bubble" can happen, but not how business works. I prefer my business not to get any funds at all, but better to be profitable on it's own.

Nevertheless, MBA could probably be overrated.

Only 146 of the 500 executives reported having MBAs, a surprising number considering the hundreds of thousands of B-school alumni with enough experience to qualify them for top jobs. What's more, only 71 received MBAs from the top 10 B-schools, and two-thirds of those executives have degrees from just three institutions: Harvard Business School, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

MBA still is pretty much a tool which helps you in your career. But entrepreneurs usually do not search a job, they prefer to create their own business. So, isn't this the case when top school MBA can give you nice knowledge and a huge debt also? Sure it will. We can also try to consider MBA as something what we buy to sell with profit. We can sell it to potential employer, we can sell it to get more social status, better salary.. If we are going to start our own business, then we will be buyers. In this case, do you think it's smart to get overpriced B-school education instead of just the same education?

Becoming a CEO will ultimately be determined more by your ability to scale social ladders than what you've learned in graduate school.

And stop once again. Do we really then need a formal MBA education? May be so called "personal MBA" will work better? Still it's an educational investment, which is not that huge and much more affordable by many people.

According to the advocates of the Personal MBA, all you have to do to measure up to the pricey MBAs turned out by B-schools is to keep gaining work experience, read a series of books at your leisure, and talk about them with an online community.
...
The Personal MBA, essentially an online list of reading material and accompanying message boards, is part book club and part online community, where participants tackle the reading list one book at a time, then exchange thoughts and insights on the Web site personalmba.com. There is no diploma, dean, faculty -- or cost, other than whatever you pay for the books or a library card. Though still in its infancy, the grassroots PMBA is gaining a following -- and might be yet another ding in the armor of traditional MBA programs.

Personally I never attended MBA school, but I spent some time on a Personal MBA site and actually time to time some of posts their picked my interest. On the other side, list of books on the Personal MBA site is very nice!

Looking back to the comparison between top ranked B-schools and online/part-time and Personal MBA - as for me the main difference stays alumni.

Despite the cost, B-school professors and administrators say there is no substitute for the intangibles -- most notably the alumni and peer network -- that come from a traditional MBA experience. Not to mention the access to corporate recruiters and career advisement offices.

As for Personal MBA - it also inspires big companies to implement the same model for the employee training programs, but also works very well for the personal education, no matter what MBA or whatever else you want to pursue. Truth to be told, I love self-education. All my professional experience growth comes from self education. It helps to force yourself to work on you, also.

Although he had a great technical background in computer systems administration, Simon Janes, a tech entrepreneur who has read between 15 and 20 of the PMBA books, didn't have the business know-how to direct company strategy. Janes says reading the books helped him see his business through a management lens, instead of the technical one that he was used to.

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abresko on "Computer programmer's career is too controversial!"

abresko — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:29:14 +0000

Those articles are stupid!!! I am .NET developer and I am okay with it. With prestige everything is fine! But I am also running microISV, and one day it will be my full time job. If I would not be programmer from the very beginning, I never see a niche where I can create software and earn money. Let them be lawyers or whatever else they want to be.

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green on "Computer programmer's career is too controversial!"

green — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:33:57 +0000

Recently, I’ve seen like dozen of different blog posts putting a lot of dirt and downgrading the computer programming career. IT sucks, programming sucks and all geeks suck. Well, this post actually forced me to agree with some points, and strongly disagree with others, and I believe this one is the most reasonably explained one. So, let's go ahead with my comments - starting with age differnce and experience. I do agree that computer programming job can be considered as _temporary knowledge capital_, but definitely it's not always true. Not necessary. Just in example, please imagine 27 years old 5-years-experienced guy, and 52 years old 27-years-experienced man, both with recent 5-years Java experience. Well, who is better? I should say, of course 27 years old, with only 5 years of experience. Because for me it's incredible stupid that so experienced mature man with 27 years of professional experience is still working as programmer. He can be lead, architect, consultant, but not programmer! But, if we are going to talk about other position, like senior developer, instead of just developer, I will prefer 52 years old one -- because he has an experience of taking part and solving situations which younger one probably never even had before. Surprisingly controversial, no?
Now low prestige thing... Well - I cannot say anything about it. I just do not care. Do you care?
I skip outsourcing argue, just because it can sound that it is a big bad thing for US employees, but there are too many points when outsourcing is bad and inapropriate, so I just think it's a whole new discussion point, which goes beyond of "computer programmer's career" topic. ;-)
And let's talk about project management. That's an absurd saying that it's only about planning and reporting. May be it _can be_ in a too many levels organisation with internal bueracracy and stupid executive management - but the most companies which I know are sucessful and have project managers they prove that project managers just _drive and lead_ the project. Project managers are and will be in demand for long time. It's also about people management, and is a very important thing why not _everybody_ can be manager.
Working conditions. Don't be silly. If company sucks and does not want to have best employees, they will crap their working conditions for IT or anybody else. But does Google do that? :-) It's just a question of what you want from your employees, and how do you see them - long-term, or short-term.

Did I finish? Not yet. There is a small follow up also. I do not think it's much there to say, but I can just stress that I do agree on the following statement:

"The billionaires [mentioned] are people who were once programmers but who became entrepreneurs."

That's absolutely right - you are the boss of your life, of your fortune and your goals.

To crown it all - programming is just an entrance into IT world. You cannot be good in managing team of developers without knowing deep deep level. This is my opinion, and I see that project manager grown from junior developer is much more professional and goal oriented and succesfully than many book-worms-project-managers-right-away. It's the way it is! Althought, even if you can be a sucessfull business owner without being programmer, but at least you need to have a clean vision to know how _software helps people_ - and that's pretty a lot from IT. ;-)

P.S. Being a lawyer is nice, but it's not the silver bullet.

P.P.S. Computer careers do not stink that much as a lot of people are trying to show it.

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