[Screed]Business Administration Majors

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:46 am

All the business administration majors I knew in college were failed industrial engineers. Seriously, they got to Calculus II, couldn't hack it, and gave up and changed to business instead. Business Calculus was way easier.

Now, I don't mind the other business subdisciplines - Accounting and Finance, those are guys I might not envy but I can respect. They Do Work.

Business admin majors though - and again, maybe this is just my experience - were to a man and woman clueless slackjawed cocksockets. There wasn't a one of them that even vaguely approached competence in any single field, but felt they could somehow manage people. The MBA crowd are even worse - they want a Master's to earn that next promotion but don't really want to work for it.

Now, I don't mean to say that the whole program of business administration is rubbish - because hey, I did graduate courses over in the business college, I've seen what they're like. Balance sheets, future compound interest vs. depreciation, all that - I can see how that's necessary for budgeting, investment and whatnot. But the crux of a business administration degree is learning how to manage and lead people, and that's generally where things fall down.

You can teach leadership. I believe that. I've taken more than a few ROTC courses that taught that. No matter what you innate talent (or lack thereof), it can get better if you work at it, try to understand people and processes better. That requires a level of effort almost alien to business majors. I blame metrics.

Metrics have always been around in business - dollars in versus dollars out, this model is cheaper than that model, etc. Fair enow. But then, see, in Industrial Engineering there was this concept of "time-motion studies." Analyzing movements and timing them. Increasing efficiency. And it has destroyed so much.

Because my miniboss - currently struggling through an MBA program - has these fucking spreadsheets on his computer, and if I don't do task X of Project Y in Z hours, he grows a vagina and gives breach-birth to a two-headed frog monster that fucks him up the ass until he's on me about it. It doesn't matter when Project Y is due, he wants constant fucking update reports on how I spent my day down to ten minute increments, so that it can be charged against the right slot and his spread sheets give back all green.

Now, I understand the mentality behind this. It's the proliferation of managers. Instead of having one big boss that gives out the assignments and makes sure you get paid and aren't showing up at work with a bag of blow, three bottles of vodka and your choice of hookers for a party on the conference table during work hours, there are dozens of minibosses with specialized (read "fuck all") authority on individual projects. There are a number of problems with this, but the first one is that what might be intended as a team project devolves into the engineering equivalent of a B-grade porn actor walking onto the set of a gangbang video expecting to be a fluffer and suddenly finding out they're the star.

Team projects are big in business, but primarily consist of the capable people freezing out the no-talent fucks and getting work done. There are very few things that can be handled better in a big group meeting than with a cogent couple of emails. I had to rewrite every sentence of every group paper in my business colleges, because two of my teammates were almost functionally illiterate and the other five didn't speak English as a native language. Of while you can get business majors to work together, the hard part is to get them to stop. They are needy, needy fucks that will send you a desperate series of emails starting around 11 PM and progressing through steadily decreasing English. Cheating is rampant on anything that can be cheated on - maybe it's just a misplaced desire for efficiency.

I want to reiterate that it doesn't have to be this way. There have been some brilliant idea people in business administration - Abraham Maslow, for example. I don't think Maslow ever sat an employee down and explained that if they didn't spend X percent of their budget by Y date, the government would assume things were exploding in the lab and the engineering department was a bunch of clueless fucks, but don't spend too much because we want to get this thing in under budget and over schedule, and oh overtime now has to be scheduled two weeks in advance and with justification.

Anyway. What inspired this is that at work today, miniboss was getting a verbal handjob from some business process consultant - which is a lot like being a whore, except instead of an STD you worry about catching a soul as it escapes from your clients. It was buzzword-heavy pat lingo and miniboss was licking it up like he was eating out the most beautiful asshole in the world. There were lots of things about identifying flaws in the process, the dreaded "synergy," and - oh dark gods strike me the fuck down now - team-building exercises.

Team building exercises were invented by the Spanish Inquisition to torture crypto-Jews into confessing. They are soul destroying, morale-draining farces that only braindead junksluts think are fun, useful, or anything but demeaning. I have three powerful motivators in my work life: a paycheck (and benefits, ha), getting shit done, and the finish line at the end of the day. That is it. It's not like I'm going to get a ride on the company bicycle when I get in every day, there are no free Dr. Peppers in the community fridge, and the firewall at work blocks out any of the really good timewasters unless I go through a proxy, and I'm pretty sure that would be a federal offense.

Yet - and this is the second thing that set this off - every fucking day on Yahoo or Monster or something there's some bright chipper article about the top five most-in-demand majors in the workplace, and Business Administration is always one of them. ALWAYS. Oh my fuck, why? I know good managers are hard to find, but do employers really think the next smiling asshole fratboy MBA in a salmon-colored shirt is going to be any better than the other six? Or the guy that took six years to get his MBA at night school? I mean yes, a graduate degree is definitely an accomplishment but it's not like the fucker was taking a lot of advanced math classes or had to sit down and make some shit work. Most of them have trouble putting together a coherent power point presentation (my main boss still hasn't grasped the concept of keyboard shortcuts - he uses the mouse to right click to bring up the little menu and click "next slide" - every single fucking slide), much less be able to brief it without sitting there and reading the gods-be-damned slides back to the entire group.

I gotta admit, I did look at getting an MBA once. Went to the seminar a few weeks back. It was an accelerated schedule - do all the classes, pass everything, get it in a year. Two things stopped me - one, it was about $24k, and two, that wasn't counting all the prerequisite classes they wanted me to take. Because sure, I'd taken a lot of business management classes, and statistics and finance and accounting, but they didn't count since I took the all over in the engineering side of the house - and they just don't trust those fucks. Ghost fucking forbid. There was a newly minted doctor of business administration in the room, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that with my MSEE I've had as many statistics courses in my life as he's had, but according to those bastards I needed a business statistics course. Because of course the bell curve looks different when there's a virgin-mary-be-fucked-in-the-ass dollar sign hovering next to one of the axes.

Okay, end of rant.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:32 am

You can teach leadership? It always seemed to me you were either born with it or not. The few times I've been promoted I got yelled at constantly for not already knowing how to be a leader. So I stopped giving a rat's ass.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:41 am

Some people have more raw talent in leadership. Upbringing, disposition, whatever. But you can always improve.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:51 am

Ted the Flayer wrote:You can teach leadership? It always seemed to me you were either born with it or not. The few times I've been promoted I got yelled at constantly for not already knowing how to be a leader. So I stopped giving a rat's ass.

I would find it extremely likely that it can be taught. Or rather, it can be learned at least. Almost every mundane skill that humanity has exhibited, from art, to leading, to math and so on, can be learned. If people practice something enough in an enjoyable manner, their brain will quite adeptly form those connections and pick it right up.

Nobody is born being good at any of those traits, they are acquired. Some people may be more likely to be placed in an environment where they can learn those skills, but the potential is surely there for everyone, barring significant impairment (as caused by autism, having an extra chromosome, or other serious conditions).

It sounds like the times you got promoted were neither instructional nor enjoyable. Quite the opposite for what you want in a learning environment. If that was a superior that was yelling at you Ted, then it sounds like they were a shitty leader themselves.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:57 am

I found that rant quite amusing. Good job.

I'm also certain it was better than the rant that I would have heard had you been a business administration major.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 2:21 am

Heh, wait until you have to deal with Education majors, or worse, those with degrees. Or, even worse, those with Administration degrees (Admin, incidentally, is a subfamily of Education).

I just took a 6000 level "Work at your own pace" Education course for a book I'm writing. Took me all of 2 weeks. Got an A. Next was an 8000 level Educational Research Methods Course...holy gawd it was so idiotic. Two papers, both under 10 pages, basically following a "write by numbers" instruction manual. Then comes the statistics part of the 8000 level course..."the sample is a small copy of the population"...that's it, that's the entirety of addressing a Simple Random Sample. A picture of the normal distribution covers that topic. Finally, the Ph.D. candidates need to do 5 problems (and we're talking T-tests, using software)....complete answers provided.

So yeah, if you think business admin majors are bad, trust me, it gets much worse.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 2:42 am

Ted the Flayer wrote:You can teach leadership? It always seemed to me you were either born with it or not. The few times I've been promoted I got yelled at constantly for not already knowing how to be a leader. So I stopped giving a rat's ass.

Leadership can indeed be taught. Feral children have no leadership skills. Well socialized people have better leadership skills than shutins. Leadership is a combination of knowing how to motivate others (which is a learnable skill - ask any autistic person) and how to prioritize (also a learnable skill). A combination of toast masters and home ec.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Fri Sep 28, 2012 3:11 am

The dark secret of higher education is that the vast majority of it is crap, often for entirely different reasons depending on the actual subject.

In places like Silicon Valley, a degree doesn't even mean anything. Start-ups know that the guy with a CS degree has nothing on the guy who has been completing actual projects and lacks that degree.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 3:34 am

K - that's been the conventional wisdom for 15 years now, but I don't think it's true any more.

Certainly, there are some very skilled programmers who lack formal education, especially in the older crowd; likewise, slightly more than 50% of recent CS grads don't know shit.

But CS program isn't completely worthless - you learn to learn new languages, just for starters. Now, for many projects, maybe that doesn't matter. You want a ruby developer - you want that person to know ruby. You don't care if they could switch over and code in prolog. But if you want someone who can function at a higher level, you want someone with a good foundation and systematic expertise, not an audodidact with a hodge-podge.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 3:47 am

One last side comment: anyone know of a way to learn leadership abilities that doesn't involve money or the charity of my social betters?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 6:09 am

Well, there are problems with Computer Science (and similar) courses, these days

Warning: contains Four Yorkshiremen

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 11:45 am

Ted the Flayer wrote:One last side comment: anyone know of a way to learn leadership abilities that doesn't involve money or the charity of my social betters?

There are some good books on the subject - I've already pimped Maslow on Management - but as with most things, there's nothing quite like experience. Military training generally emphasizes small rotating leadership roles to get members used to varied commands, both giving and obeying orders, in a reasonably safe-to-fuck-up setting. On your own you'd have to use more initiative and fewer safety nets - leading raids on WoW can be a fun way to get started, but you'll need some face-to-face action, maybe by starting a volunteer group or something.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 5:46 pm

Koumei wrote:
Well, there are problems with Computer Science (and similar) courses, these days.

That person is off base like whoa Right now I am taking two electrical engineering classes, one requires the use of an assembly instruction set and the other requires Java. Hell, the prerequisite course to both classes requires you to do programming projects in C and the prerequisite course to THAT required you to do programming projects in ASM.

But both professors are clear that the higher-level the programming language is the better, because you can do work in it faster and be more productive. Which is the entire point of using a computer to do things.

The only reason why you need to have knowledge of lower-level languages (and this includes C and VHDL) is for computer architecture and/or embedded systems. Which are a tiny minority of computer programming projects these days. Seriously. So this junior's (I am a junior, too) whining about people not knowing how to do recursion and pointers is stupid. Stack frames and bit-flipping with finite state machines are much harder to get right than C-programming constructs. But unless I am actually programming at that level then who gives a shit whether I know it or not? The only thing that should matter is your productivity.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:07 pm

Lago, the author of the article isn't a junior.

Hell, I'm a computer science major (Freshman) and I've have already learned Python and now am learning C++. Later I will be learning JAVA and I think at least one more. If I were to branch to Electrical or Software Engineering I know I would have to learn another.

Also this article was written about 7 years ago, so a lot has changed.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:09 pm

My bad. I totes misread that advertisement at the bottom.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:14 pm

Full disclaimer: I have Associate's and Bachelor's degrees in Business Administration and am about halfway through the MBA Program. My "concentration" (which is a minor for a university that didn't award minors until after I graduated) is in Computer Science, and I passed Calculus II with a B average.

Business Administration is a really superb field that most of its students never actually learn. The sad fact is that a large number of the people who graduate with a degree in any discipline do so without a thorough (or even necessarily workable) understanding of the subject at hand, and the problem is especially bad in disciplines where there's no sharply-defined metric of quality. This is more an extension of Sturgeon's Law than anything else, but it's exacerbated by the fact that schools nowadays tend to focus on "improving their metrics" (ie passing students who really shouldn't pass) and reducing the number of time it takes to complete a course (12-week courses become 6-week courses in graduate school, etc). These factors combine to produce an environment where understanding your discipline is encouraged, but not required, and you can have graduates that are totally incapable of practicing effectively in their chosen field.

Business Administration usually gets an especially bad rap because:
[*]People tend not to like their bosses, and their bosses are often BA majors;
[*]Properly-practiced BA is indistinguishable from poorly-practiced BA to the layman (and sometimes even the expert, because it is easily obfuscated);
[*]As a discipline of aggregation, it's often difficult or impossible to see the whole picture that BA efforts are intended to address from an isolated viewpoint; and most importantly,
[*]Most BA majors are provably incompetent at their discipline.

The average BA major is probably about four times more terrible than the average engineer, because it is much easier to bullsh*t your way into a BA degree than it is an engineering degree (and tends to attract less-than-desirable applicants for exactly this reason). But the actual academic field of Business Administration is both highly useful and interesting - if you haven't read Bolman and Deal's Reframing Organizations (ISBN 0787987999), I'd recommend it for a really thorough understanding of all the complex and challenging things that go into leading an organization successfully. The precise fact that it is so difficult to actually learn and master, and so rewarding to practice effectively, is exactly why competent BA majors are so much in demand: because the supply is both highly valuable and extremely limited.

echo

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:22 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So this whining about people not knowing how to do recursion and pointers is stupid. [...] The only thing that should matter is your productivity.

If you don't understand pointers, you probably don't understand memory structure. And if you don't understand memory structure, you are unpleasantly likely to make very costly design mistakes in higher-level languages like Java and C#. If you don't understand recursion, you're going to have some very serious problems implementing or extending third-party controls. And if you aren't capable of designing efficient code that properly interfaces with other components, you aren't going to be very productive.

echo

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:30 pm

echoVanguard wrote:If you don't understand pointers, you probably don't understand memory structure.

I find this line of reasoning very suspect. It's like saying 'if you don't understand slide rules, you don't understand logarithms'.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:32 pm

Pointer arithmetic is a wonderful thing that tends to lead to horrible debilitating failure when done wrong.

echoVanguard: I completely agree with you on all your points. I do think there is good and valuable material in the BA curriculum. It just amazes me how much of the bad stuff is institutionalized. Total Quality Management alone has much to answer for.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:42 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The only reason why you need to have knowledge of lower-level languages (and this includes C and VHDL) is for computer architecture and/or embedded systems. Which are a tiny minority of computer programming projects these days. Seriously. So this junior's (I am a junior, too) whining about people not knowing how to do recursion and pointers is stupid. Stack frames and bit-flipping with finite state machines are much harder to get right than C-programming constructs. But unless I am actually programming at that level then who gives a shit whether I know it or not? The only thing that should matter is your productivity.

That person is actually a highly successful businessman and computer scientist, but regardless...

It's really important to know the lower level stuff for, I believe, one reason and one reason only. That is because the higher-level stuff is a convenient abstraction. And abstractions can (and will) break down. The Java machine (or C ABI, for that matter) is an abstraction on top of an operating system and hardware platform, which is itself an abstraction on top of some instruction set architecture (which is, itself, a microcoded abstraction of the actual chip nowadays). So when that convenient abstraction breaks down in some corner case, you won't have to run around the office flailing your arms and shouting "WHAT DO?!". You can figure that shit out. Or, if you're security minded, you purposefully look for places where this abstraction breaks down because those are prime exploitation spots.

If all you know is the abstraction, how are you ever going to write anything critical? I think the courses Joel mentioned are often hard because the abstraction barrier is typically broken in them (except for the functional programming one I guess, so this is not a perfect argument to make).

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:48 pm

Regarding the advantages of a CS degree, yeah: you'll get a solid basis in algorithms, formal languages and on what's actually going inside a processor there. I got all that, and that actually helps. But that education mostly built over what I already was doing for fun - I program by hobby since I was 12 or 13 and got a MSX instead a NES for Christmas. Truly a life-changing gift.

Point being: I already had bad experiences interviewing a bunch of CS graduates and undergraduates for temp jobs when I figured they didn't know how to make an algorithm. At the same time I had great success with a guy who was in a graphical design course but made simple flash games as a hobby. My effective experience then supports what K said and my advice to people who want to work with programing is actually "start to program". Education can come later.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:57 pm

Like most things in BA, Total Quality Management and Six Sigma are widely misapplied and often practiced by people who don't understand them. Before implementing any methodology, you should conduct a cost/benefit analysis, and if you don't include the real costs of implementing the required metrics (including non-monetary costs such as goodwill and lost productivity), you are going to get a grossly unrealistic indication of feasibility. The unpleasant truth is that both TQM and 6σ are often poor fits for the organization, but there are actors that have concrete financial incentives to convince you otherwise - and even when this isn't the case, it is often very easy to implement them improperly and make your problems much, much worse than they were to begin with. The misapplied metric is a dangerous tool, and not nearly enough people pay attention when this fact is repeatedly stressed in most business statistics classes.

A recent ops manager MBA classmate had a horror story about how a company's chief analyst produced a report that failure to implement TQM was costing them upwards of $10 million a year. The company's subsequent failed implementation of TQM clocked in at over $100M in direct costs before being scrapped.

echo

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Sep 29, 2012 5:14 am

I forgot to mention this with my first reply: this thread is awesome, and just shows that bile-fuelled reviews needn't only be about gaming products. Though Business Admin: the Incompetence sounds like it could totally be a winner.

Leress wrote:Also this article was written about 7 years ago, so a lot has changed.

One thing that hasn't changed is that Java is fucking awful, and if there was any justice in this world, people who made software that utilises Java would get a colonoscopy every time they went to the doctor.

Apparently Firefox doesn't recognise "colonoscopy" as a word. Or "Firefox".

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:57 am

Koumei wrote:One thing that hasn't changed is that Java is fucking awful

How can Java be fucking awful? I cannot think of a language easier or with a larger more accessible library of shit to use. There are things it is not good at (like working with hardware), but that's generally not an issue. Anytime I need a simple throw-away tool for something I'm working on, to Java!

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Sep 29, 2012 4:25 pm

1. It requires updating every ten minutes. Sure, you can go into your settings and tell it not to - and I advise absolutely everybody in the world to do so. I hate patching things even once, accepting it as a regular thing is just giving in and letting lazy fucks make stuff that doesn't work and needs altering all the time.

2. I can't remember ever actually liking... well, anything that was made using Java. Whether they be silly little timewaster games (basically doesn't happen anymore because Flash happened), or database software that sometimes feels like crashing and then just erasing the data. Competent programmers who aren't lazy use better, more stable languages for their software. They accept more trouble on their end so the users are saved a lot of grief.