There is a culture of groupthink in hiring that mainly benefits people that are doing the hiring. MBA's are bad. Devs that are not social are bad. People with degrees of any kind are bad. Anyone who wouldn't make a good drinking buddy is bad. If you stop and think about who they're optimizing for, it's very dumb yes-man bro friends that don't challenge their decisions or thinking.
While I upvoted you, on the flip side, I've noticed that MBAs tend to be hired by other MBAs. This is certainly the pattern at the company where I work. If you highlight the MBAs on the org chart, they will tend to be clustered. Folks also decide to pursue an MBA when they see that the entire ladder above them is populated by MBAs.
It could be that MBAs have something that the rest of us don't know we need, or that we don't know how to hire and manage an MBA.
I've always seen MBAs as filling positions that make it possible to grow your organization. A sort of organizational glue. My perspective is by the nature of their roles they aren't meant to play a pivotal role.
So perhaps for the time being fewer MBAs means less growth in the sector. However, I envision a future where the positions MBAs fill will be some of the first ones automated. My perspective is that MBAs are a dying breed, and over time it will only become more evident.
I don't want to sound too cynical here, but just the right amount of cynical: I work in a large organization that has layer upon layer of hierarchy. To me, middle management seems like an information processing task: Gathering, organizing, analyzing, and reporting up and down the ladder.
The language of management is a COmmon, Business-Oriented Language. ;-)
I agree that alot of startups have horrible culture. Technical teams can be particularly responsible for it if not kept in check. But I would argue that teams configured of that kind of personality generally won't get past the first round of funding.
But having worked with / for many startups in my career, my intuition tells me that competent / grounded MBAs bring little to the table when compared to competent / grounded technical folks.
