Pooper Scooper
Earlier this week I ran across an article [Link] discussing a master’s degree for science akin to the MBA. At first I thought this was some type of sick joke but as I continued it became obvious that the sickness was not humorous but actual.
My problem with this starts with the MBA. I have had to deal with a large number of people who have this degree. Almost all are thucks. That is, they have incompetence in equal measure with ambition and expectation of achievement and asentient adoration. As such they have an absence of both skills and knowledge to do anything with but an excess of ego and arrogance. I have yet to see any MBA do anything constructive except by accident. That is, I have seen them make such a mess of things that we were forced to reengineer and reorganize to correct the mess that a better organization resulted, albeit after much suffering and loss of productivity and morale.
Part of my problem with them arises from a fundamental observation that the Sloan philosophy that good managers may be trained without any knowledge of what they are supposed to manage is void and destructive. Yes, mediocre managers can be trained, and they can indeed make profit if that is the metric. If the metric is a strong, vibrant organization, I have yet to see one who is so developed who is more than mediocre and abided. A far better path is to take a competent member of the organization who has the necessary technical skills of whatever discipline the organization practices and educate and train that individual as a manager in a craft fashion – apprentice-journeyman-master. Not only do you get a bigger crop of mediocre managers, you actually get some who are good to excellent.
In the environment I have worked in, MBAs have never done better than mediocre because they not only have the shul arrogance of divine anointment, but a total lack of technical skills. So my question is how does a master’s degree in being a professional scientist make sense? First of all, the master’s degree in science has only made sense for almost a century only in an industrial context. In a real research environment, all it does is qualify one to be a super technician in the same way that a bachelor’s degree qualifies one to be a junior techhnician. [1]
No, the only value I can see in such a degree is in some peripheral job that no real scientist wants to do and which is a waste of his time and capabilities. And definitely somewhere where humanity, especially scientists who have real work to do, can be sheltered from their arrogance and uselessness.
[1] This is not the case with engineering. In that environment a master’s has great meaning whereas a doctorate is almost always a limitation or a call to exceptionality.
