Speaking of business school, I’ve decided to get an MBA. I start next fall – I received my acceptance letter last week. Robert Morris, definitely not a top tier school, has a promising looking e-commerce concentration that has a bit of an entrepreneurial focus. I have been torn for years over the decision – I haven’t been able to cost justify the experience, and it hasn’t seemed to be terribly important to my career thus far. However, there are always those occasions when there is an interesting job opportunity, and they want the applicant to have an advanced degree.
That’s probably not a good enough reason. Really, my reason is because of the program itself. It seems like a good opportunity to learn all of those things I didn’t really take seriously in undergrad (marketing and finance), and to meet and network with other like-minded people. Granted, it doesn’t provide the advantages that a name school would provide, but then again, I’m not really interested in a Fortune 500 career – I’ve worked in large companies before, and I didn’t much care for it. The extra cost (CMU costs at least 4 times as much as RMU) is just not justified unless you want to be the CEO of Intel someday.
OK, actually, the real reason why I’m doing it is to keep up with my wife – she already has her master’s degree – she’s a nurse practitioner… J
This is meant to be humorous. And it is. But it is also realistic. Oftentimes, we techies forget that the reason people pay us to develop software is to provide value to the business paying for the software, be it the company we work for, the client, or the people who buy our shrinkwrap. It doesn’t matter how elegant the solution is, if the solution doesn’t make business sense (i.e. pay for itself, at the very least), then the effort taken to produce the solution is wasted.
I have been reading Return on Software. It’s a decent book – reminds me of all of those classes I took in my undergraduate work (my degree is in Quantitative Business Analysis). The author spends a little too much time on the math, but then again, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the book, so he has basically only been laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. I’ll write a full review when I finish, but suffice it to say that, even if the book isn’t that good (actually, it’s not too bad – not the greatest book I’ve read, but not bad), the concepts it contains are terribly important to our industry, and constantly overlooked.