> most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else
This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?
Not OP, but in my early thirties finishing an MBA now.
Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company.
Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.
Tips, suggestions, warnings - very subjectively and at random...
- The "hard" stuff (with numbers in it...) didn't really grab me at all, I originally studied math and was somewhat disappointed in much of that part of this kind of MBA program, my hunch is that a regular full-time MBA would have been better for this, more immersion, this was all a little in the one, out the other for me because there wasn't much time to practice.
- But, the "soft" stuff on the other hand, was a goldmine, all the personal development, organizational psychology, negotiations, etc. This alone was worth the tuition.
- The best part was gaining a far better understanding and tolerance of why and how pretty much everything we work with in software is more or less "broken", it's actually not broken, it's as good as allowed by budget and organizational circumstance, and if something is to be improved, well, then that background has to allow for that improvement or else the improvement is just a pipe dream.
And you meet interesting people who will do interesting things in the community where you live, assuming you stay put, which I didn't, so I can't say much about that.
That's why I decided against the MBA. I was in this stage of life in my early-mid 30s, and asked for some advice from other engineer-with-MBAs. All of the ones who had done things of value with their MBA were no longer engineers.
What's your endgame?
Do you want to be a CEO some day? A product manager? Business development? Work in something other than software? An MBA will teach you useful things and help you get your foot in the door.
Do you want to be a CTO? Do you see yourself creating software down the road? None of the MBA things explicitly help you, and executive MBAs are very expensive to do "just for fun". If you want to go back to school, go get a masters in CS if you don't have one yet.
This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?