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Should those who develop Software do an MBA?

Sometime back, Thomas R. Eisenmann wrote an interesting article in HBR based on his survey ‘Should MBAs Learn to Code?‘ The content of the article was primarily based on the research conducted by Eisenmann by sending survey to 41 HBS students.

The content led me to thought to find answer to another answer to opposite of what Eisenmann did. I asked Chris Maunder from CodeProject if he could arrange a survey on the topic ‘Should those who develop Software do an MBA?‘ Thanks to Chris and CodeProject, survey received good response from the audience. A total of 1401 people voted their opinion on the questionnaire.

Should those who develop Software do an MBA

It should be noted that the survey was done mostly among developers as the key audience. Based on the very fact, many developers believe that those who develop software should not pursue an MBA at all.

In fact, there was hardly any positive response if developer or Solution Architects should do an MBA. Solution Architects and the Developers were the only two choices where the key role with the development team is technical. R. Erasmus supported that fact that people that study MBA should learn software engineering but disagreed with the statement that people writing software should study MBA.

The survey suggests that doing an MBA might be a good choice if someone in his current or future role involved in Business/Functional Analysis or Managing a Businss Unit.

One of the respondents Rahul Rajat Singh argued that having an MBA gives developers a different perspective, The perspective of looking at software as business solutions. Most developers tend to think about the code and application without having the holistic view of the business application or schedules, deadlines, estimates.

Erik Burd who is currently busy with his MBA and had several years of experience in software engineering claimed that the MBA is useful for understanding business principles and also gives you a better awareness of “non techie” work in a larger ecosystem.

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