MBA= Master of Barely Anything

As a female manager in the tech industry, if I had a $20 dollar bill for every single time I was told by company higher-ups that I could not advance my career unless I went back to school to get my MBA, I would be rich. Swimming in an Olympic sized pool of green.

I ignored them. I have no MBA degree. I’m not dripping wet with money (which many point to evidence I should have heeded their advice), but I don’t have a Mt. Everest sized school loan debt, either.

My advice to women between the ages of 21 and 40 who aspire to management in tech?

WORK YOUR WAY UP. DON’T GO BACK TO GRAD SCHOOL.

Some women will argue that a MBA is the only way of achieving managerial position parity with men but research has shown that “within a few years of graduation, women with MBAs earn lower salaries, manage fewer people, and are less pleased with their progress than men with the same degree” according to Bloomberg Business Week.

Plus, there is nothing academia will teach you that you cannot gain in the real world for free.

Save $100 to $200K. MBA degree holders will quietly confide that you’re not purchasing skills; you’re paying for an invaluable lifetime business network through relationships you forge with fellow classmates. Buying friends is a form of bribery in many parts of the world.

Silicon Valley companies and special hiring committees are doing a huge disservice to current employees by hiring and promoting MBA degreed managers, who have little to no on-the-job experience in product design, technology or startups, to manage employees who have centuries of combined professional experience. It’s akin to sending someone to lead an Mt. Everest expedition after they read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. They’re convinced they can scale summits because secondhand experience counts.

If leadership is a pizza, words like ‘belief’ and ‘passion’ are the most requested Bay Area company toppings. It’s a shitty tasting pie. Belief and passion do not entrust employees to bosses or build department morale. Hard work does. Managers should be able to perform the day-to-day tasks any of their employees do. While many might, very few I’ve encountered can.

According to a 2015 PayScale survey, two of the top technology companies have the shortest median tenure of employees and the highest turnover rate. The average employee at Amazon only lasts 1 year while Google last 1.3 years. I’d be curious to see if there’s any correlation from exit interview data how many employees left companies over frustrations of bosses who were put into management roles on the sole merit of their MBA degrees without having related work experience.

Want to improve retention? Improve company morale? Garner employee respect?

Please stop hiring and promoting MBAs from without. Grow your teams from within.