Do programmers need MBAs?
When I was an undergrad at the University of Waterloo, I went back and forth on whether an MBA made sense for me in future. Tuesday 6/15 at 4:30pm I’m back on campus via the Computer Science Club, eight years later, to give the talk I wish someone would have shared with me on the subject:
Do programmers need MBAs?
What value (if any) does an MBA provide? Isn’t it enough to be smart and get stuff done? Hear from a Waterloo alum who struggled to figure this out. Ian Tien is currently a Stanford MBA student and was formerly a senior product manager at Microsoft developing consumer cloud computing offerings extending Windows to the web. His portfolio included Office Web Applications, SkyDrive, Live Mesh, Windows Live Photos, FrameIt, and Favorites. In 2009, he served as interim lead for the Hotmail product management group. Previously, he led and managed engineering teams in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server division, and is first inventor on multiple Microsoft patents covering Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and SQL Server product lines. He’s an alumnus of Cornell University and the University of Waterloo with degrees in computer science, cognitive science and computer engineering.
