> Born in El Paso, Texas, Caldwell graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Psychology
Opportunity cost...? What makes having a B.A. in Psychology not a negative hiring signal too? He could have been getting a business degree which would have helped him know more about accounting! Etc.
Feels like a pretty silly argument. An MBA is generally going to be more likely to be successful than a non-MBA in running a business, startup or not. It might not be worth the kinds of salaries an MBA would demand, but a negative? Feels a bit anti-intellectual. More knowledge is always better.
You're misinterpreting what Dalton said. An MBA is not a negative hiring signal strictly because the hirer is thinking about opportunity costs. The fact is that a candidate who spent two years getting an MBA is at a disadvantage relative to people who spent those two years doing more useful things (e.g. getting an engineering masters, or getting real world startup experience). More knowledge is better, but the idea is that a non-technical candidate with 2 years of operational/sales/marketing experience at a startup will run circles around someone fresh out of an MBA program - this is the opportunity cost Dalton talks about. The argument is that the person with experience will indeed have more useful knowledge than the MBA.
It goes without saying that the opportunity cost of a dual major in Psychology is extremely low (i.e. a few classes) if your primary major is already Symbolic Systems - a degree which integrates CS and psychology.
> in running a business, startup or not.
Saying that an MBA will be better at running any kind of company, implying some sort of equality between the completely different challenges of startups and normal large companies kind of undermines the credibility of this argument.
> The fact is that a candidate who spent two years getting an MBA is at a disadvantage relative to people who spent those two years doing more useful things (e.g. getting an engineering masters, or getting real world startup experience).
But then the MBA is not a negative signal, it's just not as strong a positive signal as two years of relevant experience.
The MBA is only a negative signal if between two people who are exactly the same except for one of them getting an MBA 'on the side', you'd pick the one without.
I suppose Dalton could have worded it better, but technically, "lack of positive" is just as bad as "negative." The problem with how people think of opportunity costs is that they don't perceive them as a negative cost, when in fact they have the same effect as negative costs.
Opportunity cost...? What makes having a B.A. in Psychology not a negative hiring signal too? He could have been getting a business degree which would have helped him know more about accounting! Etc.
Feels like a pretty silly argument. An MBA is generally going to be more likely to be successful than a non-MBA in running a business, startup or not. It might not be worth the kinds of salaries an MBA would demand, but a negative? Feels a bit anti-intellectual. More knowledge is always better.