Technical MBAs

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing this season where we're just interviewing a bunch of interesting people. We're starting out with Trevor Ewen and this is going to be part two. This one's sort of when you start editing these kinds of things, it gets somewhat a little interesting, particularly when you're doing a discussion. So this was a little less, maybe a little shorter than I would have normally spliced this out, but it really seems best because it focuses on a discussion about a technical particularly the MBA program and the experiences that we had. And there's a lot of similarities of what we ran into. In particular, I guess it's important to note that the program, the experience of going through was really far more valuable than any educational, like direct educational knowledge that we got. We actually went through and we took courses and we learned stuff from an academic point of view. But the greater value actually came from the interactions we had with other students. And in our cases, it was something where it was not a university kind of style. It was more people that had gone out into the real world and then were coming back and doing an MBA, which may be something that is very much in line with what you're dealing with. So I think this is a really good little discussion. And I don't think it's one that we've touched on too often. Typically it's more about is a degree valuable as like a sheet of paper? Is that a neat thing, a useful thing, a valuable thing to have on your resume? But this really goes more to it as a way to make you as we go back a better developer, career, professional, whatever it is that you're working in, in the technical world. And I think you'll probably find that maybe it is that there's some stuff out there that we always, we lack, we don't know what we don't know. But when you have a lot of people and you've got a team that's essentially all pulling in the same direction, it's amazing how much you can learn from others, from their experiences, from interactions with them and discussions and just rubbing shoulders and it's sort of working in the trenches with them, going through those classes, those courses on those various subjects that some of your strengths, some are going to be strengths to the other team members. And it's very much that, much like the same things we get from mentors and from mastermind groups and all of these other situations where they put ourselves in where we're learning side by side with somebody else that has a different set of experiences, different set of skills and it gives us a different point of view. So without getting too far into that beforehand, I'll go ahead and kick us off and we'll pick up a little bit right where we left off last time around. And here is Trevor Ewen again. My mentors at the time, particularly the ones who knew me well said, hey, long term, you got to think about your role in the organization because your communication skills are strong and some of the things that I just wasn't really prioritizing that high at that time. And it's just funny how much that stuff comes back to you later. I mean, I spent a lot more time, say, editing documents, for instance, in the last couple years just because a lot of people would really want my second opinion on, say, editing choices, which is just something I never really thought I'd be using that so much in a technology context, certainly not in a software development context. That's very funny because that actually sort of skips ahead to something I was going to talk about a little bit, but actually I think we sort of swerved into it. So I think I want to swing back to that anyways, is the idea of a software engineer MBA is starting with maybe a computer science, which this goes very much to some of my experience. It sounds very similar to yours. I was computer science for undergrad, then I went back and somewhat more or less because it wasn't quite I had a mentor push me that way, but I had some people in some interactions that I thought, you know, I have some skills like communication and some of these other things that are not typical developer skills that really are more on the MBA side. And it does make you useful as a developer because then you can talk to customers more directly. But when you're junior, they don't really give you those options very often. It's usually here's some code or here's a problem, go code it and don't talk to the people too much. We'll give you some pizza and some caffeine and you'll be off and running. And so there was a little bit too of, I guess, wanting to prove myself to that I turn around to, you know, I think I could do this. And I did want to learn the stuff that I'd sort of skipped out on in my undergrad. And so I see an MBA would make a lot of sense. And sort of as a dovetail for your last comment there, that was one of the that was a point where I learned that I could write. I never really thought I could never really considered it to be a strength at all, but often found myself through my MBA. We had teams doing just about everything throughout my pursuit of that degree. And inevitably, we're in a lot of papers. I'm sure you know that you're writing all the time. And a lot of times it would come back around to me and they say, hey, we'd like you to you know, can you edit this? Can you clean it? Clean it up a little bit. We just, yeah, it was sort of implied or stated that I had an ability to be precise and concise in how I wrote stuff, which is very much the, you know, I think to me at least, and I think it's still considered to be the way is that it's one of the better ways to communicate in business is just be very clear, be very precise, don't get too wordy, don't get don't cut the details too much. But just to write that, get that right level of balance and make sure that you're communicating the technical stuff in a way that is understood by your audience. And so that's sort of a long introduction is just sort of get your thoughts on how you sort of stepped into that and what you got out of, you know, being going from coding and into the MBA program. Yeah, well, how much time do you got is the real question. I mean, this is a lot of ink, a lot of podcast time has been spent on this question. And I'll pose it initially with some ambiguity, which I think is it's important to have a little bit of humility about this. But you know, I think the nature of the MBA as a degree has changed a lot. And I'll just get your opinion. How did you feel about your expectations going into it relative to what you had coming out of it? Mine were 180 degrees off of what I think I got out of it. My thought was that I was going to get as I said, I came into a little bit of my chip on my shoulder. It's like I just I need to just have something that shows that I do know a little bit about what I'm talking about so that I can maybe get into some of these conversations and contribute more as a team member. And I figured, hey, I'll just I'll go in, I'll learn a few things, I'll get a degree. I went through an entirely online program. So there was a lot of there's two things about it. One is there was a lot of communication back and forth among students and professors. There's a lot of emails, there's a lot of chat sessions, and things like that. That was really the bulk of the I guess the class time. And then there's a lot of research and writing done for the papers. But within all of that, one of the key things is that the people I went through, they were all people had gone out into the real world and had come back and were working. I think it was required that you were working full time while you were going through the MBA program. So I had these people I was exposed to that were in just all different areas of business and doing things, you know, they're working for themselves, they're working for big companies, for little companies, doing all kinds of different stuff. And the conversations and the experiences that they had and their opinions and their points of view were just it was it was absolutely invaluable what I got out of that. And so it ended up being that the the journey for that was so much more than I ever expected from the degree itself. The degree when I was done really was like, OK, yeah, I finally got the degree. But I'd learned so much there if I was very happy to have done so. Yeah, I pretty much agree with your assessment there. I think my expectations about the formality of it were dashed a bit, but the peer group was very strong. And of course, it's really good to be in a club of people who you have two things going for. One, there's a nice self-selection bias of people who are working full time and crazy enough to do that, because that means they're motivated people. Number two is they want to uphold the value of the club. So it's a shame we can't be like this in more areas of life, but it's it's just a group of people who the moment they get there are motivated to contribute and do a lot because otherwise they'll get less out of it. And actually, I think most things in life are like that. If you go to on a Saturday to clean up garbage at the park and if you really take that much more seriously, you're actually going to get more more out of it in terms of the relationships you build and the quality of the park you're you're cleaning up. But I think it's hard for people to get that into their their heads. But I think with the NBA programs, you have money on the line, you have a lot of time on the line, and it's often with people who may have money but don't have a lot of extra time. And so it's it's a really good opportunity to, you know, build in that defensiveness about the degree and about the process itself. And so I felt that about my peers. And it's something you'd love to have in every group. Right. You'd love to show up to parent teacher conferences or show up to clean the park or show up to a church meeting, have everybody there 100 percent committed. And I think it's partially the money, but also the time commitment that people are making that they say, I really want to make this a success. So they're intentional about the relationships, they're intentional about the things they do, but also intentional about maintaining the good reputation of the program. And voila, you know, you get a surprise of good things happening. And it's it's funny that we need those forcing functions, but it's exactly what you get out of it. And the other thing I noticed while I was there is I really thought the program would err on the side of full time corporate ladder types, so maybe 80, 20 on the side of management consultants and then 20 percent entrepreneurs and people doing other stuff. Part of the reason my program was a bit different is because it did have an international focus and that opened up the industries quite a bit. So it wasn't just consultants or finance as much as you would have seen in one of the more New York focused programs. The other thing that was really great about it, though, is it really did put the balance on the side of the entrepreneurs. And there was a couple of things going on. I think that the MBA programs have changed a bit where they are attracting more entrepreneurs and providing more resources for entrepreneurs. Similarly, I think entrepreneurs are seeing more benefits. And then also some of the countries people are coming out of, they were in situations where there was not a track for someone to necessarily climb the corporate ladder, except maybe within government. But in many of these countries, it was you've got to make your own way forward. And I think of my peers, those people were some of the most inspiring because they just from a time in their early 20s, they just had the idea that nobody is really going to do this for me. I got to go out there and make it happen. And they did really innovative, interesting things in markets that I knew very little about before then. And that understanding, one, the expansive network is amazing, a huge gift, but just the understanding you get of just how many different people are doing it this way. And you get to be a rare bird, which is always nice as a software engineer. There was only one other software engineer in my program, which on an occupational basis, that was pretty good considering there was probably about 15 or 16 people in finance and accounting. So I was fortunate there because I got to stand out, also got to learn a lot about what other people are doing. And then you go with the amazing peer network and the knowledge. And of course, you do have the universities later as a nice launching point too for different things you want to do. And they could be a good test bed, say if you're recruiting interns, which we've done some of recently, or you're trying to do a talk on a topic or even drumming up new business. There's always someone in those alumni networks who's willing to talk to you. That's true. Those are a lot of excellent points. And that's one that I've, particularly the international mix, that is one of the areas that particularly from an entrepreneurial point of view is I think it's maybe underutilized or maybe they're even just not understood as much, is that when you do go actually open up and start talking about people that have come from some very different environments at times, there are some fascinating entrepreneurial stories and how they got through stuff. There's usually a lot of obstacles that they went through. And listening to it is usually not only educational because you hear how they work their way through those things, but also often very inspiring. You look at sort of what your background in is, where you come from, and you say, okay, here's what I had to struggle through. But then you look at what they got through and it's an impressive human story if nothing else. And then like I said, that goes to the idea of now you've got these networks of people that are particularly not, if they're not in your normal circles, that just makes your overall network that much better, that much stronger, because then you can reach out to places that normally you'd be in a little harder press to get a toe in basically. Yes. Yes, a greater degree of loose ties, which you talked a lot about the idea between tight networks being execution networks and loose networks being opportunity networks. MBA programs are definitely an opportunity network, unless you go to one that's very narrowly focused and has mostly people from your industry, in which case it's probably more of an execution network as well. And I love that aspect of it. And one of the things I try and do is I try and make sure that I am making the first move. I want to make sure people are coming to me with questions and asks and concerns before I'm coming out to them. And I think it's been a good process so far, in part because I was pretty intentional about making sure to get to know everybody at some level, which is a hard thing to do with that size of a class. We had about 50 people in our cohort. And it was important for me to make sure if you guys are in this kind of space, the software developer questions space, which you and I obviously live in day to day, that's where you involve me. That's where you come to me. And I'm not an attorney, so I'm not going to charge you for my advice by the hour. You're my friend and I want to make sure you have the best advice. And it's just cool to see what's coming out of that. For one thing, there's people planning career changes, but there's some very interesting products bubbling and others who just haven't really thought of their business in a certain way. Given the market they come from, things might be quite manual. There's maybe a pretty pen and paper way of running it. And that may be sufficient for a number of years. But right now, fewer and fewer businesses, even internationally, have the option of sticking to the old way of doing it. They have to start thinking about their technology. Agreed. And there we have it. We actually changed gears fairly quickly there and start switching into another topic, which gets a little bit more into the modern world of software development and a little more technical kind of discussion. But I thought that was a good stopping point for this episode, as we've had a pretty good discussion, I think, like I said, of technical MBAs and maybe what you can look forward to. As always, if you have any questions about any of this, you can feel free to contact me. We've got links in the show notes. There's also links for Trevor if you have questions for him. He welcomes those and you'll hear that as we get through the net. We'll probably do at least one more, maybe two more parts to this one as we get into that wrap up. We're both very open to questions and trying to help people out wherever we can. And as you even heard there, he stumbled into a little bit, talked a little bit about the networking side of things where it's very much an attitude of, I'm going to help you as much as I can. And eventually you may be able to help me, but I'm always going to be happy to help you first because that just seems to build that trust and that relationship a little bit better. But it's been some great discussions with him. I'm going to continue these in the next at least episode or two. Hopefully you'll continue to join us. Send any feedbacks you have or questions. No challenge for the week again. Other than maybe, think of, spend a little time thinking about if you have not gone through a technical MBA or MBA program or a higher degree, maybe that's something you want to think about now after we've had this discussion of it. Or maybe you've got another thing, I guess it would be a little bit of a challenge if you've gone through one and you have similar or very different experiences. You should always shoot me an email at info at developinure.com. I would love to hear those and build that into future discussions that I have. But as always, go out there, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developineur podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developineur.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, the Developineur podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. 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