MBA isn’t a field. It’s a degree that helps you gain entry into fields like finance, investment banking, management consulting, marketing, and whatnot.
I mean I don’t know what to tell you. I got an MBA from a decent, but not Harvard or Wharton school, landing a job as a management consultant in a Big 4 firm in New York back in 2001. It didn’t pan out because of 9/11 and the general economic landscape, but between 2001 and now I’ve had a not atypical, if turbulent and mediocre “management consultant” career of working for a number of big name firms, a few stints in “industry”, some interesting tech companies and startups earning a pretty decent six-figure salary.
To your point, at very few times at my career have I felt I have been working at a company that is “taking off”. Or if I did, it didn’t last long. The highlight of my professional career was probably a firm I worked for from 2004 to 2008. In that time, we were crazy busy with work, I doubled my comp and was promoted up to a management role. But most of the time, I join a company and they are busy for a few months, maybe a year. But then I start seeing people sitting around idle “on the bench”, taking long leisurely lunches because they don’t have work to do, and eventually looking for other jobs.
On few occasions have I ever worked for someone I felt was “visionary” or “competent” at their job. If they were a bit older, they mostly seemed like relics of an age long past. People from a time where all you had to do was graduate college, not fuck up too bad, and you would work for a company for decades. The company would move you around to different branches or locations as your grew with them. Or at worst, you just plateaued and did your thing for the next 20 years. Like my older fraternity alumni who are fucking morons driving Jaguars and whose wives wear $1000 mink coats to football tailgates. Or my dad who all he had to do was get his MBA and decide to take a job with General Electric instead of General Westmoreland and he was set for the rest of his life.
Basically the way I see it, companies treat every job as if it were disposable. My dad, who retired a decade ago, doesn’t comprehend my perspective, thinking that “companies value good people”. I tell him “companies don’t give a shit about people”. They pay lip-service about their people. But at the end of the day, if they don’t need them or their particular skills, they will just get rid of them and go to the market to find replacements with the skills they need. As “management” I have these conversations all the time. You have these developers who are way smarter (or at least way more knowledgeable) than me (and orders of magnitude smarter than the dimwited “resource manager” or HR recruiters) where we basically just call them “resources” and trade them like Pokeman to put in front of some idiot client. And if the client doesn’t like them because their pants woosh when they walk or whatever, they are on the phone to me and I’m on the phone to find a replacement ASAP.
I was interviewing for a job today and the recruiter is like “I noticed you had a lot of jobs” (keeping in mind, my manager from my last job actually referred me). What I didn’t say but thought real loud was “yeah I also fucked a lot of chicks before settling down with your Mom and that worked out for you, didn’t it?”. I get it. Companies don’t want to be worried someone is going to quit after a year or that there isn’t something inherently “wrong” with them - like my inability to suffer idiots. But what guarantee do I have your company isn’t going to get acquired by Amazon next year? Or get hit by a fucking meteor? Or that your bullshit vision for future growth turns out to be bullshit and all this growth you are experiencing in the “collaborate remote shared workspace” field goes away next year when things go back to normal?