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What are the Marketing C's?

Does a company, hiring two equally skilled tech people, care at all that one of the two has CS, MBA, and JD graduate degrees, and the other doesn't?  If so, how does it affect their career paths?

  • Is it worth spending a bunch of money on an MBA (at a fancy private school, in this case), on top of my CS undergrad and law degree (from highly ranked, but public universities), just to have the pedigree of a business grad degree (which might "bridge the gap" between computers and legal, as I will elaborate on in a moment), for someone in my position?  Or would it be wiser to just focus on self-teaching computer science skills and refining hardcore programming chops?  Also, CS skills equal, does having a business and/or law degree mean anything at all to a company hiring someone for a strictly CS role (e.g., web developer)?  Most people I've spoken to say that having the combination confers no additional value, or more often, that it confers negative value in their opinions. Every employer I've applied to, large or small, seems to hate seeing the combination of law and computer science.  They have, when actually asked, even gone as far as to say it would be better to simply hide one or the other depending on which is relevant to the position (one, after considering me for a project manager role, ultimately said that though the law background gave me an advantage over the other CS employees in that I understood business, was more mature, had better people skills, and could organize more complex projects, that I did not "fit into a box" sufficiently for him to wrap his head around).  I would have assumed that to a legal employer, the CS background would be a bonus showing I actually *understand* the substance of tech-related legal work they do, and that a tech company (especially a startup) would kill to have a software engineer who can also be pulled aside to answer legal questions regarding intellectual property, corporate matters, stuff about contracts, and other general legal/business issues, potentially saving thousands of dollars and statistically raising the probability of receiving funding and reaching a profitable exit.  Not so!  I tried to find a job for four years after passing the bar, and never got one (I spent the first three focused on obtaining a law job with CS as secondary; the fourth year doing the converse–a programmer with a secondary legal/business background).  When I finally started just outright asking people what was wrong, they always pointed to the combination of degrees/skills; and either didn't like or didn't believe that I was actively working in, and expanding my knowledge of, both fields, though I had a deep understanding of both, was making decent income doing both, and clients were happy–it was just too stressful to do both types of work while also marketing and obtaining clients for both, doing all the bookkeeping, etc). So, going beyond the obvious answers and assumptions (e.g., the ones I made), does say, a startup, or a medium/large company, hiring two equally skilled engineers/programmers/CS people, care at all that one of the two has CS, MBA, and JD graduate degrees, and the other doesn't?  And what about the converse–what does a law firm care about someone having a Computer Science background that is up-to-date? What path does such a dual background usually send one down that is any different than just being a good programmer, if any? What is the best way to present having both of these degrees and fields of experience, and if one has failed at pursuing law as the primary field (e.g., obtaining a job at a law firm), what is the best way to sell the overall skill set to an employer who is looking either at the CS side primarily, or ideally (but something I've yet to see), at both equally?

  • Answer:

    Sure, there's value.  You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook -- where would they be without their COO, Sheryl Sandberg, a Harvard Business School graduate?  It's one thing to have a vision, and it's another to know how to execute, especially if a business starts to take off with a really disruptive product. A startup may not need coders with an MBA, but it definitely helps when upper-management knows how to operate a business (general management, finance, supply chain), and an MBA will give you the grounding in fundamental business principals to do so.

Rafael Alfonzo at Quora Visit the source

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I wouldn't say it's a clear negative, but the JD is nearly useless for a CS role.  It's nearly useless for most other roles too for that matter.  The most valuable of the three is your CS degree, followed by the MBA and trailing well behind is the JD. I say this as an attorney with an EE background who practices as an attorney.  From that perspective, the combination EE/JD is incredibly helpful, but if I were an engineer, the very expensive private school JD would only be useful for rounds of trivia.

Kevin Keller

I disagree with the other two answers. You don't think that someone working at a startup with a JD and a CS degree is going to have better value than someone with just the CS degree?  It seems to me that a 2-3 CS guys are going to get taken advantage of (see "The Social Network" film for an example), because at the end of the day they know very little about business, corporate finance, intellectual property, and very little about the law.  The MBA (which I have) looks nice but every MBA student admits that you learn absolutely nothing in business school.  In law school, and through law practice, I learned how to negotiate venture capital deals, including, particularly, term sheets, along with the SEC regulations, and all the internet law and intellectual property law that could possibly apply to a startup.  A business lawyer is a superset of an MBA; we know everything the MBA knows plus all of the legal practical knowledge to actually make it work, and to understand the finer (most important) components of every deal/transaction.  As they've always said, "At the end of the day, an MBA needs lawyers, but lawyers don't need MBAs".  These days, it's also starting to look like "regular people prefer technology/robots to lawyers/MBAs", too (see below).  From my experience, the MBA has been virtually useless, whereas the JD has allowed me to understand how a business/startup actually runs and interfaces with the real world (via contracts and the law).  Everything in the start-up world really boils down to product (CS), marketing (business, but really just a knack for social media), and law (term sheets, financing deals, contracts with employees/other companies/financiers/so on and so forth).  In addition, generally (not always, but often), someone with a JD and some amount of experience, has a certain type of "wisdom" when it comes to managing complex projects, dealing with massive amounts of information, managing disputes between people/colleagues, and overall having a more wise and complete view of how the world works, having intensely studied the "prerequisites" of law, which include history, political science, economics, business, and in some cases, engineering sciences/CS. Thus, for a small tech company these days, a CS + JD is the ultimate combination, IMO; but one has to pick which service they want to render, and the average tech employer may still think in "boxes", not understanding the value of this combination.  Either way it's useful; the startup needs a JD in house to structure everything correctly, get the best deals, and avoid problems down the road that have killed many a startup that didn't want to pay for legal.  Likewise, a lawyer needs to actually understand computer science/engineering if he is to represent a tech company in matters of corporate transactions, intellectual property, etc.  Furthermore, more and more technology will need to be law-knowing; as regulations become more difficult, so in a somewhat included and somewhat separate way, legal technology has become very important and is even a major factor in the recent displacement of thousands of lawyers in recent years; e.g., LegalZoom has nearly wiped out the market for much transactional law, even though they deliver a very poor product, the average Joe assumes it's smarter to pay $30 for a Will & Trust on LegalZoom than it is to hire a lawyer to do it at $200+/hr.   Ray Kurtzweil, maybe the most famous and accurate futurist, actually said in his most famous book that in the near future, the most important people will be those who can speak the language of both technology and law/policy, because the two are going to become inexorably intertwined, and I would posit that they are pretty much the only sure industries right now (law being much less sure; it's downsizing in a tremendous way, but law & policy as a concept upholds our societies), besides energy and medicine.

Anonymous

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