One thing you will learn in the MBA program early and have reinforced over and over again is that people in business positions solve nearly every problem using Excel. If you can resist the temptation to do the same, you will find that the MBA program offers a low-pressure opportunity to create lots and lots of software.

Just as in high school and your undergraduate studies, you will feel like you are doing everything. This time, however, it’s really part of your training to learn how to deal with that and get everyone working. You will learn how to use collaboration tools to work better and gain a new respect for the people you work with. You will try, and fail, to just assign sections of work to people and try to glue it together before the deadline, and learn from this failure.

You will be faced with difficult choices about your priorities and will need to make them correctly, whatever that means for you. Being a graduate student means daily delivery on a commitment that you made when you were better rested and when you idealized the process and experience. Chugging along despite the realities of grad school demonstrates your ability to honor your commitments and work toward a distant goal.

We are at the mercy of people who are trying to pre-translate their problems and requirements into a language they think we understand, which dumbs it down just enough that friction is introduced in the form of ambiguity. It’s like lossy compression, in a way, with those compression artifacts showing up in the form of arguments over acceptance criteria.

I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, and I think I have some reasons why getting an MBA as a software engineer makes sense, even if you have no immediate plans to be a manager.