Is it worth getting an MBA as a software engineer?

No, MBA is for financial engineering growing startups into IPO or acquisition scams (being checky) Building a startup is very different from what they teach in MBA programs.

You want to read books on this list: https://verdverm.com/books/ The Lean Startup - Eric Ries was the seminal work (with Steve Blank). Crossing the Chasm, The Challenger Sale, and Don’t Make Me Think should be near the front of the list. Nice benefit is that the list costs less than a month of tuition

Check out YC's Startup School https://startupschool.org | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5PjfCy7mE77... | https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=startupschool&s...

It depends on what you want to do. I stayed on the IC track and rose to a staff/principal level role in big tech.

I worked with quite a few MBAs, mostly product or program managers or directors who managed PMs.

I don’t have an MBA, and the ROI isn’t clear to me. Maybe it was just a cultural problem at my last company, but many of these MBA types wrote documents on often cringy or useless features that they’d claim will “delight customers”. Customers hated most of these product features and and saw them as privacy violations.

It’s entirely possible there are more successful MBAs and my specific company perhaps didn’t have the top MBA talent.

Not yet