"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” says Hart, and pay attention to details. It also keeps her employees on their toes."
I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.
You would think so. I was working on an oil rig and they made a big deal about ‘management by walking about.’ So the heads of each of the departments were supposed to go and check ONE job their charges were working on that day. They were supposed to write a short report about what they observed. This was too much for them so they quickly got in trouble from shore-based management for not filling out their reports. So they promptly delegated to the next-in-line management They promptly delegated it to the people doing the work so once a week besides all the other paper work I had to fill out a report about how I was observing myself working safety while management still had no clue what was happening.
> How do you know what's going on if you're not there?
> Ask a restaurant manager. Or a bartender. Or the manager of a retail shop. Or a call center or an office. Or the supervisor of a factory or warehouse floor. What do you think they'd say? [...]
> Ask anyone responsible for something, "How do you know what's going on if you're not there?" and you'll always get the same answer: "You won't."
> Unless they were an I.T. manager.
Not really though - that's an entire article about how IT is so unique and special in how disfunctional it is, nobody else is like IT, aren't we the special snowflakes. That's almost the opposite of what the previous poster was saying!
That’s sort of different stakes, right? In your case your direct managers decided to prioritize not doing their jobs over some pretty important stuff—your personal safety and the damage the oil rig could do to the environment if something went wrong. In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly.
Thank you to clarify. Then why did you write "just"? In one reading, this is slightly dismissive. In retail spaces, cleanliness and tidiness is very important for the shopping experience.
I disagree that it matters beyond sanitation, although I admit that’s a matter of preference. In any case, it isn’t life-or-death, environmental catastrophe level stuff.
You apparently didn't live in the U.S. during the late stages of K-Mart's existence. K-Mart was a major discount retailer, locked in a years-long battle with Walmart. But in the years before it finally went under, many stores (maybe all?) were plagued by messily stocked shelves, unattractive merchandising, stock pulled onto the floor and not picked up, dingy flooring and poor lighting. I'm not talking just the toy section, but the linens and other dry goods. The stores in my area were simply unpleasant to shop in, so people stayed away, and the whole company went out of business. There are certainly issues with Walmart as a company and employer, but in my experience their stores are well-maintained, the merchandising is decent, and the shelves are neat.
I both A) don't believe you at all (would you rather shop somewhere you can easily find and access the product you're looking for, or where you have to track down an employee to dig through the clutter to find each item?) and B) feel we should note that Walmart's "ideal shopping experience" is not the same as the customer's. They want you (in the amalgamated, averaged sense) to traverse the store in a certain way, to select the right items, to be enticed to buy the other right items, and to leave without encountering so much friction that you decide to go to Target next time; those subtler effects are absolutely affected by organization and aesthetics.
I don’t believe that you don’t believe me, and I don’t think either of us will be able to present a compelling argument about the beliefs and preferences bouncing around in each others heads.
This would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early stage startups where the person is truly in a player/coach role, it rarely happens.
Toyota calls it a "gemba walk" -- managers and even executives need to walk the factory floor and see problems with their own eyes, not through hearing reports.
With software, the codebase is the gemba, not the office. Managers don't need to be writing code, but they should be reading it. Otherwise it's like a production manager who has never seen the inside of their own factory.
User experience and observing how they interact with the end product of software development is the true version of walking the aisles. What to find improvements, just be the person that trains and teaches the administrator, the general user, the maintainers, and the installers.
For example, I documented how to load an OS image for assembly. Watched them use the guide and saw they flipped through the document. Afterwards, I inserted an extra page of what shows up in the text stream and said, "sit and wait for ...." at that point they started flipping around.
That's looking at the car and driver, not the factory. That's important too! But the gemba walk is about seeing the factory floor where the car is made. If your cars are shipping late and there's lots of defects, you have to look at the factory to find out why.
For example is talking about the assembly line. Assembly workers are your users too. Having an application packaged as as an installer versus a ZIP reduces knowledge and work on both by the assembly user and the maintenance user. In automation, Assembly works still have to engage with the software and make configuration changes, from factory settings to job settings. There really is not a black and white, just a gray area when it comes to assembly and end user.
Not quite the same thing but I subscribed to one of my team's code review email lists. I also cc'ed myself on bug reports. Mildly interesting but didn't really impact anything although I was always looking for signals in the noise.
On the other hand, my boss had a de facto policy of visiting each remote office at least once a year and conducting one-on-one meetings face-to-face as much as possible. I found this useful for myself to understand the team/environment/product and good for building connections with people, especially when cultures are significantly different.
It did result in my visiting Wuhan 16 times between 2012 and 2019, for better or worse.
I mean, Wuhan isn’t some exotic danger zone. It just happened unluckily to become an epicenters for an outbreak recently, but otherwise it’s just a big city.
I work at an industrial plant (steel mill) - "Walking the floor" is still taught to current managers I think it comes out of LEAN manufacturing or similar. It is supposed to be an informal thing, so not looking over people shoulders and writing things up etc.
I believe the idea is for the manager to be visible and approachable so people can feel comfortable coming up to the manager raising issues etc. If the manager is away off site in an executive office or similar then it becomes an added barrier for people to be able to approach them, to notify them about issues etc.
Would you compare "walking the floor" to doing some PRs or improving test coverage? Neither of these specifically delivery features, but they keep a close eye on the software.
I would say getting a development environment up and running and running the test suite would usually be a great start. You’ll see pain points almost immediately if you just do those things.
I think one can definitely progress to becoming CEO of a large company by 37 if they make a lot of right moves, which I'm guessing she did. But yeah, to go from being the kind of manager that walks the aisles to the kind that regressed a bunch of great products - it seems like something broke along the way.
I have a 2011 mac mini I'm using as home server. It had Linux Mint for a time (this year) and it was snappy, except for browsing the web. Everything else work fine, even LibreOffice and playing videos. But load youtube and you can see the stuttering.
I have absolutely had managers (and managers managers) contribute code. I think the typical team lead manager lite position was supposed to be like 20% of time on development and my managers manager who oversaw like 30 people contributed some when our team was behind. Probably didn’t read much code outside of what they contributed though.
Since every company seems to come up with their own job titles, it would be more useful if you described how large your organisation was compared to the entirety of the engineering organisation at your company.
His style of leadership was what a good captain should be. Kind, caring, patient with everyone but also personally set and expected a higher standard. Mistakes were opportunities to learn, and you never felt belittled.
He was the kind of person that was the first to show up and the last to leave and knew every part of the business as if he had done it, and was busy but always had time for people and knew there names.
He was a leader not a manager or supervisor, a trait I’ve found common among military people.
He took cleanliness and safety seriously from the navy and applied that to the store, the store staff vacuumed and cleaned the store as it was his and we took pride in it from top to bottom and he lead workplace safety efforts very early on.
He ran the store like a family, and he shined his boots every morning.
Thinking back to one manager I had that everyone loved for similar reasons, and I remember now that he had a military background. I never thought then that it might be connected.
You’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.
I don’t really understand what this looks like. I mean, when I worked in retail, I was at a place smaller than Walmart, so, maybe Walmart managers tend to be more hands off and need to make a show of actually knowing what’s going on in the store.
But I’d typically get some instructions and then be left to clean up or stock things. Tidying up isn’t that complicated or high stakes. Normal people know what messy and clean look like.
My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying. And even in a pretty small store, there are a lot of aisles to tidy up. If a manager is known to be annoying they’ll also have to waste time looking for me.
A Walmart Supercenter can have 500 employees and dozens of deliveries per day. I can totally see why they'd get wrapped up working mostly in the office and talking to department heads vs. walking the store.
> My favorite managers were aware of what the store looked like and could say “tidy up the pillows” or whatever if something needed particular attention. But the manager that came by with attention to detail and an intention to keep me on my toes? Nah, that’s annoying.
I'm confused. What is the difference? It sounds like "eye of the beholder" kind of stuff, like micro-management vs high touch.
MS popularised that, but based on some recent comments here by employees, it sounds more like they're just getting force-fed the dogfood without having any power to change it.
Credit to Walmart for creating an environment where a person can still love their job after years of service.
That stuff can't be faked, even with a high salary. Before you say, "it's easy to say when you're getting paid $240K a year." Nah. A person needs challenge; a purpose. Lots of FANG ICs making $500K+ who hate their job. Why? No challenge or palpable purpose.
To create a scaled corp structure where a person can ascend from the bottom is also tough to do.
If you work a lot like this lady does you do not really have much time to reason about how you spend your life and whats important.
It just happens to you. But it becomes all encompassing and consumes the person. For some thats the right way to live their life, for most not so much.
FANG has a problem in that they have a lot of highly paid individuals doing nothing or very little, so they have a lot of time to sit around and get depressed about it.
Another issue is we’re a couple generations in where kids were told over and over swe is what their passion is without it being a real reality. Eventually they get old enough to realize the lie but not young enough to take the risk of doing something about it.
> but not young enough to take the risk of doing something about it.
I cannot grok this statement. The older I am the bigger risks I was able to take because I had accumulated more financial independence. Why would you be able to take more risks when you are young?
When I was 23 I had little savings, little assets, lots of debt I was worried about paying off, and felt like I needed to work or I was going to be homeless and starve. I took the highest paying job I could find, and worked until I had enough experience and network to find a higher paying job. I took no risks.
When I was 33 I took large career risks because I had no debt (outside of low mortgage payment), lots of savings, plenty of assets, and a professional network to fall back on if my risk didn't pay off.
According to systems theory (and karl marx?) purpose of the system is what the system does. Here system = person.
And according to those who dont like that theory "The Protestant Ethic" is the reason for "The Spirit of Capitalism" or continuing to work/optimize/explore/exploit way past the point your Needs are meet.
IMHO This is like status. Sounds smart but not much behind it... How do you know what are someone needs, maybe they evlolve? Maybe your need is to try a FAANG job and have first hand expiring that will change your needs to less material. Maybe one of your needs is to satisfy protestant ethics? And your need is to go beyond the first level needs... So I'd say the same way system purposes I'd defined by what it does. Your needs are defined by what your do.
Having said that, this type of philosophizing is nothing but an empty exercise in confusion. Everyone one is an individual an has his one subjective epirience, a person aspires to live his life as he best understands it.. anything beyond that is just nonsensical.
If there companies paying 500K who’d like a software engineer to just professionally do the job, not complain, not have an agenda, not worry about promotions - drop me a reply. You pay, I work. That’s the all there’s to it.
> That stuff can't be faked, even with a high salary. Before you say, "it's easy to say when you're getting paid $240K a year." Nah. A person needs challenge; a purpose. Lots of FANG ICs making $500K+ who hate their job. Why? No challenge or palpable purpose.
Something only someone with a high income would say. Contrary to all data and research and evidence.
Not sure if you’re discrediting the parent comment or pointing out the reality of it.
But yes this is something only someone with a high income would say. And yes, it’s true.
Beyond a certain income, the wrong job can be soul sucking and depressing. And it takes achieving that level of income to fully appreciate that reality.
It's been described as another way to hit rock bottom, because you realize that even after "making it" it doesn't make you happy. So NOW what do you do?
"You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help."
There are more than a few studies behind it. Is that "scientific"? Remember that viral story about the guy who made the min salary in his company $70K? What did he base that number on, do you think?
Separately, if someone said that your take is "complete anti-scientific hogwash only poor people would repeat," would you think their opinion valid?
… maybe cite them? While I could see a study that says being vastly wealthy doesn't lead to happiness, the kinda wealth gap being discussed here is "cannot easily afford a home" ($70k/y; max $1.7k/mo affordable) and "can trivially afford a home" ($500k/y–$700k/y; max $17.5k/mo affordable). (For reference, homes in my area are currently ~$4.8k/mo.)
And a 2021 follow-up that addresses criticisms of the original (TLDR: if you were already happy, you get more happy > 75K. If you were unhappy, you don't get more happy > 75K.)
There are plenty of studies showing a diminishing return in happiness / general satisfaction after a certain income threshold. You can look themselves up yourself.
> I could send you paper and paper that wealth/income and stability increases happiness aggregated
Nobody disputed that. You made a statement about "something only someone with a high income would say." That's drawing the generality to a specific. It would be like concluding from the fact that most dogs are black, brown and white, that every dog is black, brown or white.
In this case, it could absolutely be the case that the factors that cause money to turn into happiness are not present among FAANG employees to a greater degree than population.
I hated it and put my money where my mouth was. I took another job for a massive pay cut.
Money isn’t everything. I started comparing my everyday life to prison. “How much money would I take to live in prison?” Realized it was gonna have to be a lot more than what I was getting.
Yes, please. I think a lot of HN people have lost all sense of proportion. A 7 figure job is $1M plus--a year. That's financially life-changing, no matter how much you hate the content of the work. Grin and bear it for a couple of years, and then... do anything you like for the rest of your life. Maybe 0.1% of the population gets an opportunity like that.
I think if a marriage breaks up after 2 years of one partner working 80+ hours a week to make enough money to have reasonable financial stability for the rest of their lives, the marriage probably had other issues.
Of course 2 years of stress can lead to otherwise-good marriages breaking up. Didn't you know happy couples who divorced during COVID lockdowns? It was common.
To me, those seem like fragile marriages. If it wasn't covid, then it'd be an illness or disability. If covid unearthed ideological differences, then it's likely that would have surfaced during other poticial events. If it was the financial hardship, that may have struck at another time. It's not that 2 years of stress can't destroy a marriage, it's just that it tends to destroy the weak ones.
I also didn't know any couples to divorce during lockdown.
Sure. I’m just arguing that “Here’s an opportunity to sacrifice for 2 years and put ourselves on a solid financial footing” is different from “the world is collapsing and we have to make the best of it”.
Sure, those things are common in many jobs that pay much less. Many marriages can survive a year or two of hardship. If they can't, then perhaps it's not a good marriage and it will fall apart anyways at the next major event. Illnesses happen all the time, but I assume you mean stress-related. But there are many stressful jobs that pay much less and result in injury or disability.
It's also possible they're saying it because they're in a national article and would almost certainly lose their job if they represented the company poorly. I would also guess PR got involved to approve or even pick which manager would show their image the best.
The other interesting effect I notice is that in rural communities especially, you find a lot more long-term employees that have just stayed because it was the solidest employer of the time.
Between jobs and before I launched into my current IT position I had a small stint at my local Walmart just to make ends meet -- MANY of the staff had 5, 10, 15, and even 20+ year service badges. Many of those 20+ year employees were there as the concrete was being poured and have been here since that store first opened in the community.
Also these people can make personal impact that is visible for them. They might be wrong, but still they can affect things and see them changing... It might not be possible in many other jobs specially in big corporations.
Yeah, after a certain amount (like enough to cover expenses, have a little fun, and build savings) and a certain amount of time, your income stops being something that makes you excited. This is especially true if you’re around other people who make the same as you do. If becomes normalized in your mind. Everyone needs a challenge and some goals. Something to look forward to.
I'm looking forward to retirement. I'm not interested in professional challenges anymore. In my experience they're usually BS and you don't get rewarded.
That article is from 2014. The average Walmart employee rate today is $17.06.
And a non-zero amount of those employees can someday make a lot more.
How many other companies of that size can say the same?
I'm not saying it's not a problem, and not saying we shouldn't be trying so solve it. But are we talking about wage reform, or Walmart uniquely being a shithead?
I read the article you linked and it feels like it's got an agenda. Conjecture 1 is that Walmart doesn't pay employees enough, then Conjecture 2 is that it pays its executives "too much," but conveniently defines "executive" as just the CEO, when in reality executives include the very people that OP's article is about - store managers!
I admittedly stopped reading after that because one can always find a convenient fact to backup their view. If I'm misinterpreting, let me know.
It's also complicated. When Walmart announced wage increases in 2015, their stock fell 5%. Who owns Walmart stock? Us.
> How many other companies of that size can say the same?
This is a bit of a strawman argument. How many other companies exist on planet Earth of this size? Very few. And are you insinuating that Walmart is paying well because they want to? I doubt it. They are tried-and-tested mega corp that responds to labour market pressures. I don't attribute anything else to this level of pay. Finally, average isn't a good metric to use; median is more useful.
If we leave size aside, I would say that Starbucks and Whole Foods are very good employers and large.
I was not insinuating that. The bigger you get as a corp, the harder it is to do have a mutually beneficial relationship with your employees, -because- market forces dictate so much of the strategy. So, that Walmart is the literal biggest corp and can still have legit upward mobility and satisfied mid-level employees is no small feat.
> “I love my job,” says Hart, but “it doesn’t turn off. That is one of the hard things about it.”
I'm lucky that in my industry I can make a good living as an individual contributor, because having to actually think about my job when I'm not at my job sounds like a living nightmare.
If you're in SW, you probably will need to think about your job off work: They usually don't work in shifts, and will have deliverables in a timeline of months. They need to plan the work, and always adjust to hit the deadlines.
If you're a doctor, then you probably don't have to think about your job off work.
That is not true about doctors at _all_, especially inpatient. They have so many hours in a day to spend on patients. They are checking on them after hours, fielding calls, looking at lab results, responding to messages, preparing for the next day, filling out notes, reading new notes. So not only do they think about the job off work, there is lots of job to do off work as well.
> That is not true about doctors at _all_, especially inpatient.
Varies depending on the type of work you do. People I know who are hospitalists, urgent care and ER doctors actually do just check out at the end. If something happens to a patient, it's the headache of the doctor who's rotation it is - not theirs.
And I also know PCPs who check out at the end and are done with it. If something happens off hours, they get taken care of by an on-call doctor, not the PCP. If it's serious, they're referred to urgent care and ER.
But as I said - all a function of who they work for. Same with SW.
Negative. Almost twenty years in the software industry, and I clock in at 9 and clock out at 5. Let's be honest, earlier on Fridays. It wasn't always that way, but now I prioritize time over more money, and for me it's worth the trade.
Doesn’t a doctor tend to have deliverables in a timeline of minutes or hours, on the order of dozens such deliverables a day, often with health- or life-critical stakes attached?
It seems like only yesterday that this counterpoint made the rounds here:
There’s a difference between things like not being able to disconnect from work emotionally vs requirements for off the clock training vs on call rotation. Some subset of this stuff might affect some doctors and some engineers, it all depends on career goals and trajectory, so probably not that useful to try and generalize.
One observation though, doctors on average have a better reason for work stress to follow them home, seeing life or death shit all the time. Whereas SWEs carry home an unreasonable amount of stress in situations that not only aren’t as important as that, but situations where the fruit of their labor will last only a few years at most. Like, your magnum opus at work will very likely be torn down anyway, so in terms of lasting legacy you’re probably better off with a job in landscaping or carpentry rather than a “living in the future!” career in ad tech, self driving cars, etc.
From this I conclude that most software people, including myself, are way more obsessive and less rational than we usually like to think.
I'm not discounting the prior submission. The medical field is vast. Some jobs are a lot worse than others. Just as you can't generalize across all STEM jobs, you can't generalize across all medical jobs.
Yes, a lot of doctors have a high amount of stress. And a lot don't.
True but the number of hours I work in SW + the number of hours I think about my job outside of work is still probably less than a typical doctor's working hours so I feel like we come out ahead anyways.
She's giving CEO/COO vibes. I bet she would crush it in either of those roles. It would be amazing if this article catapulted her towards running her own business.
Loved this:
> Hart gets to the front of the store, a product-display area in between banks of registers known as the horseshoe. “So what are you thinking here?” she asks Wright. “Easter or summer toys?”
> Wright suggests summer toys and T-shirts.
> “I think we should go after the eclipse,” says Hart, filling the section with eclipse-themed gear, as well as outdoor chairs and coolers.
Micro teaching opportunity and giving the employee an opportunity to have input, rather than just "put eclipse-themed gear here"
In some contexts yes but I think the idea is to teach the employee that they can answer with a different option. But it does depend on their relationship and personality.
If their answer is anything other than "eclipse", then they failed. There was no follow-up question to see why theh felt that way. There was no real discussion on strategy or reasoning. This is a trap.
Eclipse is obviously the best possible answer. You don't need to spend 15 minutes deliberating on this. This is a teaching moment to encourage staff to give great ideas by demonstrating how to communicate great ideas.
> To end the meeting, Michael Cole, 66, a maintenance worker, leads the group in the Walmart Cheer, a chant workers throughout the company do to start and end meetings.
It's a very effective manipulation technique - get the person to commit slightly past their comfort zone.
For instance, the Nxivm corporate training scam / sex cult [0] operated this way. At your very first meeting they'd ask you to wear a coloured sash and bow to the seminar giver. "It's just like judo!," you'd be told. "We're bringing a bit of fun to corporate training! Don't be such a grouch!" But of course the function was to (a) make you say yes once, which means you're now slightly committed, (b) make you look slightly ridiculous, which naturally makes you defensive and feel closer to your fellow ridiculous people (the ones in sashes), (c) make you give up a bit of your 'face', to make you more vulnerable and open, (d) weed out people strong enough to say no.
And once you're sitting in a sash, letting your guard down, comes the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. And after a thousand and one little pushes, you're so committed that you know you look absolutely insane from the outside, and it feels like the only future you have is within the organisation. You've committed so hard, bit by bit, that you no longer see a way out. And that's how you wind up with people getting branded for their slave master. [1]
Now I'm not saying Walmart brands women (though I'm not saying they don't - I have no evidence either way!), but it's worth noting that the only purpose of a tool like a 'corporate cheer' is to short-circuit your rationality and force an emotional commitment and loyalty that the business has no right to, and is unlikely to get from a purely rational employee. It's not just a fun little thing that may be inadvertently somewhat manipulative, it's a textbook manipulation technique.
So my 2c for anyone being asked to give a corporate cheer is to politely say no, and then think very hard about what kind of employer uses manipulation techniques to ensure obedience.
I worked at Wal-Mart in Canada for seven years when I was younger and during the summer, when I worked more hours, I would see the department managers and the upper level store managers do it every morning during the week. Wal-mart really pushes the idea of winning. Everything is about being the best at generating profit and beating the local competition into submission. The location I worked at completely destroyed a Zellers, Eatons, Bi-Way and possibly others that I'm forgetting.
I worked in the electronics department and my manager had the discretion to price big new movie releases below the competition (he would actually check out the competition himself). We had a line that snaked through the entire store for days when Titanic came out since we had the best price for a large radius. Having the best price on an item would be something that would be mentioned during the morning meeting and would be something everyone in attendance would get excited about.
Wait, so you're saying you had to do a chant as a SWE? That's wild. I'm really glad I never took up the recruiters for Walmart Labs now, that would have been a disaster for me.
It wasn’t super common, only like all hands stuff, and it’s not like they would fire you if you didn’t do it. I didn’t do the chant every time and I wasn’t fired.
I bumped into their manager AGM (well, quarter of it, they did 4 separate ones consecutively) in Kansas City one year. My employer had booked the hotel months previously. I think I was the only non walmart person.
They had four lines at check in, men smoking, women smoking, men non-smoking, women non-smoking. You shared a room with whoever you got in line with.
Lots of shop talk, no juicy secrets, silence when they found out I was not one of them.
> She passes a prominent display of Lume Whole Body Deodorant, a new product for the store priced at $14.97.
>
> “It’s interesting, but it’s too pricey for my customer,” says Hart. It isn’t selling that quickly.
> Near the cereal aisle, a customer walks up to Hart while recording on his cellphone.
>“Hi! Can we get some Snoop Cereal here on the shelf?” asks the man.
Earlier that month the rapper Snoop Dogg sued Walmart, claiming the retailer, along with Post Consumer Brands, had worked to suppress sales of Snoop Cereal. Some fans were recording videos related to the dispute for social media.
It's like you think you know America because you see it on TV and film so much, and then you read something that makes it sound so weirdly foreign.
There are few things more American than the passage you just quoted. It is about a fan of an aging stoner/rapper talking to a Wal-Mart employee about the fact that he wants cereal.
This is not a normal human, less then probably .5% of 340 million Americans are like this.
It's called being an attention-whore and hoping to strike it big by filming a non-controversy and making it into one on Tik-Tok. You can thank social media (and regular media) for the profiting off clicks/algorithms/non-controversies and driving this nonsense. This isn't filming a cop making an arrest to keep them accountable, it's filming a store manager hoping to create controversy and rid her of her job because she 'said or did the wrong thing' on film. It's no different then filming a fat/alt-lifestyle/whomever person on the bus without them knowing and then making fun of them to drive clicks to your video.
>Hart has seen that change firsthand. About 20 years ago, then 19 years old and a mother of two, she started part-time at the same Walmart she now runs. Her first job was cooking live lobsters pulled from a tank in the deli.
Was definitely expecting this to be a story about someone who graduated college and walked into management. I have respect for anyone who could rise though the ranks of retail.
There they talk about the Aldi culture and how "walking into management" isn't possible there, as everyone goes through the ranks of a store. That means of course that hiring someone from outside is almost not possible, but people there usually stay a very long time or even retire at the company.
I wish more operated this way. No matter how well you do, or what you accomplish, you will never be as successful ($$$$) as someone who joined a women’s leadership club right after their MBA and never worked a real job in their life.
Promoting from within forces you to actual reward value and understand the business.
Imagine working at a company for 10 years and you end up under some total knob as a manager. They don’t help you at all, they’re crap at their job, and you have no chance at moving up because you’ve basically reached a dead end.
Hopefully you have some lateral move you can make but that’s going to cost you time as you endear yourself to another manager (who hopefully is not also a useless prick). And the only other options are bailing entirely and ending up starting over again somewhere else or just sucking it up and staying in that position for who knows how long.
So the main qualification for being an Aldi executive is years of experience throwing people's groceries from one side to the other, never making eye-contact? And this translates to the skills required to run a multi-national business how exactly?
Don't get me wrong, sounds like a great deal for mediocre 'lifer' employees, but seems like a terrible deal for anyone bright (years stuck 'waiting the ranks' - or more realistically a massive brain drain for places that do let them 'walk into management'), or just corporate strategy in general (the skills required to run international JIT food logistics and the skills required to mop a spill in aisle 12 don't exactly have the greatest overlap.)
I’d suggest you listen to the episode, and it’s obviously not about transferring grocery stacking skills to running a logistics company but steeping people on the culture of treating suppliers well, saving costs, paying above market salaries etc.
I think their success speaks for itself and people who want a long term, stable job are not necessarily “mediocre lifers”, which is a pretty ignorant thing to say.
> I think their success speaks for itself and people who want a long term, stable job are not necessarily “mediocre lifers”, which is a pretty ignorant thing to say.
That's a pretty ungenerous micharacterisation of what I said, and a bit of a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have a long term stable job in a company that doesn't adopt any of Aldi's practices on hiring and promotion - and those practices are, as a matter of simple incentive logic, going to lead to brain drain and a senior management structure afflicted by the Peter principle. [0]
Walmart’s current CEO, Doug McMillon, also began working there as a high schooler unloading trucks (before completing college and returning to a corporate role).
When I worked at best buy we called them “lifers.” Last time I was in there I noticed one of the managers was a guy I worked with when we were teenagers. I’m still kinda mad he got picked to be the idea box over me, but in retrospect it looks like they picked the team player.
>Was definitely expecting this to be a story about someone who graduated college and walked into management. I have respect for anyone who could rise though the ranks of retail.
Some huge percentage of Americans's first job is at McDonald's (another business that has historically found management talent in-house). They learn the importance of cleanliness, customer service, accuracy.
A lot of Walmart management are promoted into it. While certainly not a great job, it's not too bad to make a career out of it. The average Walmart location will see about $70M/yr in revenue, so her responsibility is fairly high.
It's inspiring because it's in large part an outlier and not applicable to the vast majority of people who lack college degrees. It would not be remarkable it it were common or realistic.
She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probably frequently needs to manage upwards; interacts directly with customers; etc etc...
Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.
I don't about others but based on past experience if one really attempts to do their $240k software / IT job well they ought to encounter similar if not in some ways worse challenges - some just realities of the tech industry/stack/complexity and some injected by bureaucracy, incompetence, mismanagement and not to mention the ever hanging sword of change in technology and possibility of layoff for no fault of yours. It adds up.
When you are signing up for a job it's not just the money and the physical things you do - it's also the intangibles, the time spent in unproductive meetings, time spent afterwards feeling unproductive and worried, the resulting stress you have to manage etc, it all adds up and takes away something more than the money. I would argue that well managed jobs with some semblance of stability, human connection and predictability/routine are quite pleasant and easier to do compared to Software/IT.
No. Your job as a software developer may be stressful (as every job is) but her everyday challenges are way worse than yours. She has hundreds of actual people to manage, mentor and motivate, many with little education and lacking resources. Which means lots of absences, low-effort work, health issues, high turnover, and sometimes even theft. Plenty of issues dealing with customers as well. And then the managerial issues related to meeting revenue targets, implementing health care plans, managing inventory, putting on a good face for the bosses, as well as intense competition to be elevated to regional manager against a bunch of other colleagues in the exact same role. And her salary is only $120, there's a whole lot of stress when half your annual comp is bonus-driven.
Oh for sure, the intangibles kind of /are/ the job once you're past a mid-level position. But think about her job in the context of your description.
You think she doesn't have useless meetings she's invited to that every manager in the region needs to attend even though it could've just been an email from the regional director? The stress from the lights busted in the parking lot brought on by worries that a darkened parking lot and a random crime that night might trigger a spurious lawsuit? Doomscrolling about physical retail being replaced by online? That she's falling behind in understanding where robotics might move? That if that particular store was shut down in a strategic shift, she's wedded her entire marketability as an employee to a single company on a single ladder and that she can't really just easily grab a job from a company across the country?
Yeah, I used the word similar but sure! Just to be even more clearer I wasn't at all saying her job wasn't hard - I was merely saying IT jobs paying that can be equally hard.
I consider pay more like a caste system in the US. It's a way to separate people who "deserve" to be highly paid and people who don't. Working in software, it always felt odd that I make 3x as much as the guy making my food and have 10x the expendable income, even though they work harder at much more miserable work. The first degree of separation is whether you can afford to do a 4-6 year take home test that's getting more and more expensive each year.
Caste != social hierarchy. It's divinely-attributed, multi-generational, immutable social hierarchy.
What you're describing is bog-standard social stratification. We aim to do it by economic utility. But even though we're not good at economic mobility [1], in a caste system that mobility is near zero.
Caste is a specific system of social hierarchy. What you're describing--some people having it better than others--is common to all systems of social hierarchy.
What would be a better word for what I'm describing, then? India still has a caste system even with their government driven programs of mobility and hiring quotas, and more people moving upwards through marriage. It's not literally the same but it seems analogous enough to me.
I think there are lots of hard jobs that go under appreciated in our society.
I think about people playing pro sports for millions and then minimum wage labourers, drivers clerks, cleaners and cooks who make minimum wages.
One group are celebrated and the other are essential to society continuing to function.
My parents currently works at Walmart, they’re the one restocking supplies in the shelves. They are in their 60s and 70s, immigrants that became US citizens just last year. Also, they work night shifts.
Based on their feedback, Walmart is a very kind and good employer.
I think about this frequently. I hire day laborers occasionally and it’s actually quite astonishing at how much physical labor most those folks can perform and rather quickly and cheap. Yet when I get to know them the reality is most of them exist in an unfamiliar and invisible to society type way.
It's hard work keeping the staff below the full time limit where they get benefits, squeeze suppliers and ensure the reliable flow of inane corporate directives downwards. Has everyone completed their mandatory union training yet?
I don't know man, I'd rather make new stuff, ya know.
Not to detract from her performance (I've made a top comment about how she's giving CEO vibes), but we software engineers worry about short-term and long-term, do planning, work cross-functionally, manage upwards, focus on the customer's requirements. And way more.
It's easier to find revenue streams that scale horizontally by the number of programmers and servers. It's hard to open new Walmarts. This won't always be true for either case, so make well of your situation regardless of whether you think there's some kind of difficulty or effort moat.
A big question I've tried to answer in my life is whether the high pay in the software world has an intelligent economic explanation, or maybe a more sinister explanation involving false models encoded in the law.
A delivery driver who makes 30 deliveries per hour, with senders who pay the business $2 per parcel, is bringing in $60/hour of revenue. That revenue gets split with other workers who collected and sorted the parcels, the fuel bill and van insurance, and the investors who own the parcel-sorting machines and vans.
A software developer that saves $0.001 per delivery across 5,000 delivery drivers who make 30 deliveries per hour saves the company $1500 per hour. That gets split with the folks who maintain the CI servers, the Kubernetes cluster, the pen testers and so on. But it's still 25x as much.
And ability differences. For example there is a ton of supply for basketball players. But the product is magnitudes better with Lebron James than it is with me on the court.
Is the best garbage person in the world that much more productive than your average person (not even versus another garbage person, but someone you randomly pick and train them for a couple of weeks)?
Based on my years interviewing there are huge levels between the best SW engineers and even those with CS degrees, much less randomly selected people.
So much of being good at software engineering is non technical though, in ways I sometimes don’t feel things like how interviews are conducted don’t do a good job of screening for.
There's much less government intervention in hiring programmers, than there is, in hiring teachers (you need a state certificate) or CPAs (same). Even if you want to be a hairdresser you need a state certificate.
Yes there is no government intervention in who can be a programmer, but that's not what the issue might be.
Might it be the stuff that programmers work with, the inputs and outputs of the craft, that are covered by laws that create an unnatural economic disequilibrium?
But, we're probably all doing some form of the above in one way or another. A few minor edits may make the list a little more familiar to more software folks:
>worry about short-term and long-term [...] planning; works cross-functionally...;... manage upwards; interacts directly with customers
Salaries are awkward. I personally believe someone who collects the municipal garbage should make more than someone who sits in an office all day and solves logic puzzles. Because I wouldn't want to do it.
> Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.
Wow, this is such a nonsense view. Software development may seem easy to you, because you know how to do it and probably have been doing it for a long time. But I can assure you, software development is a hard job. If it was easy, everyone and their dog could do it. Have some respect to your profession!
Yes SW development is a hard job but she is doing a lot more than one job and the skill set required (not just knowledge but also behavior) to cover so many roles is a lot broader than most developers and also many managers in the software industry require to do their job.
On the other hand, there are a lot of Walmarts and similar stores, and a lot of people who have managed these in the past. There are many people who she can turn to for reliable advice. I'm assuming one Walmart is not fundamentally different from another. It's hard work, but it's essentially predictable.
Software developers are often called to do work that's not predictable. At the top of the pay grade we're generally asked to design something novel, because it's obviously not worth paying $240k / year for a developer whose work could be replaced by off-the-shelf software. (Sure, there are many exceptions and cushy jobs where people are raking in the cash with few risks. I'm thinking there are probably less of these around than a few years ago, though.)
The SW development is not just knowing the programming language, you also have to cover many roles, you need to understand and have the domain knowledge of the thing you are developing, you need to have communication skills to coordinate with other developers and stakeholders and many more (like developing intuition to know when to stop manager from making a mistake - e.g. you know this and that idea won't actually work in practice or it will have problems down the line adding to technical debt and so on).
If both options paid you 240k a year, would you rather be a software engineer or do the exact job the Walmart manager does? I'm guessing you'd rather do SWE
I think you misunderstood my point. I actually had a conversation about it with my friend who was a manager of a private health clinic. She had a moment of massive burnout and was looking to switch profession to something else. She was particularly tired of abuse she was getting from employees she had to manage and patients, unrealistic targets, overtime and relatively poor pay. The prospect of sitting in a cubicle, with noise cancelling headphones, minding own work and having similar pay while being surrounded by like-minded professionals was really enticing. Her understanding of programming was very much that you type in commands so the computer does things you want, easy. When she was this motivated, I asked her to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjov-2OZ0E
She managed to watch about 20 minutes and from there she couldn't focus. Then she asked to stop and asked me: "Do you know all of this? Do you have to know this?" I said that this is just the basics. That was very much the end of it.
She changed her career later and she is managing construction projects.
Something I wouldn't like to do. It would be a hard job, because that's not something I am interested in.
Depends. Walmart manager could be one of the highest salaried roles in a LCOL area enabling an early retirement or better quality of life than a SWE stuck in a HCOL.
If salaries are based on effort and not on what *relative* value they produce, people can just move rocks up and down a hill all day and become billionaires.
Devs are paid so much because the skills they posses are precise, not fluid. managing a store is more fluid not precise. Coding, like surgery, requires precision, like the syntax. Get one character wrong and the whole thing fails. This entails having a high IQ. Being a store manager is hard work, no doubt ,but the skill set is less IQ dependent, so it can be done by more people. A dev is paid so much because when you need a product to ship, the syntax has to work, and finding someone who can do it is hard.
I don't like shopping at Wal-Mart but you have to respect a company that's operating a real business at massive scale and about a 2% -3% profit margin. And Nichole seems to be good at her job.
It's interesting how the bulk of the decisions about displays, ordering, stocking, are apparently made in each store and not centrally.
Having worked around a particular system of Walmart I have to say they are brutally efficient and typically hire good people to run their internal systems. This would be at the corporate level and not store level, can't say much about that myself.
When working with them in measuring the efficiency of the software they were using they were getting significantly higher throughput at significantly lower hardware cost than the average large customer that uses this software. All of it because just a few well learned employees understand how the all systems work together in this workflow and optimize the process.
Walmart is a well oiled machine. Not saying there's nothing to improve, but in the context of the overall system in which it operates, it's crushing it.
Even in software engineering it’s “easier” to be higher level (staff, principal) because your output is more fluid, you delegate more, and command more respect. Yet the vast majority of engineers are incapable of reaching those levels because they don’t seem to have the mindset for it. So I’m not sure I agree with this, it seems to just be selection bias.
They are incapable of reaching those levels because they are never given the chance to develop those skills, or to even exhibit them. There just arent that many opportunities
not sure why you are getting downvoted, this is exactly my experience as well. In 5 years working on my own gig, I have developed more skills not only in sales, marketing and engineering than 12 years as a pure software engineer in the industry
Time-management is probably the single most important skill in these higher-paying jobs and...well...given the amount of self-help books there are on this topic, I'm not so sure I'd agree.
People who do well in higher-level jobs know /exactly/ what they're best at or uniquely positioned to do, and do that. Meanwhile, you need to delegate the rest to whoever's in the best position to do so (growing people if there aren't enough) which is itself a tricky calculus.
Everyone I've seen rise through the ranks has absolutely nailed communication, self-promotion, parroting the party-line, moderating their words, adapting to their audience, improving their speech techniques, giving excellent presentations etc.
> Many, many people simply aren’t able to do that. You can’t manage complex organizations that include people without that ability
Never thought about it that way, but I think you're correct. The number of adults who cannot hold their cool in the face of a perceived slight or setback is shocking.
Spoken like someone who has never had to do it. I've been up and down the ladder and I can tell you that it's much harder up than down, even though from afar it doesn't look like it.
If it's easy for someone it's because they are special, and usually in my experience they're special in a sociopathic tendency kind of way, where the things that make being in leadership hard (having responsibility over so many careers, feeling social and professional pressure from all directions, fending off middle management politics) come much more naturally to them.
Probably because a significant portion of HN readership already subscribes to the websites that commonly make it to the front page, and others know how to bypass the pay wall (i.e. https://archive.is/lk15F if you want to read this without a subscription).
I can't remember seeing any pay walled article on HN that wasn't bypassable using popular free services online. Usually, someone will also link one of the bypass websites pretty soon after a post starts gaining traction.
That the archive URL is some generally accepted thing here seems bizarre to me. I mean, taking the text and hosting it elsewhere—that’s just an unauthorized copy, just like if somebody had posted a torrent of a new popular movie so we could discuss it. Or links to cracked software (how else could those of us who don’t want to pay for it discuss it, right?)
I respond to the headline/other discussion in the thread if it is interesting. IMO, the publisher’s decision of how they want their work distributed and discussed should be respected. That includes not making unauthorized copies, and also the fact that that constrains conversation about their work.
I’m surprised that we seem to understand this for software but not written word. And we mostly act accordingly: lots of discussion of open source works, not so much on “paywalled” proprietary software.
