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A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
21–30 of 379 posts
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#22This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed limits and accomplished something phenomenal. One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. T…
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Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#23Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a plant boxing chips.
That's the way to work in my opinion. I worked at a place where just because I had an engineering degree I was around 25 years old managing a manufacturing plant full of 40+ year olds that have been working the lines since they graduated high school. It makes absolutely no sense. The best I could do was just make sure they had all the supplies and everything they needed because they knew every machines and issue inside and out and there was absolutely nothing I could help them with in that regard. Would have made 100x more sense having one of our maintenance guys or line workers promoted into a managerial position.
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#24The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to the top is done. Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole. Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing a…
It may just look different now. At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in tech. Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs or who have…
This is something I've been wanting to ask at interviews, "how many people who work here were hired with a different title?" I'm pretty sure that promoting from within is an extremely strong indicator of resilience.
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#25I love this story. It's not about how Montañez "got lucky" - it's about how he, in several key spots, set himself up so luck would find him.
It's a great American success story.
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#26Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a plant boxing chips.
That's the way to work in my opinion. I worked at a place where just because I had an engineering degree I was around 25 years old managing a manufacturing plant full of 40+ year olds that have been working the lines since they graduated high school. It makes absolutely no sense. The best I could do was just make sure they had all the supplies and everything they needed because they knew every machines and issue insi…
Thank you for being humble. Experience is worth a lot more than credentials on paper. This is a truth that SV turns a blind eye to.
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#27Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a plant boxing chips.
My dad literally went from putting the chips in the boxes when he was 23 years old, to overseeing the construction of a brand new manufacturing plant (and running it), to managing scores of plants at HQ in his 40's.
Frito-Lay however, is not immune from boneheaded decisions. After 20someodd years of employment, and a trophy case full of awards, he and some of his [white male] colleagues were laid off in favor of creating a more 'diverse' management roster.
Lacking the experience of those whose positions they took, performance tanked with the new management team, and the person who set it all in motion was fired.
At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, or gender.
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#28The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to the top is done. Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole. Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing a…
Games industry is probably one of the few jobs where you can work your way up to the top role from the bottom. It's still not uncommon at all for executive producers that manage entire projects to have started as game testers that would have been paid a low hourly wage.
Games companies hire their own cleaners and mailroom and they make it through to the C-suite?
Your comment takes a tone suggesting disagreement but the content agrees completely with the parent.
If you started in a technical role then you manage to reach a top technical role then you haven't done the "start in the mailroom" progression at all.
Are games testers even taken on straight from school at age 16 or do they have to have a degree to get in the door nowadays?
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#29Great story. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of D'Angelo Barksdale's cynical speculation about the inventor of Chicken McNuggets being a "just some sad ass down in the basement of McDonalds, thinking up some shit to make some money for the real players": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A
Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
#30The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors. I wonder how likely this scenario would be in today's world. I have found personally that many companies are unwilling to take risks on employees who aren't formally qualified, even if they demonstrate the skills…
> The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors.
A practical question, and a moral one:
Would it be have worked out had the CEO tried to steal Montañez's idea, given Montañez came up with the spices himself?
Does someone merely not doing something unethical, at no cost to themselves, make them a hero?