181–190 of 379 posts
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>"Were are problems?" What is this sentence? I had to stop reading here.
Yes, downvote instead of acknowledging the mistake and fixing it so that people can understand what you're saying.
Inspirational. I'd love to hear names of companies today where folks feel their work place culture might allow something like this to happen.
I work at Nucor and know of several people who have done exactly this in the 20 years I've worked here. They started working in a entry level production position and worked their way up to department manager, division manager/VP, senior VP and even CEO in one case.
And this is why VCs often say they prefer teams with just domain expertise to teams with just the technical expertise, if the team doesn't already have both.
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Yes, downvote instead of acknowledging the mistake and fixing it so that people can understand what you're saying.
On HN you cannot downvote someone who responds to you, so uh, that's not what is happening.
My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me. The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes, which I had in LA) and adapting them i…
What, adding chili to a food? I reckon the monoculture cohort you talk of could have come up with that.
Frito 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.
His wife was playing the role of co-founder. She believed in him and helped him make the MVP. Kudos to the guy for the initiative, but we are wrong to assume the janitor is in a weak and powerless position. You can work in a factory where you don't see any of the building apart from the walk to your station and the walk to the tea room. You just do your shift operating a machine. The janitor isn't so intensively over…
Secondly, why does it matter that what he made was a popular junk food made of corn? If he was a chef that made a popular meal made of locally sourced ingredients, would you find that more impressive? If he were an artist and he splattered paint onto canvas made of cotton? I’d be careful to not trivialize what it means to make something beloved by millions just because you ascribe negative value to junk food and corn.
Janitor takes some food his company produces, adds spices, makes a shitty pitch deck and profit? Cool, but... this could have easily happened in a dozen different configurations and gone nowhere. This is more luck than anything else.
The interesting story begins after that. This guy didn't end his career there - so, presumably, he was't a one-hit wonder. We have an illiterate janitor who suddenly got swept into the orbit of the CEO, without any business or operational acumen. He somehow -how??- managed to learn the ways of the new tribe, learn business, learn to read and write, learn how to lead a business unit, and do it well. This guy came out of nowhere, and had to zero-to-sixty from manual laborer to - what? executive? What position did they put him in? How did he ramp up? What kind of support did he get, if any? What kind of education did they provide him with, if any?
There's a long, interesting story between "janitor" and "successful VP", and they neglected to tell almost any of it!
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(Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them) > Also interesting is the backlash he faced…
It is a real thing. On the other side, I am a black female who grew up in middle class suburbia and has a typical Bay Area accent. This affords me a level of privilege because I can easily "class pass" as someone more affluent - even though it is generally assumed black people are lower class. This means I have the "right" mannerisms and speaking patterns for corporate jobs and other things and it is easier for me to…
My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me. The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes, which I had in LA) and adapting them i…
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I 100% agree. But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based on race/sex. If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not really diverse then, is it?
Class diversity is pretty hard to achieve because you usually need some baseline class to actually be able to succeed in a role, i.e. you can't show up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo jorts. And social mobility from lower classes into corporate-ready roles is rather low in this country, so while there certainly are people who grew up poor and would be useful for companies to f…