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A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

thehustle.co

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Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#201

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

bluedino wrote: post #189
starpilot wrote: post #123

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…

There were hot/spicy snacks before hot Cheetos. No white person could have put two and two together?

Maybe they could have, but obviously they didn't.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#202

Post by dsfyu404ed »

arkades wrote: post #187

This article ends right before the actual interesting part begins. 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 wond…

>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?

When you get an opportunity like that not learning isn't a realistic option. You do whatever to take advantage of the opportunity.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#203

Post by spaceflunky »

bendbro wrote: post #12

Very impressed with the janitor's vision and the CEOs good leadership. A poor leader would have quashed the process when the janitor could not justify his idea. Being a good leader, the CEO came up with a solution to determine the viability of the janitor's idea. The difference between seniors and juniors is experience, and that experience can partially be defined by your "moveset". A janitor would not know it is pos…

Great comment. It takes a hell of a CEO to squash any ego they have and stop to listen to the janitor about what direction their business should take.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#204

Post by yellowapple »

opportune wrote: post #166
slimsag wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> i.e. you can't show up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo jorts

This betrays a very non-diverse view of the world :) In more rural parts of the USA, this is kind of the norm (save for the "shareholders", since a lot of rural transactions are among sole proprietors or other sorts of tiny private companies, if they're even formal at all). Sometimes those proprietorships get big fast, and you end up with that weird case where the CEO wears a camo suit and takes stakeholders hunting instead of golfing.

On a different note: it looks like you're mixing up "class" in the economic sense v. "class" in the etiquette sense, and those ain't always equivalent.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#205

Post by kortilla »

slg wrote: post #194
rolltiide wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the cultural ideal of meritocracy needs to be addressed, and this is conflating two separate issues: 1) People of certain backgrounds want to and need to prove they CAN compete. 2) People of certain backgrounds should be helping make decisions even without credentials. so there are both competent and less competent people that need to be included. "wait what why? I wasted way too much of my life to accept why…

The idea that a push for diversity is somehow in conflict with a meritocracy is deeply flawed because it relies on the idea that people with diverse backgrounds either haven't shown they are capable or that there are no people with diverse backgrounds that are capable. A good diversity program does two things: 1. It identifies and removes certain unnecessary credentials that might rule out people with diverse backgro…

That’s a fantasy. The reality is that there aren’t enough diverse candidates to reach the diversity goals of every company without hiring incompetent people.

If every company wants 50% women and the graduates with interests in CS come out at a 4:1 male to female ratio, the strive for diversity either needs to give up and hire what the pool provides or start giving underqualified women.

TL;DR - Companies absolutely need to lower the bar for minorities if they want ratios that don’t match the pools. This problem is only made worse by the popularity of these very diversity programs.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#206

Post by WalterBright »

bshipp wrote: post #141
notatoad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if this was for a school assignment on marketing, that would be cheating. If it was something he was publishing under his own name, that would be plagiarism. But if you're giving a presentation to your bosses, pretty much everything is fair game.

If my programming tasks--comprised of Github snippets and Stackoverflow answers--were graded by any University TA I'd certainly fail too. But I'm getting appraised by different standards in the workforce than in school. The workplace doesn't care what I've learned, they care what I've done. if I choose to spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch instead of recycling work that has already been published I wo…

I get annoyed with programming books where they present sample code demonstrating a technique, and then straitjacket that code so you can't use it.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#207

Post by thundergolfer »

arkades wrote: post #187

This article ends right before the actual interesting part begins. 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 wond…

thehustle.co as a publication is catered to young 'hustlers' who very much buy into the capitalist American Dream.

This is a hype-article for the 'anyone can make it' myth, a myth that fuels culture of overworked young people[1] struggling against structural changes they're told to ignore.

[1]. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#208

Post by HillaryBriss »

This is my favorite part of this story: “It seemed there was a group of [executives] who wanted it to fail,” he later told the podcast, The Passionate Few. “They thought I got lucky. They were paid big bucks to come up with these ideas… they didn’t want some janitor to do it.”

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#209

Post by marsrover »

m463 wrote: post #195
starpilot wrote: post #123

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…

Went to the east coast, couldn't find spicy chips/snacks of any kind in the grocery stores. Finally found Takis at... Home Depot.

Try the gas stations next time.

Re: A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)

#210

Post by johnvanommen »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #14

This 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…

> 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. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it.

In business, I think this is incredibly commonplace. People have a bad habit of looking at what the competition is doing and copying it.

That isn't a bad strategy if you're in an industry with big margins. For instance, Microsoft spent a lot of time telling people how SQL Server was competitive with Oracle. With their large margins, it made sense to go head-to-head with a similar product.

But if you're selling a commodity like potato chips? You gotta figure out some way to differentiate yourself from the competition, break out of the "commodity" mold.

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