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

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

#231

Post by Cyph0n »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #202
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…

Trust me, it takes a motivated (and talented) individual to push through something like that. I would wager that the vast majority of us would never have taken it this far.

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

#232

Post by School-Cotton »

davidw wrote: post #130
pram wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like being called Chicano, Latin, or Hispanic. It’s seemingly only a US thing afaict. My family is from Mexico and “Mexican” suffices. It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That’s how I feel about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn’t identify with it, if that’s how they feel. :V

If I go to a party and there's a bunch of people from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and a few other places, I might say "yeah, I went to this party, and there were a bunch of Europeans there". It might be similarly be convenient to have a broad term for (mostly) Spanish speaking people from a somewhat ill-defined area of the Americas as a matter of convenience...? If I'm talking about someone like my friend from Gua…

If you wanted to avoid offending people who dislike the term "Latino", I think you could just say "people from Latin America" which AFAIK absolutely nobody objects to.

Interestingly I think there is a parallel to this: there’s no widely-used term in English to refer to white, English-speaking people from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. People in those countries just think of each other as foreigners and don’t spend a lot of time talking about their group as a whole.

But there is a widely-used term in France (and probably other European countries) for this group: anglo-saxon. Which is only used very rarely in the US unless you are talking about the actual medieval Anglo-Saxon tribes.

To me this feels similar to how people in the US are much more likely to describe people as “Latino” than people from Latin America are.

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

#233

Post by whatshisface »

wutbrodo wrote: post #222
whatshisface wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up You perceive subtle rejection a lot more strongly than you perceive someone else being subtly rejected. The effect you perceive could be explained by pointing out that all of the negative interactions involving you were "bottom-up," while the ones involving the "random lower-middle class friends,"…

That's a very insightful point, but I'm not comparing the way my friends interact with me to the way I interact with them, but rather the way friends in a lower social class interacted with me vs the way those in a (sort of) higher social class interacted with me. I feel like not having much money meant that there were ways in which I was out of place among my childhood milieu too. And yet somehow, I don't recall eve…

Class comes from behavior, which is I guess what you are saying - but it's real, as real as body language or your native language. This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your extended family. I'm not sure if there is a class in America higher than rich (Zuckerberg class?) but if there was, you would have to hang out around them to really test your theory.

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

#234

Post by gerbilly »

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…

You don't necessarily need class diversity, though that would be nice, you need psychological diversity.

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

#235

Post by lanewinfield »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #73
uponcoffee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be the one that is out of touch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

Cursory look at google trends suggest that latinx is a relatively uncommon term and that the term latino is approx. 30x more popular ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=latino,lat... ).

Do you want to compare other words that used to be popular but are now offensive? Not to say "Latino" is offensive, but your argument doesn't really hold water.

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

#236

Post by School-Cotton »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #220
sverige wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because I have been ridiculed for calling myself Swedish or Swedish-American instead of white. Somehow some people have even thought that's racist. But it is a strong identity in my family, and, for example, I really don't want to be lumped in with the people of Bavarian descent who made up about half of the town I grew up in. I'm nothing like them culturally. Honestly, "white" isn't an ethnicity and it is…

With all due respect, if you were born in the US and grew up speaking English, you have a lot more common with those "Bavarians" than you do with Swedish people in Sweden.

I was going to leave a similar comment, but decided not to. Anyway, I mostly agree with you -- I never refer to myself as "X-American" where X is some European country, because first of all I don't care much about it, and second I know how ridiculous it sounds to people who were born and raised in country X.

On the other hand, I also think the Swedish-American OP has an understandable point. Cultural group identification is a natural, strong human urge, and it can be a bit arbitrary and not objectively correspond to actual observable culture or to ancestry.

I wouldn't tell someone living in Serbia who identifies as a Croat that that's nonsense because from an outsider's perspective their culture is 99% indistinguishable from that of a Serb. They have their own reasons for identifying as part of that group, and it's important to them. And similarly I don't really think it's illegitimate for Nth generation white Americans to feel that they are "Swedish" or "Irish" in some way that means something to them. (With the understanding that, yes, they are culturally quite different from someone actually raised in Stockholm or Cork).

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

#237

Post by lanewinfield »

eindiran wrote: post #72
g_sch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested (and somewhat taken aback) by the intensity of the reactions to this term. Maybe it's a generational/political thing? For my part, I know significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx" than "Latino".

"Latinx" is more-or-less a rounding error compared to "Latino"/"Latina"[1], so having people insist that the far more common terms are incorrect (for a political reason) is what is driving the intensity of the reaction. I'm not saying the reaction is right or wrong, but afaict that's the reason people respond the way they do. If you know significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx", I'd wager that yo…

>so having people insist that the far more common terms are incorrect

It kind of seems like the opposite is true here...

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

#238

Post by _wldu »

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…

The point is that the CEO was open minded (he took a phone call from a janitor... and actually listened to him and then gave him a chance). He saw past this mans lack of education and experience and focused on his dedication and enthusiasm. There's value in everyone, everywhere (even the lowest employees). We need leaders who can put ego aside and see that. IMO, that was the point of the story. The subsequent success of this man is another story entirely (and a good one I bet). I'm just glad that someone recognized his talent.

Edit: Credit also goes to the secretary for putting the call through to the CEO and not acting as a gate-keeper. She could have ended the call. Thankfully, she was open minded too.

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

#239

Post by manigandham »

tylerhou wrote: post #41
polartx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crea…

> At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, or gender. Except, as the article shows, diversity often does increase revenue share. Flamin' hot cheetos were invented by a Mexican immigrant who realized that Frito-Lay didn't have any products which appealed to Latino people. EDIT: Changed Latinx to Latino.

Diversity of what exactly? None of those physical qualities have anything to do with your talents, motivations, passions, interests, and ability to actually do the job.

A wide range of backgrounds, opinions, and thought processes is good and what everyone wants, but forcing diversity based on people's unchangeable physical attributes is nothing but injustice masquerading as morality.

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

#240

Post by danans »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #121
pram wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like being called Chicano, Latin, or Hispanic. It’s seemingly only a US thing afaict. My family is from Mexico and “Mexican” suffices. It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That’s how I feel about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn’t identify with it, if that’s how they feel. :V

> It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does not look Indian, what should I call them? There are many Mexicans into the US, but there are also people from other countries in South America etc. I have no idea what Hispanic actually means, but I've hea…

> I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does not look Indian, what should I call them?

If you are in a rare situation where you need to describe their appearance, Latino or Hispanic would work. At the end of the day, if you're speaking in good faith, people will understand that.

I don't get what the big deal is about someone using latinx is. It's not a pejorative, and it makes some small subset feel better, so what's the loss to anyone?

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