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Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

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Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#341

Post by stuaxo »

WalterBright wrote: post #229
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions. However, there's a real smell of something g…

The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems. For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.

The CEO has the same advantage a new person has coming onto the job and seeing problems.

As soon as you have been in a place 3 or 6 months you are used to all the workarounds and the reasons why things can't be done.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#342

Post by don-code »

bigiain wrote: post #325
don-code wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that your post is sarcasm, but it does bring up the underlying issue of who's been empowered to make changes, and ultimately, who's had (correctly or incorrectly) trust placed in them. An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were suppose…

This _might_ not be Amazon. But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon. (And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)

I can say that this was not Amazon.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#343

Post by fsckboy »

WalterBright wrote: post #251
WalterBright wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems. For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.

For a small example: S s; S *p; To read a field: s.field p->field It turns out that there's no ambiguity in using `.` for both `.` and `->`. Both can be: s.field p.field But what's the problem with `->`? It's when you want to refactor the code to switch between a value to a reference. If `.` is used for both, just change the typedef and maybe a couple places. With `.` and `->`, there are maybe thousands of tedious ch…

> switch between a value to a reference

your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to an" r-value? This all makes a difference because C is a call-by-value language, and you can't pass a struct, so it's an important distinction to maintain.

This kind of change might be something a student or newb might encounter, but an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one. Maybe on more common a struct containing a struct might switch to a struct containing a pointer to another struct.

personally, I use hungarian and ps->x vs s.x is a nice reinforcement of what hungarian is trying to reinforce. Using parenthesis to illustrate a sort of precedence, I guess I associate the (pointer->) like that as opposed to the (.member) though I can't defend that as making an inordinate amount of sense :)

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#344

Post by nunez »

logicalmonster wrote: post #77
whack wrote: post #13

I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.

> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoy…

If developers spent more time in sales or customer service...many of them would quit out of frustration, but some would refactor the world, also out of frustration.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#346

Post by Corrado »

don-code wrote: post #302
otikik wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Obviously , he's much more intelligent than all those other people, that's why he's the CEO and way richer than them. Rich people are more intelligent and better than poor people in most aspects. That's why the laws favor them.

I understand that your post is sarcasm, but it does bring up the underlying issue of who's been empowered to make changes, and ultimately, who's had (correctly or incorrectly) trust placed in them. An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were suppose…

I've actually been in this situation. In a past life I was a programmer at a t-shirt printing company. On their first day at the company everyone worked on the line for ~4 hours. I was picking and printing t-shirts on the factory floor. I was able to see how things worked and how they didn't.

But the major factor is I wasn't scared to make or suggest changes in how I worked. Everyone else on the line needed that t-shirt printing job so they just did what they were told. I wasn't afraid of being fired or reprimanded for making changes so I was much more free with my words and work.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#347

Post by flappyeagle »

quacked wrote: post #197
flappyeagle wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about how dumb he will be. Like you think he will just overfit on every detail instead of asking the store manager or employees about what he experienced? You think he will not work in more than one store, in more than one geography? Cmon man.

Honestly I think you're making as many assumptions as the parent commenter--I agree you're right that the portrayal of the exec is really biased towards assuming stupidity, but it really depends on the quality of the executive and the people that hired them. It's completely possible to get a total dumbass, and also possible to get a genius.

I know it’s an unpopular opinion to hold but I don’t think you make it to being CEO of Starbucks while being a dumbass

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#348

Post by fennecfoxy »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
tshaddox wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workers might be distracted by other problems that are literally impossible for the CEO to even simulate, like food insecurity, housing instability, looming medical bankruptcy, etc. I bet the CEO is able to be a much more productive barista without spending company time worrying about those things!

If the CEO is spending a shift working on the line, he still has all his CEO responsibilities to worry about. Those are 24/7, they never stop.

Well for companies as large as Starbucks, I think most of those responsibilities come down to picking the nicest place for a three martini lunch.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#349

Post by logicalmonster »

toyg wrote: post #312
logicalmonster wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Just thinking out loud here, but some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces you'll ever see. And sometimes they solve this problem by introducing new features in sort of a well-designed, first-class tutorial over the course of a few missions in a single-player campaign. Maybe Apps can try the same approach? 2) I can't help but think that many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacin…

> some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces Completely different audiences and incentives. Gamers game because they want to; most people use apps because they have to, to get shit done and pay the rent. Gamers are motivated to inspect capabilities in order to get an advantage, to solve the gameplay puzzle, even just to kill time; people are motivated to get the hell out of apps as quickly…

I don't think we really disagree on much, just having a conversation with some random points to feel out what I think about this.

1) I understand that the motivation for playing games is far different from the motivation for work. My main point is just to indicate that there's some games that basically simulate entire economies (on a planetary or even galaxy-wide scale) and a large amount of intricate detail. Using some approaches from games to display UI might help in the business world too. (and might have other benefits)

2) Text taking up more real estate than an icon can in a sense sometimes be considered a big feature rather than a bug. A big part of good UI design is picking and choosing what UI items belong on a particular screen. Icons IMO can lend themselves to bad overall practices because you can fit more junk into every single screen. If you need to fit every single possible command into one screen, the command line is the best method for that.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#350

Post by WalterBright »

fsckboy wrote: post #343
WalterBright wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a small example: S s; S *p; To read a field: s.field p->field It turns out that there's no ambiguity in using `.` for both `.` and `->`. Both can be: s.field p.field But what's the problem with `->`? It's when you want to refactor the code to switch between a value to a reference. If `.` is used for both, just change the typedef and maybe a couple places. With `.` and `->`, there are maybe thousands of tedious ch…

> switch between a value to a reference your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference ; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to a…

> an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one

In my and others' extensive experience in C, almost everyone is wrong about where their programs are consuming time. Profiling almost always produces surprising results. Being about to easily refactor programs to experiment with different data organizations is a superpower for a language.

C programs are difficult to refactor, and so they tend to persist with their earliest design decisions despite changing requirements and profile results.

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