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A day in the life of a Walmart manager

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Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#101

Post by simantel »

bee_rider wrote: post #83
havaloc wrote: post #10

"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” says Hart, and pay attention to details. It also keeps her employees on their toes." I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.

I don’t really understand what this looks like. I mean, when I worked in retail, I was at a place smaller than Walmart, so, maybe Walmart managers tend to be more hands off and need to make a show of actually knowing what’s going on in the store. But I’d typically get some instructions and then be left to clean up or stock things. Tidying up isn’t that complicated or high stakes. Normal people know what messy and cle…

A Walmart Supercenter can have 500 employees and dozens of deliveries per day. I can totally see why they'd get wrapped up working mostly in the office and talking to department heads vs. walking the store.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#102

Post by Ekaros »

mvkel wrote: post #67

Credit to Walmart for creating an environment where a person can still love their job after years of service. That stuff can't be faked, even with a high salary. Before you say, "it's easy to say when you're getting paid $240K a year." Nah. A person needs challenge; a purpose. Lots of FANG ICs making $500K+ who hate their job. Why? No challenge or palpable purpose. To create a scaled corp structure where a person can…

Also these people can make personal impact that is visible for them. They might be wrong, but still they can affect things and see them changing... It might not be possible in many other jobs specially in big corporations.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#103

Post by varispeed »

heisenbit wrote: post #24
varispeed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job. Wow, this is such a nonsense view. Software development may seem easy to you, because you know how to do it and probably have been doing it for a long time. But I can assure you, software development is a hard job. If it was easy, everyone and their dog could do it. Have some respect to your profession!

Yes SW development is a hard job but she is doing a lot more than one job and the skill set required (not just knowledge but also behavior) to cover so many roles is a lot broader than most developers and also many managers in the software industry require to do their job.

The SW development is not just knowing the programming language, you also have to cover many roles, you need to understand and have the domain knowledge of the thing you are developing, you need to have communication skills to coordinate with other developers and stakeholders and many more (like developing intuition to know when to stop manager from making a mistake - e.g. you know this and that idea won't actually work in practice or it will have problems down the line adding to technical debt and so on).

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#104

Post by varispeed »

prh8 wrote: post #32
varispeed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job. Wow, this is such a nonsense view. Software development may seem easy to you, because you know how to do it and probably have been doing it for a long time. But I can assure you, software development is a hard job. If it was easy, everyone and their dog could do it. Have some respect to your profession!

If both options paid you 240k a year, would you rather be a software engineer or do the exact job the Walmart manager does? I'm guessing you'd rather do SWE

I think you misunderstood my point. I actually had a conversation about it with my friend who was a manager of a private health clinic. She had a moment of massive burnout and was looking to switch profession to something else. She was particularly tired of abuse she was getting from employees she had to manage and patients, unrealistic targets, overtime and relatively poor pay. The prospect of sitting in a cubicle, with noise cancelling headphones, minding own work and having similar pay while being surrounded by like-minded professionals was really enticing. Her understanding of programming was very much that you type in commands so the computer does things you want, easy. When she was this motivated, I asked her to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjov-2OZ0E She managed to watch about 20 minutes and from there she couldn't focus. Then she asked to stop and asked me: "Do you know all of this? Do you have to know this?" I said that this is just the basics. That was very much the end of it. She changed her career later and she is managing construction projects. Something I wouldn't like to do. It would be a hard job, because that's not something I am interested in.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#105

Post by listenallyall »

blinkingled wrote: post #37
doytch wrote: post #9

She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probably frequently needs to manage upwards; interacts directly with customers; etc etc... Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.

I don't about others but based on past experience if one really attempts to do their $240k software / IT job well they ought to encounter similar if not in some ways worse challenges - some just realities of the tech industry/stack/complexity and some injected by bureaucracy, incompetence, mismanagement and not to mention the ever hanging sword of change in technology and possibility of layoff for no fault of yours.…

No. Your job as a software developer may be stressful (as every job is) but her everyday challenges are way worse than yours. She has hundreds of actual people to manage, mentor and motivate, many with little education and lacking resources. Which means lots of absences, low-effort work, health issues, high turnover, and sometimes even theft. Plenty of issues dealing with customers as well. And then the managerial issues related to meeting revenue targets, implementing health care plans, managing inventory, putting on a good face for the bosses, as well as intense competition to be elevated to regional manager against a bunch of other colleagues in the exact same role. And her salary is only $120, there's a whole lot of stress when half your annual comp is bonus-driven.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#106

Post by bee_rider »

wmoser wrote: post #80
havaloc wrote: post #10

"Walking every aisle is a new practice for store bosses in her area, implemented by their regional manager. It helps managers “see what your customers see,” says Hart, and pay attention to details. It also keeps her employees on their toes." I can't believe this wasn't policy already. Seems like good practice.

You would think so. I was working on an oil rig and they made a big deal about ‘management by walking about.’ So the heads of each of the departments were supposed to go and check ONE job their charges were working on that day. They were supposed to write a short report about what they observed. This was too much for them so they quickly got in trouble from shore-based management for not filling out their reports. So…

That’s sort of different stakes, right? In your case your direct managers decided to prioritize not doing their jobs over some pretty important stuff—your personal safety and the damage the oil rig could do to the environment if something went wrong. In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#107

Post by listenallyall »

newsclues wrote: post #27
doytch wrote: post #9

She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probably frequently needs to manage upwards; interacts directly with customers; etc etc... Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.

I think there are lots of hard jobs that go under appreciated in our society. I think about people playing pro sports for millions and then minimum wage labourers, drivers clerks, cleaners and cooks who make minimum wages. One group are celebrated and the other are essential to society continuing to function.

Right, this was made pretty clear during the first few months of the pandemic in 2020.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#108

Post by karaterobot »

BeetleB wrote: post #63
karaterobot wrote: post #25

> “I love my job,” says Hart, but “it doesn’t turn off. That is one of the hard things about it.” I'm lucky that in my industry I can make a good living as an individual contributor, because having to actually think about my job when I'm not at my job sounds like a living nightmare.

If you're in SW, you probably will need to think about your job off work: They usually don't work in shifts, and will have deliverables in a timeline of months. They need to plan the work, and always adjust to hit the deadlines. If you're a doctor, then you probably don't have to think about your job off work.

Negative. Almost twenty years in the software industry, and I clock in at 9 and clock out at 5. Let's be honest, earlier on Fridays. It wasn't always that way, but now I prioritize time over more money, and for me it's worth the trade.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#109

Post by listenallyall »

paulpauper wrote: post #52
doytch wrote: post #9

She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probably frequently needs to manage upwards; interacts directly with customers; etc etc... Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.

Devs are paid so much because the skills they posses are precise, not fluid. managing a store is more fluid not precise. Coding, like surgery, requires precision, like the syntax. Get one character wrong and the whole thing fails. This entails having a high IQ. Being a store manager is hard work, no doubt ,but the skill set is less IQ dependent, so it can be done by more people. A dev is paid so much because when you…

Lol, as if no software developer has ever released code with one character wrong.

Does your "syntax" ever call in sick? Steal from the loading dock? Get punched in the face by an angry customer?

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#110

Post by aworks »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #81
icedchai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early stage startups where the person is truly in a player/coach role, it rarely happens.

That's exactly what they should be doing though. Toyota calls it a "gemba walk" -- managers and even executives need to walk the factory floor and see problems with their own eyes, not through hearing reports. With software, the codebase is the gemba, not the office. Managers don't need to be writing code, but they should be reading it. Otherwise it's like a production manager who has never seen the inside of their o…

Not quite the same thing but I subscribed to one of my team's code review email lists. I also cc'ed myself on bug reports. Mildly interesting but didn't really impact anything although I was always looking for signals in the noise.

On the other hand, my boss had a de facto policy of visiting each remote office at least once a year and conducting one-on-one meetings face-to-face as much as possible. I found this useful for myself to understand the team/environment/product and good for building connections with people, especially when cultures are significantly different.

It did result in my visiting Wuhan 16 times between 2012 and 2019, for better or worse.

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