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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

#141

Post by doublepg23 »

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 underestimate how many people hate interacting with computers.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#142

Post by blinkingled »

doytch wrote: post #79
blinkingled wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Oh for sure, the intangibles kind of /are/ the job once you're past a mid-level position. But think about her job in the context of your description. You think she doesn't have useless meetings she's invited to that every manager in the region needs to attend even though it could've just been an email from the regional director? The stress from the lights busted in the parking lot brought on by worries that a darkene…

Yeah, I used the word similar but sure! Just to be even more clearer I wasn't at all saying her job wasn't hard - I was merely saying IT jobs paying that can be equally hard.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#144

Post by nitwit005 »

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.

This is one of those things everyone will agree is extremely important, and which they then won't do when assigned the job.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#145

Post by Sabinus »

alpinisme wrote: post #118
aworks wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usefu…

I mean, Wuhan isn’t some exotic danger zone. It just happened unluckily to become an epicenters for an outbreak recently, but otherwise it’s just a big city.

Corona virus research and and wild caught live animal markets aren't quite 'luck'.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#146

Post by userbinator »

bookofjoe wrote: post #127
loceng wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Akin to the golden rule of "use your own product."

Eat your own dog food.

MS popularised that, but based on some recent comments here by employees, it sounds more like they're just getting force-fed the dogfood without having any power to change it.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#147

Post by VS1999 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #69
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.

Pay isn’t really based on how “hard” a job is (and I don’t think we would want it to be!) It does factor in to the demand side but clearly it’s not the primary factor or else there wouldn’t be any high-paying “easy” jobs.

I consider pay more like a caste system in the US. It's a way to separate people who "deserve" to be highly paid and people who don't. Working in software, it always felt odd that I make 3x as much as the guy making my food and have 10x the expendable income, even though they work harder at much more miserable work. The first degree of separation is whether you can afford to do a 4-6 year take home test that's getting more and more expensive each year.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#148

Post by hd55 »

chasd00 wrote: post #138
Seanambers wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trap in there. If you work a lot like this lady does you do not really have much time to reason about how you spend your life and whats important. It just happens to you. But it becomes all encompassing and consumes the person. For some thats the right way to live their life, for most not so much. FANG has a problem in that they have a lot of highly paid individuals doing nothing or very little, so they ha…

Another issue is we’re a couple generations in where kids were told over and over swe is what their passion is without it being a real reality. Eventually they get old enough to realize the lie but not young enough to take the risk of doing something about it.

According to systems theory (and karl marx?) purpose of the system is what the system does. Here system = person.

And according to those who dont like that theory "The Protestant Ethic" is the reason for "The Spirit of Capitalism" or continuing to work/optimize/explore/exploit way past the point your Needs are meet.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#149

Post by yndoendo »

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…

User experience and observing how they interact with the end product of software development is the true version of walking the aisles. What to find improvements, just be the person that trains and teaches the administrator, the general user, the maintainers, and the installers.

For example, I documented how to load an OS image for assembly. Watched them use the guide and saw they flipped through the document. Afterwards, I inserted an extra page of what shows up in the text stream and said, "sit and wait for ...." at that point they started flipping around.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#150

Post by JumpCrisscross »

CPLX wrote: post #74
doytch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time-management is probably the single most important skill in these higher-paying jobs and...well...given the amount of self-help books there are on this topic, I'm not so sure I'd agree. People who do well in higher-level jobs know /exactly/ what they're best at or uniquely positioned to do, and do that. Meanwhile, you need to delegate the rest to whoever's in the best position to do so (growing people if there are…

Disagree. The most important skill as you go up higher in the ranks is emotional regulation. Many, many people simply aren’t able to do that. You can’t manage complex organizations that include people without that ability.

> Many, many people simply aren’t able to do that. You can’t manage complex organizations that include people without that ability

Never thought about it that way, but I think you're correct. The number of adults who cannot hold their cool in the face of a perceived slight or setback is shocking.

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