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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

#211

Post by sib »

zhivota wrote: post #170
tombert wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chant is absolutely real. I don’t know how frequently they do it in retail, but it was pretty infrequent in the software engineer positions. Source: I was a software engineer for Jet.com for two years after the Walmart acquisition, and then another year separately.

Wait, so you're saying you had to do a chant as a SWE? That's wild. I'm really glad I never took up the recruiters for Walmart Labs now, that would have been a disaster for me.

For those groups, typically at things like quarterly all-hands, etc. Not on a daily basis as they do in the retail side.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#212

Post by VincentEvans »

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…

If there companies paying 500K who’d like a software engineer to just professionally do the job, not complain, not have an agenda, not worry about promotions - drop me a reply. You pay, I work. That’s the all there’s to it.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#213

Post by hx8 »

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.

> but not young enough to take the risk of doing something about it.

I cannot grok this statement. The older I am the bigger risks I was able to take because I had accumulated more financial independence. Why would you be able to take more risks when you are young?

When I was 23 I had little savings, little assets, lots of debt I was worried about paying off, and felt like I needed to work or I was going to be homeless and starve. I took the highest paying job I could find, and worked until I had enough experience and network to find a higher paying job. I took no risks.

When I was 33 I took large career risks because I had no debt (outside of low mortgage payment), lots of savings, plenty of assets, and a professional network to fall back on if my risk didn't pay off.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#214

Post by hx8 »

giantg2 wrote: post #130
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some contexts yes but I think the idea is to teach the employee that they can answer with a different option. But it does depend on their relationship and personality.

If their answer is anything other than "eclipse", then they failed. There was no follow-up question to see why theh felt that way. There was no real discussion on strategy or reasoning. This is a trap.

Eclipse is obviously the best possible answer. You don't need to spend 15 minutes deliberating on this. This is a teaching moment to encourage staff to give great ideas by demonstrating how to communicate great ideas.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#215

Post by conductr »

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.

I think about this frequently. I hire day laborers occasionally and it’s actually quite astonishing at how much physical labor most those folks can perform and rather quickly and cheap. Yet when I get to know them the reality is most of them exist in an unfamiliar and invisible to society type way.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#216

Post by hx8 »

999900000999 wrote: post #3

>Hart has seen that change firsthand. About 20 years ago, then 19 years old and a mother of two, she started part-time at the same Walmart she now runs. Her first job was cooking live lobsters pulled from a tank in the deli. Was definitely expecting this to be a story about someone who graduated college and walked into management. I have respect for anyone who could rise though the ranks of retail. She deserves every…

A lot of Walmart management are promoted into it. While certainly not a great job, it's not too bad to make a career out of it. The average Walmart location will see about $70M/yr in revenue, so her responsibility is fairly high.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#217

Post by pizzafeelsright »

bandyaboot wrote: post #163

> To end the meeting, Michael Cole, 66, a maintenance worker, leads the group in the Walmart Cheer, a chant workers throughout the company do to start and end meetings. This can’t be real.

Word usage is mirrored by the hierarchy.

Whoever can introduce a word into a group is a leader.

A chant is a formula and intentional. To do so requires authority.

Giving a nickname and having it stick requires respect and shows who is the leader in practical terms.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#218

Post by bee_rider »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #153
bee_rider wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In the case of walking the floor in a store it is just aesthetics mostly. To be clear, when you wrote "aesthetics" do you mean (a) presenteeism (seeing the boss) or (b) cleanliness/tidiness of a retail store?

B

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#219

Post by frutiger »

TimPC wrote: post #76
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.

I'm at a director level and I routinely look at code and even more frequently look at product in a late stage start-up.

> I'm at a director level

Since every company seems to come up with their own job titles, it would be more useful if you described how large your organisation was compared to the entirety of the engineering organisation at your company.

Re: A day in the life of a Walmart manager

#220

Post by MrJohz »

shoo wrote: post #132
wmoser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I had to fill out a report about how I was observing myself working safety while management still had no clue what was happening. see also https://eddiots.com/2301 > How do you know what's going on if you're not there? > Ask a restaurant manager. Or a bartender. Or the manager of a retail shop. Or a call center or an office. Or the supervisor of a factory or warehouse floor. What do you think they'd say? [...] > As…

Not really though - that's an entire article about how IT is so unique and special in how disfunctional it is, nobody else is like IT, aren't we the special snowflakes. That's almost the opposite of what the previous poster was saying!
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