Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

I suspect talent is a huge issue for them.

How many designers and engineers who have the choice between Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft....or literally any other company...would choose Walmart? The company known for using the United States welfare program as supplemental income for their hordes of low-wage employees?

Their brand image is a big turn-off for the upper-middle class yuppies who make up the majority of tech talent. They would be smart to lean much heavier on the jet.com brand in the future when it comes to recruiting.

View on HN

They (Walmart Labs) do pay pretty decently. In all honesty, the solution may just be a total rebranding of Walmart's online platform and development team. If it were called "Bazaar" or something equally sexy, they could probably attract not only more talent, but more shoppers in the millenial demographic.

If their upper management has any smarts, they have to know all the connotations and baggage that go along with the name Walmart. I don't think it's a brand they can hang on to forever.

I get the sense Walmart's internal heirarchy has the same problem as GM's.

I.e. that they've both been around long enough that their management is staffed with people who owe their live to the company, and therefore have a very different perspective on it than anyone outside the company.

Feed enough corporate rah rah and keep knowledge workers from seeing any of their low level employees, and I imagine it would start to look pretty good.

Walmart and WalmartLabs are two different entites. One is headquartered in Bentonville (AR) and the other is headquartered in San Bruno (CA). The Labs is the technology entity that is funded very generously by Walmart. I work for Walmart and I find the environment very fast paced, colleagues are very skilled and the pay is at par with Google and Amazon.

Last I checked the pay at Walmart Labs was quite a ways away from Google according to Glassdoor.

My current and previous jobs were with well funded non-IT companies that have an IT arm with their own executive structure. Unfortunately, the company is still shackled by shareholders who have their own ideas and do not understand on one hand, you have a massive company with huge profits. On the other hand you have another area, more nimble that is trying to innovate. Things eventually bleed (or, are bleeding over).

I wish you the best of luck. Not just for your job, but for Walmart. The world needs competition.

> How many designers and engineers who have the choice between Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft....or literally any other company...would choose Walmart?

Well, Walmart is quite well resourced, has a lot of talented folks, the facilities (for engineers) are enticing, they offer the opportunity to work on stuff with huge scale, and the pay is relatively comparable.

What more do you want?

The ability to tell people where you work with out kind of turning your head to one side and mumbling.

This is only a problem in a relatively narrow corridor of the country. Almost everywhere else, Walmart is a staple.

Walmart is a different experience in the places where there isn't social stigma attached to it because normal people don't have any problem going there, but also because there isn't a political apparatus working to deny their attempts to improve their buildings, expand to newer areas, etc.

Moreover, there's a difference between a) shopping there b) working retail there, and c) working there in a professional role.

I'm guessing you get over that quickly if they pay well and provide a good work-life balance.

> quite well resourced, has a lot of talented folks, the facilities (for engineers) are enticing, they offer the opportunity to work on stuff with huge scale, and the pay is relatively comparable.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc. etc. offer all of these things as well.

The only way for Walmart to win the talent game would be by offering absurdly above-market pay packages or absurdly above-average work-life balance policies. Which I'm quite certain, given their corporate culture based around beating down costs and maximizing efficiency, will not sit well with the lifer-execs back at home base.

If you believe that the only "talent that has any merit" comes out of Stanford, you're right.

Good luck getting a talented engineer without either an Ivy League pedigree or a history of employment at AppAmaGooBookSoft hired at any of the trendy startups you've listed.

SV is a bubble, and there are good people outside of it.

I no doubt agree with you about the SV bubble (and credentialism is bullshit). But outside SV there are still tons of great companies offering the same thing that aren't walmart

Any "merit-less" walmart folks out there care to chime in?

This reputation is meritless these days. I work remotely from a desirable town, with, ahem, very competitive pay, 4 weeks vacation, generous RSUs, etc. It's the outdated reputation rather than the actual facts that inhibits hiring IME.

BTW, we're hiring a mobile release engineer for our small Portland office if you're interested.

> The only way for Walmart to win the talent game would be by offering absurdly above-market pay packages or absurdly above-average work-life balance policies.

Fun fact: If you account t for cost of living, Wal-Mart does pay more than many others.

There's also many other perks from working at home base. Massive fitness center (Who else can can claim they have 3 pools), cheap Sam's Club memberships. Add in that you get to try all the cool things like most others do (Savings Catcher, Scan n' Go, Grocery Pickup) and you get a substantial boost to the value.

A big part of why cost of living is high in some places is that more people want to live there.

Very true! But not everyone wants to live in SF/NYC, and imagine your dollar goes a lot farther in Bentonville.

Also, supposedly the new museum is amazing, for what it's worth.

Not for nothing, but wasn't Walmart one of the first companies to use Node effectively at scale to ship hundreds of changes on the busiest shopping day of the year (Black Friday)?

Probably some interesting engineering challenges to pursue there. Pretty sure there is also a significant chunk of engineers that aren't as concerned about their approach to low-wage management. Amazon seems to have survived that challenge just fine.

I am not sure if I would count using Node as evidence for technical finesse. Personally I would rather work for a company accomplishing the same with say Scala, Haskell, or even C#, C++ or Java, before I would consider Node.

As an aside, we often talk about the coming "labor apocalypse" with automation and AI, and yet, Walmart is the single largest killer of jobs across the country, hands down. Think of how many small retailers, groceries, electronics and nurseries and garden centers have had to close their doors. Also how many jobs has Walmart squeezed out of other companies because of their race to the bottom with pricing?

> They would be smart to lean much heavier on the jet.com brand in the future when it comes to recruiting.

They are doing just that. Have had a couple of contacts from them, and always as jet.com (with a throwaway line in the second paragraph about their exciting recent acquisition by Walmart).

You mean like that opportunity to work at Bonobos* ?

* Owned by Walmart

I actually knew some very smart and talented people working for WalMart labs. Not sure if they are still there though. I suspect upper management would be pain (hell) to deal with.

> Their brand image is a big turn-off for the upper-middle class yuppies who make up the majority of tech talent.

I like to think that too, but a lot of it is all talk. I used to work with this dude in Boulder who was really into virtue signaling. Did all the right Boulder things, shopped at the right Boulder places, drove the Boulder car that showed you "cared", but just couldn't give up that cheap Walmart cell phone coverage. His attitude was "well it's a dirty secret no one has to know", which coincidentally(?) sums up Boulder fairly tidily.

Is Walmart a cell phone provider?

Is Boulder known to have dirty secrets?

> Is Walmart a cell phone provider?

Straight Talk

> Is Boulder known to have dirty secrets?

Yes, the best kept one being that it's overblown with NIMBYism. It's residents like to think it's on par with places like Seattle in terms of social progress, but it's all talk and no one seems willing to write the checks. It's very pretty though!

It's funny because Seattle has and has been having a serious problem with NIMBYism for a while now. We're headed towards being the next SF and nobody's willing to give up their sweet single family housing designation to save the place. Same issue for our abysmal mass transit - a hyper-wealthy island community between Seattle and Bellevue is raising taxes to fund a law suit against WSDOT to stop light rail from going through their area because it would cost them dedicated single occupancy use of the HOV lanes. Can't make this shit up.

Seattle is building a lot better than SF, although it could certainly be better still.

It's simple. You just need to have offices NOT in new york and san francisco, then you don't need to compete with the tech companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com