A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
Janitor takes some food his company produces, adds spices, makes a shitty pitch deck and profit? Cool, but... this could have easily happened in a dozen different configurations and gone nowhere. This is more luck than anything else.
The interesting story begins after that. This guy didn't end his career there - so, presumably, he was't a one-hit wonder. We have an illiterate janitor who suddenly got swept into the orbit of the CEO, without any business or operational acumen. He somehow -how??- managed to learn the ways of the new tribe, learn business, learn to read and write, learn how to lead a business unit, and do it well. This guy came out of nowhere, and had to zero-to-sixty from manual laborer to - what? executive? What position did they put him in? How did he ramp up? What kind of support did he get, if any? What kind of education did they provide him with, if any?
There's a long, interesting story between "janitor" and "successful VP", and they neglected to tell almost any of it!
When you get an opportunity like that not learning isn't a realistic option. You do whatever to take advantage of the opportunity.
This is a hype-article for the 'anyone can make it' myth, a myth that fuels culture of overworked young people[1] struggling against structural changes they're told to ignore.
[1]. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...
Good. We need more of this kind of thing around here, and less negativity and the "luck is everything, effort is irrelevant, sit on your ass and wait for the government to fix all your problems" bullshit that we've been overrun with lately.
This is a hype-article for the 'anyone can make it' myth
There's a big difference between saying "anyone can make it" and saying "everyone will make it". There's also the fact that there's a wide continuum regarding what "it" means. Not everyone has to become a billionaire to have "made it." If you're working in the fields for less than minimum wage in 110° temperatures, then becoming a manager at McDonalds could easily count as "making it."
People should be encouraged to work hard and pursue their dreams... at the very least, I think we can all recognize that you're more likely to "make it" if you put the effort in, than if you sit around doing nothing.
This is something I thought was cool about this guy’s story: by the time he became a janitor, he had already “made it” relative to his campesino upbringing (or at least how the article makes it sound).
But he didn’t stop there.
110° temperatures has a tendency to kill off whatever crop you are growing. It's not a common growing condition and most areas with these temperatures regularly are not considered suitable regions for efficient agricultural production.
Phoenix itself - that is, the "Metro Phoenix" area - doesn't really supply agricultural products, but Arizona in general does, and has a very large and diverse set of climate zones which allow for this.
People tend to think of Phoenix and Arizona in general to be one giant wasteland desert - when nothing could be further from the truth.
Can you find such areas in Arizona? Certainly (but really, they aren't "wastelands" - just really hot and dry areas, but even so, there are plants, insects, and animals around). But there are far more diverse areas climate-wise in the state.
And many of these areas have been or still are large producers of various agricultural products.
Arizona is historically known for it's "5 C's":
https://azlibrary.gov/collections/digital-arizona-library-da...
Three of which are ag-based (cattle, citrus, and cotton).
Finally, this:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/yuma-lettuce_n_6796398
...which has had it's downsides and issues recently, but things like that happen and are sorted out.
What a thoroughly disingenuous strawman.
That said, is is hard to explain exactly how "free will" would work in a universe that seems to be mostly - if not wholly - deterministic.
https://qz.com/work/1231617/what-you-learn-about-business-wh...
- guy with a website with a bunch of enterprise software gibberish
It means that although you are working hard but not working smart.
You do realize that nobody said that, or anything even remotely close to that, right?
Also... I've actually "been there and done that" as far as doing manual labor, outside, in the NC heat in July and August. So you can think what you want about what I have to say, but at least I'm actually speaking based on a lifetime of experience that includes growing up dirt poor, and managing to make it to a level where I can have "a website full of enterprise software gibberish".
Edit: Credit also goes to the secretary for putting the call through to the CEO and not acting as a gate-keeper. She could have ended the call. Thankfully, she was open minded too.
I think people are downvoting because they disagree with you and not explaining why.
Past tense of verb "bear" is "bore" (not "boar", FWIW.)
;-)
Degradation of language is degradation of mind.
Most people don't like to sound ignorant and unlettered. You saw that nashashmi graciously said, "Thanks", eh?
Plus, if every company has a gentleman's agreement to ignore the help then there's no lost opportunity that the competition can jump on.
There used to be a path from lowly janitor/stocker/etc. to the executive suite but that route has largely closed.
Your comment reminded me of this article I read a while back: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/gail-evans-went-from-janitor...
Why is the janitor considered "the lowest employee" by you?
* Get the lowest salary
* Are often outsourced with lowest priced bidder winning
* Don't get on programs like bonuses, training, career advancement
* Aren't used in company marketing (Imagine "We have the best cleaned offices")
Somehow that came across as insulting what he did as of low skill level. Oops! Awful faux pas. I think I managed to clarify but I've decided to use less ambiguous words next time ("close to the metal", for instance).
In my case, we use "low-level" (in English) to convey the "close to the metal", systems programming idea, and the direct translation of "low-level" to refer to shoddy code.
In my experience, it's generally the opposite. Low level is seen as very hard and arcane.
> low level is very hard and arcane
> the opposite
Umm...
I described this guy and his lab to my parents as a "basic science" which they took to mean it was simple "easy" science. In reality he has studied the same square millimeter of turtle brain and a few proteins for decades, and knows it better probably than anyone who has ever lived.
In these contexts, "basic" and "low-level" means "insane level of detail that no one else wants to bother with."
I’d say value can be found anywhere. It isn’t everywhere. And not everyone has this man’s ability. (Regardless of background.)
Did he lack education and experience or formal education and business experience? Being able to manage people requires skills that no formal education I've seen can teach you. It can help, but it doesn't impart the required basics. Things like being able to read a person, know who is being honest, know what is the appropriate level of joking around for a superior/subordinate relationship.
Did he have the skills from non-recognized sources or did he pick these up on the go? Or was some other characteristic enough to make up for a deficit in these?
(Which I will look forward to reading.)
To me, these parts of the article stand out, all beginning with his grandmother:
>When he broke the news to his family, his grandfather imparted a piece of advice that would always stick with him: “Make sure that floor shines,” the man told his grandson. “And let them know that a Montañez mopped it.”
He was prepared to execute because he knew the company, out of his own curiosity:
>In between shifts, he set out to make himself seen, learning as much as he could about the company’s products, spending time in the warehouse, and watching the machines churn out crunchy snacks in the lonely midnight hours.
This is the key part: he actively sought the knowledge by himself. From my experience, that's a rare value that is far more important than any shortcomings in his knowledge. People help him without him having power. He already is a leader.
>After nearly a decade mopping floors, Montañez gathered the courage to ask one of the Frito-Lay salesmen if he could tag along and learn more about the process.
Finally, not being able to read must be an exaggeration. He just went to school for four years. This doesn't mean that he stopped reading afterwards. I would assume that he regularly went to the library and thus it came naturally to look there for help. Why would an illiterate seek help in the library if his manager was kind of supportive ("YOU’RE doing this presentation!") and at least would have told him the basics?
>Accompanied by his wife, he went to the library, found a book on marketing strategies, and copied the first 5 paragraphs word for word onto transparencies.
After all, being captain obvious, this is on HN because it is the startup tale: a young, ambitious man without the right education can become a business leader if he stumbles upon the right opportunity. At least for this story, I think the tale is true. There is no need to know more because whatever he learned at Frito-Lay is specific to Frito-Lay. It's his attitude that brought success.
But then again, he didn't become CEO or a regular manager, he is the token multicultural person of the executives:
>vice president of multicultural sales for PepsiCo America
> So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.
> “I’d tell the owner, ‘Man, these are great,’” he recalled. “Next week, I’d come back and there’d be a whole rack.”
https://mms.fandom.com/wiki/Dulce_de_Leche_Caramel_M%26M%27s
From your link:
> In July 2001, Dulce de Leche M&M's were introduced in five markets with large Hispanic populations: Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Florida; Mcallen-Brownsville, Texas; and San Antonio, Texas. The flavor never became popular with the Hispanic community, who preferred existing M&M's flavors, and it was discontinued in most areas by early 2003.
Perhaps there is an opportunity in introducing it to people who don't have previous experience with this flavor? Just thinking out loud...
Don't make something meant to be something else explicitly. Make something that has the same meaning (or in this case flavor) as something else but make it its own thing for its own sake.
I believe many groups that are diverse by gender or race or ethnic composition are actually quite similar if they are the same age even though they might have different upbringings.
I explored this subject in this essay a while back which was based on some reflections I did after an ASK HN i did became quite popular.
https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
my conclusion was "which diversity" is an important discussion to have.
What is this sentence? I had to stop reading here.
Where are problems was an attempt at saying it slightly more vague than where are the problems hiding. It was meant as an opener for the following breakdown of problems.
It could probably have been more eloquent or grammatically correct but I didn't think it would be a show stopper :)
Sorry, you feel that way I think it was an interesting exploration that at least got me to think about diversity and it's use as a business advantage quite differently.
The issue with "Were the problems?" is that it's grammatically incorrect on a level that makes it Really Hard to understand, if not totally ambiguous. I honestly didn't know what exactly you meant until I read your comment explaining it in the other chain.
That said, I like the premise of the article, and how you break down the different types of problems. The idea that the value of diversity is in having different backgrounds, mindsets, and values which provide different perspectives is one that I share.
Maybe for your future posts, consider pushing your text through Grammarly or another English grammar checker to clean up your prose. Solid grammar is a force multiplier when it comes to perceived quality and readability of a text (don't take this to mean Perfect grammar, though. I think an individual's voice shines through inconsequential grammar mistakes).
But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based on race/sex.
If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not really diverse then, is it?
Maybe we just need more focus groups.
Working in an environment where there is nobody like you and you have to always be on your toes for culture conflict is work! These people already get more than enough time outside of their comfort zone and most are more than happy to cash their paycheck because from their frame of reference that's more than enough "success". They don't feel the need to preach about what "their people" are like because they're outliers at work and they're outliers when they go home and that doesn't exactly make one feel authoritative on the topic.
I'm not sure what I'm saying here but it's not as simple as "listen to the diverse people" or "more focus groups".
This betrays a very non-diverse view of the world :) In more rural parts of the USA, this is kind of the norm (save for the "shareholders", since a lot of rural transactions are among sole proprietors or other sorts of tiny private companies, if they're even formal at all). Sometimes those proprietorships get big fast, and you end up with that weird case where the CEO wears a camo suit and takes stakeholders hunting instead of golfing.
On a different note: it looks like you're mixing up "class" in the economic sense v. "class" in the etiquette sense, and those ain't always equivalent.
Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?
Such individuals are no problem.
What I wouldn't want are people who are "my way or highway", non-evidence-based, paranoid conspiracy theorists...
It doesn't matter if they're conservative or liberal - if they're off in the deep end and drowning, they probably aren't going to help a team move forward.
Putting aside whether they’re Trumpers or card carrying communists, there’s a reason that some kind of Overton window tends to occur: viewpoints aren’t relative, and some viewpoints are wrong (on facts, on outcomes, ie. completely detached from reality). Diversity isn’t productive if we are expected to value dangerous delusions. Valuing off-beat or contrarian ideas, sure. But: I like milk and sugar with my tea, you want to smash capitalism violently for the rise of the proletariat; I think that Education should be free but speech should be censored, you believe in concentration camps, QAnon and pizzagate. This can get silly.
No focus group is going to tell you something obvious you don't want to hear. Walk into any library and see what you find in terms of computing from all those companies saving the world. Most likely, very little. Is that because you can't make a billion dollars selling computers to libraries, hotels and airports? Or that it wouldn't be a good marketing opportunity? Probably not. More likely because people don't give a shit and that tech companies are perfectly happy to live in their own bubble of superiority.
This isn't a "blindspot" it's arrogance, and ignorance, and incompetence. Large tech companies can't makes things that are primarily useful to other people. They are busy capturing markets with touch bars and clones of one of their own service that will be shutdown as soon as it grants someone a promotion. Then their employees can go on Hacker News, or their own internal forums, out of view of any opinion that is slightly uncomfortable and fault political correctness for how everyone else just don't understand that the state of computing is their own fault. Because $500k salaries, sophisticated tax planning and probably the least amount of regulation of any market just isn't enough to not see the world through a straw.
1) People of certain backgrounds want to and need to prove they CAN compete.
2) People of certain backgrounds should be helping make decisions even without credentials.
so there are both competent and less competent people that need to be included.
"wait what why? I wasted way too much of my life to accept why less competitive people should have such lucrative roles"
because the profit engine doesn't really need to care about the human worker's competency, it only needs to expand the addressable market. having already reached peak engagement, the business processes have already reached the evolutionary zenith for the incumbent nepotism and meritocrat talent's way of tapping into human consumptive conscious. Expanding that market further requires perceptions that people in those markets can relate to.
1. It identifies and removes certain unnecessary credentials that might rule out people with diverse backgrounds. Requiring a college degree for applicants when a degree provides no benefit on the job is one example.
2. It makes an active effort to find and pursue diverse candidates. Odds are there are plenty of people who are competent enough to do the job. Let's imagine you are hiring 5 engineers from a pool of 100 qualified people. If there are only 10 diverse candidates in that pool and you just hired the first random qualified candidate you find, there is roughly a 60% chance that you end up with zero diversity on the team. If you actively work to get diverse candidates to apply and maybe get 10 additional diverse candidates added to the previous pool, you can still hire the first random qualified person but your odds drop to roughly 35% of having a team with zero diversity.
TL;DR - You don't have to hire less qualified people to have diversity, it just takes a little more thought and effort to make diversity a priority.
If every company wants 50% women and the graduates with interests in CS come out at a 4:1 male to female ratio, the strive for diversity either needs to give up and hire what the pool provides or start giving underqualified women.
TL;DR - Companies absolutely need to lower the bar for minorities if they want ratios that don’t match the pools. This problem is only made worse by the popularity of these very diversity programs.
First, it assumes that the pool of diverse candidates has already been exhausted. Anecdotally I have not seen evidence of that. If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts. There is no evidence that is happening. This will eventually be a problem once every company tries to be more diverse than the pool of candidates, but right now there does not seem to be enough companies prioritizing diversity to an extent that this is an issue.
Secondly one of the causes of the pipeline problem is not having enough visibly successful diverse people in the industry. The more diverse candidates that are put in positions to succeed, the more visible they become to the next generation, and the more likely the next generation believes that this career can be a path they can successfully pursue.
You lost me here. Why is this the case?
We could use the same fact to prove that giving women more money than men do not increase the ration of women, as otherwise companies would have already done that.
So yes, incompetent minorities make more than the competent majorities.
I certainly didn't make the same amount of money as my coworker at my old job.
Or it just means one of the other stated assumptions is wrong, e.g., that companies don't really want 50% women. Every company I've worked for has been happy to hire women for any job, but none has ever made it a quota.
I’m saying thats only part of the dilemma and is muddied by that specific binary approach
People talk about interest in certain fields amongst demographics, pipeline problems, resent any perception of undermining a meritocratic process and this hurts everyone
But the kicker is that its not JUST about proving that a proportional distribution of people in a currently underrepresented demographic is competent, there and in the pipeline
Its that companies wont grow to address larger markets if meritocratic diversity is the only thing they look for and try to approve
People - like what you expressed - are barking up just one of multiple trees. Even if you reach peak underrepresented minority, you’ve still failed to bring diverse ideas to the market
Finally found Takis at... Home Depot.
Who knows, maybe they did tests and they didn't sell.
Personally, I like spicy because it's better than the alternatives of sugar and fat. I would say you should be able to eat lots of them without getting full, but then you do get "enchilado".
Frito-Lay however, is not immune from boneheaded decisions. After 20someodd years of employment, and a trophy case full of awards, he and some of his [white male] colleagues were laid off in favor of creating a more 'diverse' management roster.
Lacking the experience of those whose positions they took, performance tanked with the new management team, and the person who set it all in motion was fired.
At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race, or gender.
Except, as the article shows, diversity often does increase revenue share. Flamin' hot cheetos were invented by a Mexican immigrant who realized that Frito-Lay didn't have any products which appealed to Latino people.
EDIT: Changed Latinx to Latino.
There is no faster way to discredit your argument than using absurd language like latinx. I've yet to meet a latino person who referred to themselves as anything else.
If you know significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx", I'd wager that you probably live in the ideological bubble surrounding a fairly liberal American city, but there is certainly a generational component: the term is much more commonly used by American Millenials than by anyone else.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=latinx,latino,lat...
It kind of seems like the opposite is true here...
I feel like it's probably trying to include both genders, since spanish doesn't have a neutral gender, and that normally annoys me, since it's normally pretty clear when you mean actually-male or neutral-male, but I'm not necessarily against it.
People from around where I come from would've probably gone with latin@, though.
It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That’s how I feel about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn’t identify with it, if that’s how they feel. :V
I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does not look Indian, what should I call them? There are many Mexicans into the US, but there are also people from other countries in South America etc. I have no idea what Hispanic actually means, but I've heard it (and Latino) commonly used to refer to that group of people in general, and those the words that I use too.
If you were in Africa and saw a white skinned person, would you call them American or White? Calling them White would "lump a bunch of legitimately different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic," but that lumping is necessary since you can't know someone's culture just by looking at them - or even after you have known them for a while.
I’m aware that nobody actually says this in real life, but this is what people in the US usually mean when they think of “typical Latino-looking person”.
In reality though, “Latino” is not a very precise way to describe someone with that phenotype, because just like Canada and the US and other countries with a major history of colonialism, there are people of all racial ancestries in Latin America. This is largely ignored in the Western US, I suspect because most of the “Latino” people there are from Mexico and Central America, where most of the population looks like what you describe.
But Latin America started out with all the same major groups that the US did: Native Americans, European settlers, African slaves, Asian immigrants, etc., and so you would expect to find all the same ancestries there as you would in the US, just in different proportions.
And indeed, in places like Uruguay and Argentina, the majority of people would be considered “white” according to US racial classification norms. In the Caribbean, many would be considered “black”. In Brazil there are a lot of people of Japanese descent.
But even in Mexico there are people who look like this: https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bb...
That guy is Mexican and Latino and Hispanic by any possible definition of those terms, and also “white” (I.e., of primarily Western European ancestry).
The point is: “Latino” and “Hispanic” are not directly connected to phenotypes or biological ancestry in the way you are assuming.
In general I don’t understand why it is so important to describe people by their ancestry, as opposed to their actual culture. If you see a white person in India you can be 99.99% sure they are not culturally Indian, but you can’t really conclude anything similar in the US.
If you are in a rare situation where you need to describe their appearance, Latino or Hispanic would work. At the end of the day, if you're speaking in good faith, people will understand that.
I don't get what the big deal is about someone using latinx is. It's not a pejorative, and it makes some small subset feel better, so what's the loss to anyone?
If I'm talking about someone like my friend from Guadalajara, yes, then 'Mexican' is more specific.
Interestingly I think there is a parallel to this: there’s no widely-used term in English to refer to white, English-speaking people from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. People in those countries just think of each other as foreigners and don’t spend a lot of time talking about their group as a whole.
But there is a widely-used term in France (and probably other European countries) for this group: anglo-saxon. Which is only used very rarely in the US unless you are talking about the actual medieval Anglo-Saxon tribes.
To me this feels similar to how people in the US are much more likely to describe people as “Latino” than people from Latin America are.
Vida, (a show about gentrification and lesbians in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of LA) markets itself as a Latinx show, not as a Hispanic show, though the showrunner identifies as Latina...
rolls eyes
I can see latinx only being preferred by non-gender-conforming individuals to whom it applies, as opposed to when referring to individuals rather than to communities (families, neighborhoods, food, etc).
Latino and Latina are also fine. Hispanic as well although that has a slightly different meaning.
I think it’s best to call people by the terms that they use themselves. Foisting a new term on someone to describe their ethnicity doesn’t seem like it would ever be a good idea.
But it is a strong identity in my family, and, for example, I really don't want to be lumped in with the people of Bavarian descent who made up about half of the town I grew up in. I'm nothing like them culturally.
Honestly, "white" isn't an ethnicity and it is borderline insulting to think others can know all about me by my skin color, but I've given up on the idea that my opinion on this will make a difference. It is nice to say it out loud for the first time in years, though.
On the other hand, I also think the Swedish-American OP has an understandable point. Cultural group identification is a natural, strong human urge, and it can be a bit arbitrary and not objectively correspond to actual observable culture or to ancestry.
I wouldn't tell someone living in Serbia who identifies as a Croat that that's nonsense because from an outsider's perspective their culture is 99% indistinguishable from that of a Serb. They have their own reasons for identifying as part of that group, and it's important to them. And similarly I don't really think it's illegitimate for Nth generation white Americans to feel that they are "Swedish" or "Irish" in some way that means something to them. (With the understanding that, yes, they are culturally quite different from someone actually raised in Stockholm or Cork).
But what is you’re ancestry, they will persist. “From America”.
Honestly my parents have told me X generations ago where someone immigrated from, but I can never remember? For some reason the factoid just won’t stay in my brain, and it has zero relevance to me.
For some people the roots of their identity is intensely personal. For others mostly irrelevant. My inclination is that it’s a place of privilege to not know (or particularly care) where your ancestors came from, and perhaps some people would even find that offensive, I’m not really sure. I certainly don’t fault someone for identifying strongly with their own heritage or being proud or even protective of it.
At the same time, though, should we then say that all English-speaking Americans have more in common than whatever ethnic stock they came from in another country, whether Mexicans or Asians or whatever group? Or do you say that just because the Bavarians are "white"?
I’d say it depends on the extent to which they have maintained a meaningfully separate culture within the US, but largely, yes. I think in most cases, a kid born in the US to Chinese parents has more in common with white American kids than they do with kids brought up in Shanghai.
Just my opinion; I don’t have any quantitative way to back this up.
It's more that people likely don't know for sure that you're actually of Mexican descent. You could've descended from any number of Central or South American nationalities, so going with something properly broad like "Latino" is going to be much more reasonable than running the risk of labeling someone as "Mexican" when one actually descends from, say, Colombia.
This is similar to the reason why most people just stick to calling white people "white" or black people "black" instead of trying to guess something more specific.
If you don't like using Latino, there's already a gender-neutral English word works just fine: Latin. Alternatively, Hispanic works just fine too.
'Latin' is more inclusive than 'Latin American' but by the numbers both are more inclusive than 'Hispanic' which generally excludes Brazilians, and other Latin American speakers of minority languages.
Incidentally, the whole "Latin" thing was invented by the French for geopolitical reasons. Recognition of a "latin race" common among the French, Spanish, Italians, and Mexicans, as a means of balancing the scales in what these Frenchmen perceived as their struggle against the Anglo-Saxon and Slavic races.
I’ve had non-<Hispanic/Latino> correct me when I said Mexican but I knew the person was actually Mexican. What gives?
I would recommend simply ignoring anyone who gets offended about how a group they’re not even part of refers to itself.
Perhaps 'actually Mexican' in this context means Mexican ancestry. For communities struggling to be accepted as American, this is a legitimate issue.
But I certainly wouldn't suggest listening to the opinions of random Anglos who aren't affected by the issue at all claiming that "calling someone Mexican is offensive"
These threads always have the same look as the ones where people complained about singular they. Latinx doesn't have centuries of use the way singular they does, but it doesn't really matter. It costs you nothing to respect another person's self-identification.
Whether people should use it as a group term beyond enby Latin American descendants is another matter.
But I'm sorry if I offended anyone. I've edited my comment to say Latino instead.
And if we want to respect self-identification, we should reserve “Latinx” for the people who actually want to be called that way, not for whole communities 99% of whose members have never even heard the term.
Yes, they do, “Latin” and “Hispanic” were the dominant terms in English before “Latino” and “Latina” took over and are still current though less common; the main reason Latino/Latina took over is because they respect terminology used in the described community, in a way Latinx (used generically, use as a label for enby members of the ethnicity may be different) does not.
But, as a hispanic, there was already a gender neutral term for this in english. ( hint, i already used it, there's also Latin ). LatinX unfortunately is a bastardization of grammar for a language that has pretty strongly enforced grammar ( hey, we have a "royal academy of language"). It's the introduction of a foreign language construct into Spanish, which is going to have a pretty strong negative reaction by, well, those who speak it. ( and they also have a right to self identify ) Others make better points than I ever will[0][1]
The term "Latino" was a borrowing of a Spanish word into english, that already had a similar enough meaning in Spanish ( aside from gendering )
[0]https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hernandez-the-ca... [1]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinx-elitist-some-push...
It may be used that way, and that may be it's original use, but I don't think that's it's main use: AFAICT, the main use is as as a general gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” or “Latina” (i.e., basically equivalent to “Hispanic” or “Latin”, but awkward to pronounce either as an English or a Spanish word), often by people who are neither enby nor of Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx ethnicity.
A wide range of backgrounds, opinions, and thought processes is good and what everyone wants, but forcing diversity based on people's unchangeable physical attributes is nothing but injustice masquerading as morality.
Not a super cool way to add to discourse.
No disrespect is intended with this question, but are you sure that was the real reason? I've seen people get laid off before search for reasons why they specifically were singled out, and come up with some pretty biased excuses for themselves when it was really something fairly mundane. Even when their replacements turned out to be incompetent.
Does that mean that people who don't report abuse aren't victims? I struggle to see the logic behind this statement.
How does a story about a minority janitor who started at the literal bottom, get turned into a grievance thread about the damage done by "diversity hiring" policies?
There’s another offshoot discussion on this thread about how “Latinx” is a ‘white academia term’ and therefore it’s racist. Yet another about gender fluid pronouns and how using preferred pronouns is a burden some are unwilling to accommodate. It has to be the Cheetos.
In one of the first chapters, he himself talks about how he missed out on some promotion at the bank he worked for because "upper management wanted diversity". Very little detail is provided about this policy, so we have to take him at his word.
While I don't really question his interpretation of events, I have to wonder about this unicorn bank that was promoting minorities wholesale over white males in the 1980s.
Certainty may be rumors that come from colleagues in other parts of the company that play out exactly as they said it would.
>Why wouldn't he sue for wrongful termination?
This was many years ago in Texas, but imagine having the choice between fighting the brunt PepsiCo's legal team, possibly incurring crippling debt and losing the case to boot (read lack of provability)
Or signing a 5 year NDA and receiving 18 months severance.
(and in response to someone else suggesting incompetence, you know of many companies that offer 18 month severance packages for not doing your job well? I'd love to submit my resume)
I would also say that rumors are not a certainty either, in fact, I would argue that the game of telephone gives rise to biases, not the opposite.
Kudos to the guy for the initiative, but we are wrong to assume the janitor is in a weak and powerless position. You can work in a factory where you don't see any of the building apart from the walk to your station and the walk to the tea room. You just do your shift operating a machine.
The janitor isn't so intensively over-worked, not physically tied to a machine on a production line. There is scope to travel about the facility and time to observe. There is also scope to be on first name terms with everyone. But most managers would never hire anyone with an entrepreneurial brain into such a role.
Also by being outside any power structure the janitor has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
This story is also telling because of how people in America find it so inspirational. They are chips, a popular junk food item made of corn!!!
Some perspective is needed on that. No atoms were split. If you had two kids, one grew up to be the inventor of a new chips flavour, the other to be a foreign language teacher, which one would you feel best pleased with? Being happy and down to earth isn't good enough though, in America there has to be a rags to riches story for one to be deemed successful.
Secondly, why does it matter that what he made was a popular junk food made of corn? If he was a chef that made a popular meal made of locally sourced ingredients, would you find that more impressive? If he were an artist and he splattered paint onto canvas made of cotton? I’d be careful to not trivialize what it means to make something beloved by millions just because you ascribe negative value to junk food and corn.
This is the bit that some people would be underwhelmed by. Without the janitor story he is just a corporate executive, 'a suit'. And yes I did read the story, 1 + 1/2 times...
The junk food industry is not where the creativity is at. That is not a put down, it is a statement of fact. Most junk food products have not changed in decades. A century ago the brands were the same.
I am sure that there are plenty of fascinating aspects to the business, you could get into vending machines or industrial processes to find a load of intellectually stimulating stuff going on.
But look at it this way:
If you were having to do speed dating and you were an executive for a junk food company, how would you rate your chances?
Even if you had inspired a new flavour of corn chip then you are not going to have the most captivating of chat when the topic inevitably moves on to what you do for a living.
If this was me and the guy at the next table was nurse in the emergency ward, a teacher or even an artist then I would be concerned about my chances.
The fast paced world of junk food sales just has the word 'dull' run before it. As for corn, there is something you hit upon in your comment. Most things in America are made of corn. It is in everything. Beverages have the corn syrup. The meat is made from corn fed animals. Even the chips that should be 'potato crisps' are made of corn. It is this industrial feedstock variety of corn that goes into these things, not a product that can be eaten corn on the cob style as a seasonal treat.
In the rest of the world people eat less corn. I very much doubt that in France there are people having fake flavoured corn products several times a day.
Various native American tribes were corn fed. They did all the original genetic modification for corn. You have to wonder how much modern America really has moved on since everyone is still corn fed there.
Many millions of Americans like cocaine, crack, crystal meth and heroin. Nothing makes them happier. A little bit of their brain lights up when they score. These more powerful substances have hijacked the same pleasure circuits used for the reward system.
The junk food industry has the same gig going on, to all intents and purposes the customers are every bit as addicted as the crack head is. And you just have to look at the waist line of modern day, corn fed America. It isn't healthy.
We hear about food deserts in America. These same food deserts are the places you will find the most outlets for junk food. It is like an invasive species. The humble potato or the carrot does not have marketing executives trying to get the vegetable into everyone's home. The junk food industry does.
Every school has cooks trying their hardest to make nutritional meals for kids. The junk food industry is the enemy. If I was an executive, a suit, in the junk food industry then I don't imagine that I would be getting a lot of respect from the school chef. So, no, I am not putting this guy on a pedestal (or wanting to begrudge him) just because he has made it to the top of corporate America.
One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses to see the good idea at the core.
Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.
I don't agree. He copied parts of it from examples in a book on marketing strategy. One writing a book with samples in it would expect someone to use those samples. It's the whole point.
Otherwise, it's a useless book describing things you can't use.
But if you're giving a presentation to your bosses, pretty much everything is fair game.
He was less credentialed but was he less qualified?
This is a great story and a good read. Happy he exists. Lord knows I've eaten my share of Flaming Hot Cheetos.
It is ethically wrong, however given the fact that he was facing an unfair fight within the organization (other executives trying to make him fail) I believe it was a fair way to combat that.
> Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.
This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my parents' minor annoyance).
Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg, when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc).
After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger (adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from an implicit position of power that I didn't have before.
I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting.
People are weird.
[1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my immediate family
[2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic supporters among those being hurt by it the most
You perceive subtle rejection a lot more strongly than you perceive someone else being subtly rejected. The effect you perceive could be explained by pointing out that all of the negative interactions involving you were "bottom-up," while the ones involving the "random lower-middle class friends," were top-down.
One of those is a lot easier to observe than the other.
This is obviously partially attributable to the fact that everything about my parents' and my mannerisms fit in well, despite not actually having money. But I feel like the actual (significant) financial gap between me and my social circles provided plenty of opportunity for social friction, and I literally don't remember a single instance of it coming from that group.
More importantly, it would be predictable for people to enforce the advantages that a rigid class system affords them, but it's unexpected to me for those getting the short end of the stick to be enforcing the system more zealously (albeit in a limited context) than those benefiting from it.
(It really bugs me that my comments keep referring to class as if it's a real, important thing about someone's character, but I guess that's sort of the point of my comment: the perhaps-naive disillusionment that I felt upon realizing how insistent most are on enforcing it)
First off, this is a pretty bizarre interpretation of what I said: no one cares if you _don't_ talk about how art makes you feel. It's the rule that you _can't_ talk about it that gets enforced, in certain circles. I should also note that this isn't some esoteric desire: I've been on drugs with these friends enough times to hear them talking about how art makes them feel, but the difference is that, when sober, they not only feel too inhibited to do so but they feel like they have to mock others who do as "pretentious".
Secondly, I dont know what you mean by getting rejected by my extended family. That's certainly not something that's ever happened, either with my family or other people of the same class. The positive treatment I noticed from class signaling (unitentional or otherwise) was entirely from women or in a professional context.
self discipline (class-based, in your description) is something foucault explored quite a bit.
In business, I think this is incredibly commonplace. People have a bad habit of looking at what the competition is doing and copying it.
That isn't a bad strategy if you're in an industry with big margins. For instance, Microsoft spent a lot of time telling people how SQL Server was competitive with Oracle. With their large margins, it made sense to go head-to-head with a similar product.
But if you're selling a commodity like potato chips? You gotta figure out some way to differentiate yourself from the competition, break out of the "commodity" mold.
In the real world, speed, timing and practicality matter. I can't get too worked up because a janitor didn't use APA citations for an internal business proposal.
The difference between seniors and juniors is experience, and that experience can partially be defined by your "moveset". A janitor would not know it is possible to run a limited trial, but the CEO would. I have found that managers are often amenable to ideas from their workers. But, if a worker does not have a full moveset, it will be difficult for the worker to pitch an idea in a way that is actionable, and he will be turned down.
>The room went silent as the CEO stood up and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen, do you realize we have an opportunity to go after this much market share?” he said, stretching out his arms.
Huge smiles from me here.
This really amplifies the willingness of this CEO to listen and promote good ideas. I don't have a ton more context but I can relate to this janitor in many ways and this reaction from the CEO would be incredible.
I'm so glad it happened this way and that it came from the janitor's perspective.
So, this was before the Hot Cheeto idea. Montañez was looking for ways of advancing inside of the company and had asked a salesperson if he could trail him as he did his routes. This was on Montañez's day off work, so it was unpaid. The advantage to the salesperson was an extra set of hands for unloading.
He saw the shelf or whatever the terminology is and how much FritoLay product they were selling in the individual stores. That's what he had in mind when he used his arms to say how much market share. The question scared him (apparently he and his wife hadn't gotten to the "market share" chapter in the book they got from the library) until he remembered that day following the salesperson and so the punchline is that he thought he nailed the answer.
Love that.
Bleurgh.
FWIW my highest level of qualification is a bachelor's degree and I work in a position that doesn't require any formal training at all.
But having a Ph.D is nonetheless a demonstration of a particular high-level of learning, research, and technical ability.
It's a great American success story.
> Six months later, with Montañez’s help, Frito-Lay began testing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in small Latino markets in East Los Angeles.
> If it performed well, the company would move forward with the product; if it didn’t, they’d scratch it — and Montañez would likely return to janitorial duties.
> So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.
> “I’d tell the owner, ‘Man, these are great,’” he recalled. “Next week, I’d come back and there’d be a whole rack.”
:-)
Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole.
Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing as emailrooms, unless you count exchange admins). All those things that allowed somebody to start at the bottom rung in a company and climb up have been systematically destroyed and/or removed.
Crowdfunding and free marketing distribution platforms exist to aid your small venture.
Just as this old story may be less likely today, new stories of entrepreneurship continue to be written without the inclusion of PepsiCo. If anything these giants exist as acquirers.
How would a janitor working for Aramark, emptying trash cans after everyone's left for the day, "learn about problems and start something new"? Even the "start something new" bit doesn't really make sense. You're going to get an appointment with a funder on the pitch of "I'm a janitor with Aramark, and lately I've been working at the Johnson corp...."?
Jan Koum went from welfare to WhatsApp with his key job as a contractor to yahoo via Ernst & Young.
This is about the person and how they use resources at hand. The loss of corporate identity in low levels positions may have fallen away but other opportunities now exist.
There's an awfully lot of implied and stated "IFs" in that sentence.
One can only tap the 'entrepreneurial marketplace' if you have or have access to Capital. That marketplace has no room for low paid people, with low to no influence.
And another thing about starting on the ground floor of a company is being part of the culture and changing it from within. Whereas a "contractor" is just some 3rd party interloper that already has the skills and technique to be hired for a specific set of highly qualified skills.
And if you think a CEO would listen to a gig-economy'd janitor or through Manpower, try asking them.
> Crowdfunding and free marketing distribution platforms exist to aid your small venture.
To recommend crowdfunding as some solution is a joke. Again, you need Capital to make the 2 minute catchy video and slick marketing to get people. And those vids usually cost around USD 20k to 50k.
I guess you could go the beggars route and use a gofundme. But usually people are in the similar socioeconomic status as their family, friends and peers.
And the means to do so, (any smartphone and a tiktok account) are closer to the hands of a poor person than a phone call to a CEO ever was.
It may be unlikely, but no more so than the incredible story told in this article.
But I do think this is one way in which the "American Dream" was broken.
Credentials can only get you so far, at some point intuition is important. Leaders and recruiters need to pay more attention to drive, work ethic, and character than to where someone went to college or what their job title is. This is the way things used to be and they can be that way again.
But yeah, I think a huge part here is actually that Montañez went with the best he could do, he didn't snap back about not knowing or get awkwardly uncomfortable about being out of his element or his knowledge base. He presented his idea enthusiastically and he stood by it. And I think you can pick up that sort of attitude in people, and that's what may have moved him past "contributed an idea" to "worth including in continuing to develop it".
It's still not uncommon at all for executive producers that manage entire projects to have started as game testers that would have been paid a low hourly wage.
Your comment takes a tone suggesting disagreement but the content agrees completely with the parent.
If you started in a technical role then you manage to reach a top technical role then you haven't done the "start in the mailroom" progression at all.
Are games testers even taken on straight from school at age 16 or do they have to have a degree to get in the door nowadays?
At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in tech.
Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs or who have grown into leadership roles. Some have left to start their own companies.
It's actually been one of our most effective hiring channels!
They haven't completely died, my company has a mailroom with someone that delivers mail to each floor, receives packages (including larger shipments at the loading dock) and stamps outgoing mail.
I'd love to hear names of companies today where folks feel their work place culture might allow something like this to happen.
It gave me respect for a company I wouldn't think twice about. Both cases show solid longterm leadership strategy in a world chasing quarterly growth.
Perhaps give them a shot.
I wonder how likely this scenario would be in today's world. I have found personally that many companies are unwilling to take risks on employees who aren't formally qualified, even if they demonstrate the skills to operate at far beyond their current pay grade.
Second real hero of the story is his wife. How important is it to have people around you who will enable you do things you aren't qualified to do because they believe in you unconditionally? All of the importants.
A practical question, and a moral one:
Would it be have worked out had the CEO tried to steal Montañez's idea, given Montañez came up with the spices himself?
Does someone merely not doing something unethical, at no cost to themselves, make them a hero?
Read my other comment on why I consider the CEO the hero of this story.
My point here, and it was obviously lost on some, is that the CEO saw the possibilities for the person, instead of simply seeing an interesting idea. I'm sure there are plenty of stories where a similar scenario played out and the protagonist didn't end up in Montañez's position.
A CEO isn't going to 'execute' on an idea by himself... it isn't like he was going to steal the idea, and go into the kitchen himself and create the cheetos. He needs someone who can drive an idea forward to execution, and that was the real thing he was selecting Montañez for... the idea was the easy part.
No, they are going to give it someone else to execute on.
Giving it to someone with Montañez background and position, even with the initial legwork he had done was, while heroic is certainly hyperbolic, at least noteworthy. Heck, taking the call was noteworthy. Execs that invite workers to “act like owners” it similar often don't really mean it and don't offer meaningful support when they do.
1 - https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european-prod...
2 - https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured-timeline/history...
Brilliant answer for a stupid question that was probably meant to put him down.
> Frito-Lay began testing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in small Latino markets in East Los Angeles. If it performed well, the company would move forward with the product; if it didn’t, they’d scratch it
So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.
Also brilliant, as such a "test" would certainly fail due to no marketing, likely intentional by the exec's and politics.
Rare only works as a qualifier when comparing it to some other probability of social mobility, either in an ideal or real system. The US has higher social mobility than most actual countries in the world and is pretty much middle of the pack in social mobility when it comes to developed (OECD) nations [0]
If I recall correctly, there was another case of a janitor working her way up to becoming a C-level executive at Microsoft and HP. Capitalism with a social safety net is what affords this social mobility because it doesn't matter what your credentials are if you can find a market for a novel product like Montañez did. You can argue about how much of a social safety net is required to prevent the poor from staying poor forever, but it's still capitalism that provides the impetus that lifts people up to where they don't need the social safety net anymore.
Compare this to a society where you're hooped if you're born into the wrong caste or without party connections and US social mobility doesn't seem that rare anymore.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and-opportu... figure 2
Saying that you have to look at social mobility as a relative thing is certainly false, because we have an optimal yardstick: perfect fairness. If measured against that goal we don't do very well.
Then you go into what the relative numbers are, and it turns out we don't do very well there either, being behind China, Hungary, South Africa and perhaps a dozen others on your preferred yardstick.
You then note that there are at least one or two more cases of this happening (which I believe), and that it requires capitalism with a social safety net to do so. In current application the first part is right, but isn't broadly correct, and the second part just isn't true.
Regarding the first part: for such a huge change in life circumstances to happen you have to have both the extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Capitalism is very good at generating those huge disparities, and is by far the most common system with that characteristic today, but monarchies like Saudi Arabia also experience it (extreme individual changes in SES in Saudi Arabia are most downward, however). The presence of a social safety net doesn't seem to play much of a role in these extreme cases, and certainly didn't in this case. Examples of self-made millionaires going back to early colonial history abound, and certainly there was no strong safety net in place. Given the relative infrequency of such events, I would be skeptical of any attempt to compare between two historical periods or societies based on relative count between those societies or periods as well.
After all that the only thing I can think you were trying to say is that the US is doing a-ok, which just isn't supported by the points you made.
I've never heard that before, its an awesome quote.
> “Nobody had given any thought to the Latino market,” recalls Montañez. “But everywhere I looked, I saw it ready to explode.”
It's incredible what a new set of eyes with different perspectives can bring to the table.
This article NYT from 1986 mentions 26.500 employees: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-go-i...
Do you all honestly believe none of the hundreds of food scientists working at Frito-Lay thought of making a spicy version their snacks?
As a Latino with humble beginnings, this brought tears to my eyes.
And this is why VCs often say they prefer teams with just domain expertise to teams with just the technical expertise, if the team doesn't already have both.
Arms spread wide, “This much!”
That is just too perfect. Who’s cutting onions in here?
....he was going to be the “best janitor Frito-Lay had ever seen”
That's the enabler, right there.
> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e., to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you, and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?
> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a company president."
(HT: http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-bill...)