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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.

Having worked with filling shelves, that job felt sometimes a lot more complex than my development job nowadays. The store I worked for didn't in general allow anything extra to be stored in the warehouse. This lead to the filling load sometimes having excess products that you had to fit somewhere. I really enjoyed making space by moving and rearranging products on the shelves. The products came in wrapped in big rollers that contained random products so looking at the roller product list and how they were packaged you had a puzzle to find a nice path that visited all the correct shelves. Occasionally you would have campaigns and such where you could be quite creative in setup and arrangement.

It was the job I have been most satisfied with in my working life. However, I did only do it for 8 months for 6 hours a day. Maybe in the long run it gets more boring.

The variety between shelf filling between different store brands and even different stores of the same brand made me really think no two jobs are the same.

I used to have a job in the back warehouse of a white goods store. I was moving around fridges all day long. It was a really good job. The best part was I couldn't take any fridges home with me in the evenings. I'd get home and my fridge would be already where it's meant to be. Also no one wanted me to do a fridge moving side project in the evenings.

When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.

You weren't paid in beer and pizza options that vested after four years?

Yes, but that’s only because you lived in an area without fridge innovation. If you really wanted to work on the cutting edge of social fridge technology, you’d have to move.

Good work if you can get it, but all the interview questions plumbing the obscurest depths of Newtonian physics are pretty tough.

Don't confuse job in the hierarchy of an industry with the industry itself. For example: a ticket clerk at the train station isn't aware of the complexity of train engines, route planning, economics of public transportation, and so on. It doesn't mean that train transport is simple.

Supermarket logistics, which (or seems to me) system is built to put things on shelves in the way that creates most profit, is surely one of the essential defining advances in the last few decades of retail? I'm thinking short logistics chains and JIT?

Not my field, but perhaps you need to widen your view a little.

I'll bet there was someone at your store who was the Shiva of Stacking too?

I only worked checkouts (pre barcode scanning, other stores had it).

People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money.

That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, low choice style field like bus driving. I couldn't recognise an expert bus driver from a relative novice. But that probably only reflects my lack of knowledge about bus driving.

When driving a car, I tend to optimise (my wife would say overoptimise) for everyone's efficiency, and I am sure a lot of that can be applied to bus driving — for instance, many of them will stop too close to a red traffic light, so cars in adjacent lanes can't see them when they are only on the that side of the street.

I fell in love with driving after that scene in Parasite movie where we takes this very-very smooth turn. I now try to roll my Skoda like it's Mercedes: I stop and start smoothly, I turn wheel so that people don't spoil their imaginative coffee. It makes me feel like I'm guiding a spaceship!

Skoda Electric Bus https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobije...

When I was a young man, I was working at a children's museum, and one of our guests got sick by the front door. I was dispatched to clean it up. While cleaning, (no customers were around at the time), I flippantly said, "Where's the dignity in this?" An elderly woman who was working as a volunteer at the museum overheard me and said, "The only dignity a job has is the dignity you bring to it."

>> People can master nearly anything and stand out;

But a lot of it is just for show. Not really that impact-full on the work done.

People do it because they get a sense of achievement out of it.

But isn't the psychological sense of achievement suppose to be a reward for completing meaningful goals ? Isn't this "empty calories" in a sense ?

My dad sometimes works as a parking lot manager for a popular field trip location. He says the skill level for school bus drivers is hugely variable. Some smoothly traverse the parking lot, others with the same bus model have a really hard time. Some are appropriately cautious, some do not pay enough attention and are dangerous. Etc.

> That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, low choice style field like bus driving. I couldn't recognise an expert bus driver from a relative novice. But that probably only reflects my lack of knowledge about bus driving.

Look up "Bus Rodeo". It's basically a skills challenge for bus drivers.

You'll see drivers make maneuvers with 60 foot articulated beasts that the average person would have trouble doing in a normal SUV.

There is a massive differences between a well-stocked shelf and a poorly stocked shelf. The science behind the product decisions, brand placements, etc, is well-studied and practiced. The store-shelf-stockers themselves have a major impact with their level of detail-oriented work.

I'm sure you could measure it financially, and that a nicely done shelf stock makes more money than a poorly done one.

I would imagine the depth there is in determining what goes where on the shelf. You as shelf-filler probably didn't get to make this decision though.

There is a "science" behind shelf placement decisions and it has to do with height, location on the aisle, colors, lights, and of course the "fee" that the outlet asks for the premium spots. Someone who just fills shelfs (I've done that for a toystore a few decades ago, for a a couple of months).

Depends whether someone gets to just fill the shelf as per plan or has the curiosity to ask "WHY", noticing why X things fly off the shelf why Y things two shelves lower stay there forever. This curiosity builds the critical thinking 'muscle' and can motivate a shelf-filler to switch into marketing (hypothetical scenario has to do with a 17yo working part time and then deciding to studio marketing)(I didn't study marketing) :)

too late to edit "studio" = study phone's autocorrect, sleepiness, and fat fingers is a nasty combination :)

Having dated someone who specialised in developing and enforcing visual merchandising guidelines for an international cosmetics brand, I have to suggest that it just might.

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