How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)

thehustle.co

406 points80mph261 comments

That's $18.52 an hour in today's dollars. The average pay for a janitor today is closer to $12 an hour. In fact, just a few years after 1976, janitors' wages (at least in LA) started falling sharply below the cost of living: https://socialjusticehistory.org/lalabor/workingla/archives/...

The fact that our economic system worked for him does not mean that it works for the vast majority of people in similar jobs. It's quite likely that some of his colleagues are now making less money (in real terms) than they were in the 70s.

This was in "the late 1980s". Even if we're assuming this was in 1985, $4 in 1985 is $9.36 - $9.85 today. Sources:

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://smartasset.com/investing/inflation-calculator https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstarti...

The article states that the job opening was in 1976.

The US has a lot more immigrants from Latin America living here than it did back then. Plus, unemployment is lower (even with the pandemic).

I would rather have 1 million people making $12/hr and 0 unemployed and in poverty than 650k people making $18/hr with 350k just shit out of luck. I can’t say the former is what we have, but with unions or tight labor market regulation, the later tends to be closer to what you get.

> I can’t say the former is what we have, but with unions or tight labor market regulation, the later tends to be closer to what you get.

This is a big claim without any evidence. Given the minimum wages in other western countries are proportionally much higher with no negative consequences AFAIK, do you have any evidence that the richest average income country could not have a higher minimum wage?

> With data from 25 OECD countries over 15 years from 2000 to 2014, we find that a higher minimum wage decreases labor demand but does not affect labor supply. Our empirical results also suggest that relatively modest increases in minimum wages have limited impacts on employment. On average, 10 percent increase in the minimum wage decreases employment by 0.7 percent, thereby increasing unemployment rate by 0.64 percent.

https://ns1.6thsigmahosting.com/pms/index.php/jrge/article/v...

This is just one paper, I don't know if it's a fact.

I can't look at that website due to certificate trust settings, however thanks for replying with data. It's pretty interesting numbers (lets assume its true).

So a raise of 25% would equate to 1.28% unemployment. A fully socialized welfare system (Centrelink in Australia) costs 14% of GDP with 6.8% unemployment. So a reversal of 25% would reduce that to 5.52%, and 11.36% of GDP (assuming overheads etc are linear, optimistic).

TLDR; if this article is correct, raising minimum wage 25% requires governments invest 2.6PP of GDP.

At least that's a decent point to have a rational discussion about where governments spend money and what your priorities are - thanks for sharing.

>no negative consequences

Meanwhile politicians tell us that double digit unemployment is the new normal.

There are people that are not skilled enough to warrant certain minimum wage. There are jobs that are not feasible at certain wage levels. When you put a floor on what people can agree between themselves that their work is worth, you price people and jobs out of the market. It is self evident when you look at it.

Now, the problems we try to solve with minimum wages are real. Cartel formation of labor demand, coercive bargaining, these are real problems. Minimum wages solve them to a degree, hut not without a new set of problems.

Did you know Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Switzerland have no minimum wage at all?

> Did you know Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Switzerland have no minimum wage at all?

That's not true at all for example Switzerlands minimum wage is not dictated at the federal level but its equivalent to 25 bucks an hour in Geneva. [1].

> There are jobs that are not feasible at certain wage levels. > It is self evident when you look at it.

That's not self evident at all. People still work at unskilled jobs countries like Switzerland or Australia. How do you think the cleaning and fast food industries work?

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-geneva-introduce...

Where I used to live, they pay this mentally disabled girl at a grocery store to get shopping carts. She would be wholly incapable of doing anything remotely mentally challenging. But with this, she can take some of the burden off her family to care for her, she can have something of her own going on in her life, and she is a human being and I'm sure feels from time to time like she is a burden and gets down about it, so she probably gets some dignity from it. She would probably be out of a job if minimum wage got raised to 15 an hour. She would be priced out of the job market and that job would not be worth paying anyone to perform.

You'll notice that when wages are artificially increased, unemployment rises. Which jobs do you think were destroyed? Which workers do you think were let go? It is self evident. When wages are raised by decree, some jobs and some people are priced out of a labor market. Just because there are still low skill jobs and low skilled workers does not mean there was not a reduction in those jobs.

Agreed that it is self evident when examined in the right light.

Minimum wage doesn't increase the wages of the lowest tier of productivity.. It outlaws it.

Which is why McDonalds has no employees in Australia or Switzerland? It's not self evident at all looking at higher minimum wages in the 25ish countries with higher HDI than the USA and higher minimum wage.

The problem is that $12/hr is still "in poverty". You've set up a false dichotomy between everyone out of poverty vs most farther out of poverty, but some still in poverty.

There's literally nowhere in the US where a single minimum wage job can rent and "affordable" (defined as <-30% income) two bedroom apartment [1]. And it's not even a close thing like two incomes could afford that. The calculation is that you'd need to work 127 hours per week at minimum wage for an affordable two bedroom apartment.

And it gets even worse in expensive metro areas. The poverty line in san francisco is $117,000 for a family of 4 and $82,000 for an individual. Meanwhile minimum wage in SF is $33,425.6 per year (16.07 * 40 * 52).

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-...

Man I have a hard time dealing with comments like this, because people say this sort of thing and it is simply not true. When you get to brass tacks that's when all the other "necessary" expenses usually come up. Gotta have Netflix, gotta eat out once or twice a week, what is the point in life if you cannot consume products? What other ways are there to have fun?

My bills are 800 dollars a month, total. My rent is 400. I live 40 minutes from downtown of one of the largest cities in the US. Before this, they were 1200 dollars a month. I wanted to cut them so I found a way. I have everything I need, and I've got money saved in case of an emergency, I'm going to save my way into the upper middle class living this way, without a degree of any kind.

The trick is to repeat the following mantra: "bills are the devil." That's really all there is to it. Get a car with cash. If you don't have cash, save some cash by not spending all your money. A single person who can't live off 1200 bucks a month is mismanaging their finances. If you can't afford to live in San Francisco, that's not due to our economic system, it is due to how the city manages itself, and it's a way the city is telling you you aren't welcome there. Go somewhere where you can have a decent life.

The only real problem here is health insurance. I do not have it. The health insurance market has been absolutely destroyed by government intervention over the last decade. I remember when I could get a decent plan for 80 bucks a month and I thought that was expensive. It wasn't that long ago.

For families, I get that it is a lot tougher. Two incomes are a must nowadays. But historically, families encouraged their sons to establish themselves financially before having children, and communities that had children young or out of wedlock were usually impoverished. It has always been financially tough rearing children. You can't raise a family working the window at a fast food joint, and there was never a time when you could.

It may seem counterintuitive, but being able to cut your bills down like that is often a privilege. Poverty is a trap and it is hard to move somewhere cheaper when you don’t have enough money to buy a car. You can say “don’t spend your money” all you want but when money is tight you make concessions on things, and it usually leads to higher costs down the road. Cheaper products have to be bought more frequently. Bad cars bought break down sooner. This leads to debt trouble as you borrow from your future to pay for expensive costs now, leading to more fees later. The best money management still can’t predict the unexpected and when you’re barely making it month to month even the slightest setback can have rippling consequences that roll you deeper into debt.

It’s really easy to say “just move and stop spending your money lol” but it really is often more complicated than that.

It does seem counterintuitive. Would you be able to elaborate on that? What mechanism exists that makes it hard for me to live cheaply but someone else to not? I've lived very poor in my life and this argument that for some people there's no way out doesn't compute, at least not if you live in the west. I've never met a person that cannot pull themselves out of those traps that wasn't caused by discretionary spending and bad impulse control, not in the west. Ive met legitimately poor people in third world countries that are actually stuck due to societal systemic problems. But every person I've met in the US that can't seem to make their lives better, there is always some mismatched priority that keeps them that way.

Yours and the other comments below are all saying "yeah, it's fine, you can do it if you don't have kids nor health insurance". Which basically means "it's not fine". A good standard of living is not measured by how a person can live as long as she remains single and decides to forego health insurance.

I addressed that in my comment; I pointed out that raising children has always been financially more difficult than being single, and humans have always had to prepare themselves for starting a family if they wanted any chance at raising the standard of living of their children. Saying "you cannot start a family on minimum wage" is a ridiculous bar to set as justification for forcing market restrictions on entire populations.

I could survive just fine off a full-time minimum wage job in my state of Michigan. That's 9.45/hour or about $1500/month. I rent a pretty nice place in a college town for $550/month (across the street from campus, middle of downtown, utilities included). I eat mostly pasta and canned soup, but that's just because it's easy and cheap, and I do go out to eat with my girlfriend once or twice a week. let's say another $700/month for money, phone bill, gas, and walking-around money. Just to round it out let's add $200/month to put into saving for unexpected expenses and $100/month for car insurance or anything else I forgot.

I'm on my parent's health insurance, I think if that were not an option it would really complicate things. Google says the average annual health insurance premium is $15,500, which would basically be my entire yearly pay. I think when you work more than 30 hours your employer is supposed to pay some of that, and maybe there's subsidies too for people on low income, I'm not really sure how it works.

So basically, the current minimum wage is fine for me. For a single parent with 3 kids, it would obviously not be nearly enough. But also, I'm not sure I'm capable of doing any work that's worth a living wage for a single parent with 3 kids, so raising the minimum wage that high would probably put me out of a job. Maybe the minimum wage should be set as high as it can be without costing too many jobs, then the government should give everyone the support they need to feed their families and not be homeless.

Dude, I’m from Michigan. It’s getting expensive there fast. If you think you’re immune to what is happening everywhere else you are in for a rude awakening.

Before my wife and I left in 2014 or so we looked at a decent bungalow in Kalamazoo for roughly 40,000. Now you can’t find a house in that neighborhood for under 150k- and it will be a dump.

I bought a house there around a year ago before deciding it wasn’t a good fit and I still made like 15k after 10 months. It’s insane.

Mind you a good job in Kalamazoo pays 60-80k tops? Sure remote work is a thing but it’s a leash.

Traverse City or Ann Arbor are bordering on Portland prices and there are limited job prospects in either place relative to Portland.

This would’ve been unacceptable to our parents but they’re making a killing off of their investments so they don’t give a shit.

I don’t know what is happening but housing is getting expensive everywhere and fast.

I expect that the solution to that problem is to directly address it via zoning or price controls, not indirectly by raising the minimum wage

They tried that in San Francisco and it only got worse.

Even on your parents insurance if you only had yourself it will eventually get very complicated.

co-pays, out of network doctors taking care of you while you are under after a bout of appendicitis goes wrong, cars breaking down, parents randomly needing help to make ends meet because of all of the same.

Speaking from 20+ years of adulthood nearly half of which was below the poverty line there are more poverty traps than you can possibly imagine that minimum wage or even much more doesn’t even come close to avoiding. The available recourses to you when those events occur are grim.

Calculate the interest on payday loans, if you happen to need one it is exceedingly hard to stop needing them as they drive you down further and further.

Life got considerably more stable after making programmer salaries.

Minimum wage in the US is just waiting for the next big thing to push you further and further down. I was super lucky to find out I was good at this computer thing in my 20s (and that I had family to lend me 500 bucks for my very first and very bargain basement computer in that era).

It felt close to indentured servitude other than I could change jobs, but I didn’t get ahead or even tread water. No vacations, no time off when sick, and 60-100 hours of work a week for years.

I definitely would have preferred just getting a check from the government and going back to school while I got some real skills, or even that same minimum wage with a good transit network and medical care that didn’t find ways to take all my very limited savings.

In the end, unless people have gone through the sort of nightmares life can throw you it is hard to see how much money you need in the states to be stable and it takes a lot of education and knowledge to navigate all of it, which if you are on minimum wage you probably don’t have.

Something has gotta give the situation is not viable.

So what if you can’t afford a two bedroom apartment on minimum wage? Bunk up with a roommate.

okay, but as wage increases continue to lag behind cost of living, are you just going to ask people to bunk up with more and more roommates in a 2BR?

That’s a bit of a straw man saying “two bedroom apartment”. Why would a single person need to live in a 2 bedroom?

I mean, plenty of people rent a room in a shared house in SF. Are they living in poverty because they don’t live in a two bedroom?

Fair wages and guaranteed jobs can both exist.

Is there any point in guaranteeing a job rather than just giving the person the money?

devil's advocate; doing a job takes time, whereas just getting paid does not. Making it harder to have an additional side-job. (it's a common belief that you need to be unemployed and looking for employment before getting a handout)

Also, whoever's "guaranteeing" those jobs can get work done, if you're into that sort of thing. e.g. digging/filling holes, or building roads to nowhere.

I agree. You can get full employment and a respectable standard of living floor through stuff like a negative income tax and universal health coverage. But making it illegal to work for what YOU consider a low wage and permitting labor cartels is counter productive.

When bargaining with a monopoly or oligopoly, don't unions just put workers on an even footing?

Market forces leave out every human factor. Unions add it back in.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Let’s break up monopolies and encourage competition.

Is there an ETA for the break up? The trend is the other direction. We could always wait for the end of scarcity.

“Good laws can’t be passed, so we need bad laws (which we also can’t passed)”

Laws around unionization already exist.

Why are labor cartels bad but capital cartels fine?

Why must an employee bargain individually but a megacorp be allowed to bargain against them collectively?

Who here said any form of cartel is fine? If we need to regulate financial markets to prevent collusion, we should do that.

Why is a union collusive but a corporation and their HR department not collusive?

Calling unions "labor cartels" is cheap. You might just as well call democratic systems "law cartels" by that logic.

Yeah, know what you mean. It's a real hellscape up here in Iceland with all these unions and livable wages. We aspire to become a better and more profitable American style system.

$12/hr is living in poverty too.

Minimum wage in LA is like $14

If you don't want to read the twitter thread, you can read this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227175 (2019)

https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/

I actually came to post this. After noticing some weird terminology in the Twitter thread (I've never heard the term "Cucamonga Valley" used to refer to the neighborhood by Ontario International Airport) I found that hustle.co article which has very similar wording. I think the Twitter thread is just a paraphrasing with some jazzed up details

> paraphrasing

That’s a generous way to say plagiarism IMO. Link should probably be updated to this (@dang?). Plus it avoids the abomination that is long form text mutilated into a thousand tweets.

Ok, we've updated the URL from https://twitter.com/ankithharathi/status/1341193051184611331.

Especially since on Twitter it could be summarised as "Janitor introduced flaming cheetos to CEO and it made the company xxx dollars"..

God damn attention-seeking content-stealing Twitterers..

Information arbitrage is one helluva social media drug.

It’s weird but not wrong, the area he lived in is still there. Guasti, CA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guasti,_California

I'm confused now - the Ontario international airport is in California? (As opposed to Ontario, Canada; both of course confusingly abbreviated 'CA'.)

https://www.flyontario.com/

Yep, yes it is. Not confusing at all..! (To be fair I've tried to check in to a hotel on Newmarket Rd, Cambridge for a booking in Newmarket, North of Cambridge; which was at least wrong with reference to the same Cambridge UK and not Cambridge Mass. USA, but to do it with an international airport just seems particularly mean, especially when the ambiguity is on county/province/state (as you prefer to term it) level.)

Ontario, the province, is freaking huge (and, as these things go in Canada, populous). An "Ontario Airport" would make no sense at all.

Many UK airports describe themselves as 'London airport's without that making much sense.

I love that there are 2 Ontario, CA. And I love that Los Angeles could also be described as “freaking huge.”I have driven across both Ontarios so I realize it’s a different order of magnitude.

> Newmarket, North of Cambridge; which was at least wrong with reference to the same Cambridge UK and not Cambridge Mass. USA

You’re lucky you didn’t get Newmarket or Cambridge ... Ontario!

Definitely not incorrect, it was just odd enough to make me suspect that there was some copy-paste action going on

Thank you. I can't really think of a worse way to read twitter than a long form story broken up in to 13 separate posts.

Thanks for posting the original article. I remember it being posted earlier on HN. The second I saw the tweet about "Make sure they know a Montanez" mopped it, I knew it was the hot chip story, as that was a line I remember from the article.

Great story, but it can’t happen today. No janitor works for the company whose floors he’s mopping anymore, so janitors wouldn’t get that company-wide email.

Are you implying that companies outsource all of the janitorial duties now? I'm in Arkansas, so crack all the jokes you want, but the big places that produce a lot of food (McKee comes to mind - Little Debbie) staff their own positions.

https://mckee.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/mckee/jobs

So, in other words, yeah, you could be a janitor and potentially propose a new Little Debbie snack right now. That particular dream is still alive!

Yep - many, if not most, factories staff these positions themselves. It fits in with their existing maintenance, assembly, cleaning, warehouse type roles.

It's mainly white collar places that don't know how, or don't want to, hire anyone who does blue collar work.

Part of the reason white collar firms outsource is that benefits usually need to be uniform across all employees. If you are a white collar firm with generous benefit packages, it becomes comparatively expensive to hire blue collar workers yourself compared to outsourcing. Decent health insurance (~$20K/year) is more than the federal minimum wage ($14.5K/year). I'm not suggesting this is moral, but it is reality. At a factory, with many workers at similar pay levels, this won't be as much of an expense.

Unfortunately, a second reason you see outsourcing are job functions where many of the workers in a geographic area are undocumented. Companies can't hire undocumented workers directly, but will allow a middleman to do so on their behalf.

That's not true. You can offer better packages for your higher paid employees.

Outsourcing blue collar labor has to do with offering any benefits at all. Once your company has 50 employees or more, you must offer at least a bare minimum health insurance plan to all full time employees.

Outsourcing is cheaper, because you can deal with small companies that are more focused on taking advantage of employees by doing things like making sure no one works more than 30 hours a week.

> You can offer better packages for your higher paid employees.

Wouldn’t the company lose the tax benefits if they fail non discrimination testing because the highly compensated employees (HCEs) received disproportionate benefits?

Only if the factors you are descriminating with are considered protected. The ACA is still being implemented in this regard, so pay level or executive level may or may not become "protected" but as of now, I don't think it is.

SF's recently-passed 'overpaid executive tax' [1] pushes companies further in this direction.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/san-francisco...

I see like the private jet and limo service, that is uniform across all employees and the CEO

I work in a place with one third white collar and two thirds blue collar workers. We have our own 'Facilities' folks that do all kinds of things. We hire a cleaning crew to come in after-hours and handle the janitorial part. Just sayin.

That particular dream, but parent is pointing to a bigger trend, of course. This is a snapshot of the death of upward mobility, the American promise and all that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...

I work for a decent sized company in AR as well. Janitorial and Security are both outsourced. I always assumed for both cost and liability.

There are not too many companies where you can start at the bottom and work your way up to the top. Very unlikely in 2021.

There are tons of companies where you start at the bottom, work your way into a basic management role and then after a few years of that start your own company.

You go from janitor to floor polisher to supervisor to manager to slightly more important manager to "I'm starting my own company".

Not all companies, obviously, but the proportion of staff outsourcing has grown in the past few decades.

I find this contractor mindset amusing from personal perspective.

I've consulted to a company for ~6 years which has gone through some pretty huge growth. Until recently I felt was one of the guys helping the business and just happened to have a finger across several companies in non competing industries.

Now the growth is on and 'corporate employees' are joining mid size success corp. As a consultant so many treat me as second tier as though signing that full time contract changes something. Is strange how that status changes peoples behaviour.

Also amazing how much meetings took over and people there for the sake of it are involved in everything. Changed incredibly in 18 months when the money was rolling in and headcount opened. A bunch for the better but also incredible how much bureaucracy came in so quickly.

It’s amazing that corporate America thinks it can’t hire a at all levels from the custodian to the CEO, but almost every school system and government can figure it out.

I'm not sure I follow.

The reason that large companies subcontract out these roles is that they're incentivized to do so, not that they "can't figure it out". I'm not sure I've really heard people pretending otherwise.

Or alternatively, they've "figured out" how not to hire people unrelated to their core business? What does Frito-Lay have to be gained from engaging in the janitorial business?

Not paying the person in between? I worked at PepsiCo for a little and most of their job responsibilities weren’t unique to the product offering or business model.

A job that supports the core business is definitely not the same thing as a job unique to the product offering or business model.

e.g. food safety is something that is important to PepsiCo's business, yet they are far from the only business that needs food safety expertise. In contrast, they may also need potholes filled in the parking lot, but they may choose to hire outside help for this, because they do not do it enough to be good or efficient at it. Paying a middleman is often cheaper than hiring labor directly. Labor is the largest single cost for most businesses.

I think the distinctions between supports and essential to value get pretty subjective. Since 2008 the number of contracting roles has increased quite a bit and there are disputes as to whether Uber drivers (or engineers) are employees. I’d claim there is an unnecessary and unhelpful bias towards outsourcing (not saying that it’s always wrong, just more prevalent than ideal...).

Well, Uber drivers definitely directly support Uber's primary business. So I'd say that's a different situation altogether. (and they're not really outsourced, Uber directly "contracts" each one of them) Many businesses fail when trying to outsource staff that directly support their primary product or service.

A more direct comparison to the issue of Frito-Lay's janitorial staff is something like: should Yellow Cab should hire their own car wash staff or make a deal with a local car wash?

Yes, the decisions could go either way depending on circumstances. I think for me this was a good example of needing to stay on topic. Original comment was that not paying a middleman is one potential benefit of keeping common services in house and that many if not most roles could be filled externally.

You can't get kickbacks from the middleman if there is no middleman.

Those gasoline rewards points at my grocery store is the only reason I don't buy my own cow.

YMMV (I am in Austria), but there are advantages and disadvantages, it's not a clear decision. In my ex-company we decided to hire janitors, mainly because we didn't want to deal with different people all the time whom we'd have to teach how to treat computer displays and keyboards every time, with some perhaps slacking or even stealing. The main disadvantage was that as a small company, you're in trouble if all your janitors (or your only one!) are sick or on leave and you can't get a replacement at short notice. Our first hired one still works at that company after 18 years - not bad for an IT startup.

Isn't this entire story the answer to that question? Hiring employees who care and feel a sense of ownership pays off.

The story is notable because it is not the norm.

Were starting to see the results of outsourcing everything but your core business and it's not looking like a great strategy.

The software industry hasn't quite figured it out, but specialization is a great strategy for the vast majority of the economy and it has worked extremely well.

See General Electric, Boeing, The TV industry, the chip making industry, and countless others. Well, OK two of those outsourced their core business... They probably didn't understand the concept.

They make food! Cleanliness is core to that business, at least at factories.

> It’s amazing that corporate America thinks it can’t hire a at all levels (...)

I don't believe that's the case at all.

It's not like they believe they can't hire someone. That's a silly assumption. There is however the idea that there are operational advantages in outsourcing non-core areas of their business. If they hire a specialized contractor to do maintenance tasks then you no longer have to bother with gaining expertise in that area, and you can even scale up and down your service to meet demands.

The rationale is like figuring out how we have lunch. Sure, we can cook it ourselves and it will certainly be cheaper. However, if we pay a third party to provide us with our lunch then we get food cooked by pros and we even have the freedom to pick fancy dishes from some other restaurant if we deem it necessary.

> There is however that there are operational advantages in outsourcing non-core areas of their business. If they hire a specialized contractor to do maintenance tasks then you no longer have to bother with gaining expertise in that area, and you can even scale up and down your service to meet demands.

From what I've seen in practice, it's always about the outside "specialized contractor" breaking various labor laws and generally screwing workers over in order to drive costs down. This way, even with the contractor markup, the company saves money and, at the same time, is not liable and does not take a reputation hit. It's a win-win for everybody but the workers. I guess they don't put that in the MBA textbooks though.

This is a correlation that you've observed that is actually caused by a third variable: these are often low-wage and low-leverage positions. Easily replaceable, low wage employees are common victims of labor law violations regardless of whether they're contractors or not. Employees that are in no position to fight back often get screwed.

The key operational advantage is that you avoid providing any worker protections and can better achieve a race to the bottom via competitive tendering to low-margin outsourcing providers hiring minimum wage employees on temporary contracts.

Governments (in the west) don't hire their leaders, though. Same is true of schools - principals and the like might be hired, but the school boards that chose them are elected.

And those boards usually select the superintendent and that superintendent certainly didn't start in the system as a janitor, nor did any of the principals under him.

By the West, do you just mean the US? Where else are small potatoes administrative positions like school board, etc. actually elected?

This is a really nice story, but you know who the other hero is? The CEO who gave him the time and the opportunity. He could've easily told him to fuck off, as many would do. Who was he, what's his name?

More often than not, we get nowhere without people in better positions helping us, it would be great if more people would keep an open mind like that. That CEO deserves recognition.

And if you manage to climb higher on the ladder, don't forget to help others like someone helped you before. Pay it forward.

I agree and was very fortunate to meet such a guy right out of college where I was studying Recording INdustry. All our teachers said good luck getting a job and I was only three out 60 that I heard got a job out of college in the field.

Once I moved from Nashville to NYC for my label job I met a ton of other men and women whom this same guy gave them a chance too. That's how his career started .. he met a label head at a concert in the 80s who gave him a chance.

Great guy who helped found many popular artist careers in the 90s.

Would love to hear more details about this.

Thank you for your interest!

I'm a hobbyist songwriter but pursued it in college at Middle Tennesse State University. I learned you got to be the best of the best and then luck needs to fall onto you as it did for my songwriting classmate, Luke Laird (wrote many Carrie Underwood and country number one songs.. was best writer in class.. not sure how he got his break). During college I was able to intern at record labels and attend fun industry functions like CRS (country radio seminar), NARM and the parties that happened after each day of the event. At NARM in Orlando I went to the events during the day and then found the parties the labels held for record store (2001 when record stores existed lol) people. At one of the parties I met some executives and partied with them and then one introduced me their friend. Her friend was the guy I mentioned and we hit it off, gave him my business card and a month later he left a message on my voicemail (was back in Nashville) saying he wanted to hire me for a marketing job at RCA/Victor (jazz label ... Etta James was on it).

I only lasted 6 months (he forced my boss to hire me and she hated me) in my supposed dream job in NYC, but it was a fun and interesting (witnessed the twin towers falling from Times Square in my office's 41st floor) time in my life.

The CEO had an incredible life story as well:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-pepsico-ceo-roger-enrico...

Made CEO at just 38 years old despite coming from a modest background, and engaged in marketing strategies that were very much ahead of their time and dramatically boosted growth.

Agree it’s an underrated part of the story. A CEO who was able to recognize, reward, and take a chance on someone who showed initiative and potential. A sadly rare ability in the world of CYA management.

You know who the other hero is? The CEO who gave him the time and the opportunity.

I would call it "common decency". An uncommon trait for corporate executives.

But there's no reason to elevate the occasional few who are capable of it to "hero" status.

The CEO's name was Roger Enrico

Yeah CEOs never get enough respect. Also they're paid FAR too little for having an insight a child would have...

Good leadership is rare, you're right, and I don't think CEOs deserve credit for demonstrating good leadership. Good leadership should be table stakes for that position; the bare minimum.

What needs to change are the astonishingly weak disincentives (and sometimes, actual incentives) aimed at bad CEOs.

If you can worm your way into a CEO position of a company you didn't start yourself, and you DON'T demonstrate good leadership qualities with regularity, then a good old-fashioned CEO-blacklisting seems very appropriate, to me; you just don't get to be a CEO anymore.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is not "an insight a child would have". Good ideas mean nothing unless it leads to a marketable product. And for one smart janitor with business sense there are thousands of people who will just cost the company money.

The CEO here managed to notice that among thousands, this is the janitor to listen to.

As for CEO being well paid, it is simply because their decisions can make the company lose or earn a lot of money. If a $500k salary earns the company millions, it is well deserved. And when things go wrong CEOs do get kicked out.

So yeah, we can say that spotting talent in a janitor and turning into a lot of money for the company is a CEO's job and the reason he is paid so well, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be praised for a job well done.

And sure some CEO don't deserve their position, golden parachutes are a thing, but I have a feeling that most CEOs have merit.

> As for CEO being well paid, it is simply because their decisions can make the company lose or earn a lot of money.

CEO pay has risen over 900% over the last forty years:

* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ceos-are-paid-278-times-mo...

Somehow I don't see the value that they bring to have increased by the same amount. From a Harvard study entitled "Are CEOs Rewarded for Luck? The Ones Without Principals Are":

> CEOs are rewarded for luck. Moreover, pay for luck is as large as pay for general pay for performance. Pay for luck also appears on the most discretionary components of compensation, salary and bonus. Looking closer, we found that pay for luck is strongest among poorly governed firms. Adding a large shareholder on the board, for example, decreased the pay for luck by 23 to 33 percent. This finding weakens two prominent explanations of pay for luck: “Paying for luck is optimal” and “Filtering out luck is impossible.”

* https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530152466269

* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_ceos_rew...

Another study, "What Makes a Winner? Toward Resolving the Role of Luck and Skill in Sustained CEO Performance":

> This study is an empirical examination of the extent to which luck can explain sustained performance. Using a unique empirical strategy of bootstrap simulations that we compare to actual performances of public companies, we observe that over 95% of the differences in performance outcomes between “top” versus “average” performers can be attributed to luck, even if all CEOs are equally skilled. Through this novel empirical approach, we can better incorporate the role of luck into studies of sustained performance, and our findings suggest that more attention should be placed on the role of unanticipated and even uncontrollable changes on performance.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2827132

CEO pay has risen over 900% over the last forty years:

No, pay for the CEOs of the 350 largest companies has risen over 900%.

Said 350 largest companies have also grown dramatically; "CEO of the 50th largest company in 2020" (Procter & Gamble, $67B revenue) is a much bigger job than "CEO of the 100th largest company in 1980" (General Foods, $5.4B revenue).

Why did you compare the smaller company in 1980 to the larger company in 2020? Surely if you wanted to really drive your point home, you'd do it the other way around.

The way it is, you've just made it much harder to actually compare numbers. Just accounting for inflation brings that gap down to 67B vs 17B. Still sizable, but also comparing the 50th largest company to the 100th, so...

Oops. Those are both the 50th largest companies by revenue for their years. Not sure why I typed 100 for one of them.

The end result of mass centralization of industries with plenty of political backing for mega-corps and the hackery of the massive finance industry. Meanwhile new small business registration numbers have been declining in the US.

> If a $500k salary earns the company millions

If only CEOs were paid so little...

Aren't they though? I mean sure the CEOs of large, well known companies are paid many millions, but they are the highest paid CEOs. Seeing CEOs getting paid 100 million a year gets headlines, but most aren't paid that much. I wouldn't be surprised if the median CEO total compensation is less than 500k a year.

You seem to be in fact correct. Most CEOs actually earn less than that. Which makes the 2.2 million average even crazier.

>The average private company CEO total compensation package for 2017 was $2,213,679, but the median was a more modest $350,622.

https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...

If that's accurate, also crazy is 90th percentile and mean are almost the same at 2.216 million vs 2.214 million. So the top 10% is completely dominating the total compensation for CEOs.

> It is not "an insight a child would have".

Are you sure? Children listen to janitors just as much as they listen to anyone else. One's job doesn't matter to a child; they know they can learn from anyone. Very few CEOs know this. Hell, very few ADULTS know this.

I didn't intend "an insight a child would have" to mean that such an idea is a basic thing everyone knows, I literally meant "an inside a child would have."

The trouble is that there's a torrential flood of information coming at you as a CEO.

You have to be selective with where you sample your information. Sometimes this filter is too strict (only listening to VP's), but if your filter is too loose then you will spend your days drowning in information that might not be all that useful

Good leadership is orthogonal to the amount of incoming information.

I am not saying that all CEOs should listen to all janitors; I'm saying that all CEOs should have, at a bare minimum, good leadership skills.

Children will also chase a ball into a busy street, or eat candy for every meal if given the chance. Maybe there's a virtue to knowing which childlike behaviors are worth keeping.

Again, I am not commenting on the general skill of a child...

You can become the world's first CEO with a boardroom full of janitors

It is not a single voice in a room of quietness. It is noise from a 1000 directions and you need to pick out that one signal that leads you to success.

That has nothing to do with good leadership ability.

A CEO, or any leader, has a vision, and inconsequential information is easily cast aside. Our ears can do this quite easily, when we have a conversation in a noisy conference room or whatever.

The temptation might be to treat the story like a rags-to-riches fairy tale, but it is instead a parable if you read it from the point of view of a leader (which admitedly would be resisting the author's narrative).

Let's just not have ladders so that people don't have to wait for benevolent dictators to take them under their wing.

> The CEO got on the line. Loving the initiative, he told Richard to prepare a presentation, and he set a meeting in 2 weeks time.

So he didn't really just walk in like the title implies. Still it's a remarkable journey. It invokes a certain nostalgia about a past where anyone could move up through the social/corporate ladder and if that is still the case. Personally, I wonder if that time really ever existed or if these are 1/million changes of luck.

It’s cliche, but I find it to be true: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”

Mr. Montanez had done the preparation - he’d immersed himself in the company and its products, and was actively looking for ways to contribute to it. I am very confident that this was not the only idea he had to do so; I strongly suspect Frito-Lay discovered that as well, which is why he ended up in upper management.

Now, does it happen for everyone, every time? Of course not. It’s not even numerically possible for everyone to take this path. I’ve always taken pride in immersing myself with the company I work for as well, and while that has worked out very well in some cases in others it has had no apparent effect. That’s OK. I see it as part of my character, not merely as a play for more responsibility (and compensation).

I don’t think it’s just “luck”, though. I think someone who builds this type of character will benefit from it. It may not make them a VP at Frito-Lay, but it will benefit them.

I knew this was going to be about hot Cheetos guy, my favorite quote of his is:

“I have a PhD of being poor, hungry and determined"

$18/hr adjusted for inflation. Almost a living wage back then. And unlikely to be paid today.

Janitors are able to demand $18+/hour in SoCal, plus benefits in some companies.

You're able to demand anything you want anywhere... but you're not likely to get it.

“Able to demand” colloquially means they are getting it.

LA County minimum wage is $15 per hour for businesses with more than 25 employees.

Rancho Cucamonga is only subject to the state minimum wage ($13 IIRC, although it probably goes further than $15 would in many of the unincorporated parts of LA county)

It's also 5 miles from LA county, so wages should be halfway competitive.

What's kinda funky is that the LA County minimum wage only applies to Unincorporated areas, so if you're in the city of Pomona or wherever the minimum wage is still $13

Makes sense. Cities are not subsidiaries to the county in California.

Unfortunately my experience has been when a CEO is asking you to “act like an owner” it is code for “spend less” and “work more.” The subject of this article had an advantage because he took things quite literally and hadn’t heard the BS before.

3G Capital also uses the “act like an owner” code - the problem is that their employees cut a bunch stuff and they cut a bunch of their employees.

Yes, it’s always act like an owner, accept pay like a serf.

What a legend! Janitors are outsourced now, and I wonder if the outsource everything makes the work your way to the top journey a lot harder.

More importantly he had time to learn about the business. How much time does a picker at Amazon have to think about the business ?

At least a picker at Amazon works for the same company as the CEO. Most jobs at that level would be contracted out.

In the UK, at least, Amazon hires temps via an agency.

Source: I work there for the agency (since I can't find a job... thanks to the Gov response to COVID!)

Why do I get the feeling that if a janitor (outsourced or not) emailed Bezos with an idea, he'd be fired, threatened with lawyers for stealing Amazon business process IP until he signed away any IP rights, and then maybe Amazon would roll it out without crediting him?

Despite my reservations about Amazon after having worked there, I think you're wrong here, _particularly_ with respect to Bezos. With some random director or VP? Sure. With Jeff you don't get the impression that he's a snob about the sources of good ideas.

Note that I don't think you'd get so much as a bonus or pay bump for your trouble, but don't worry, you can feed your family with the pride you have in your idea making the flywheel turn that much faster.

You're right, I was more thinking about the Amazon machine. With Bezos who knows, he might make the VP a janitor and give him your job.

I doubt the janitor is going out on sales calls if they're contracted in from another company aye

This story is being made into a movie. The twitter thread, no doubt, is an effort to promote it. See

https://www.newsweek.com/flamin-hot-cheeto-movie-true-story-...

See IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8105234/

I think what is special is that they offered him VP. Today he would probably got a voucher or got fired shortly and someone else taking credit. Today taking a look at particular community and researching what they are missing and taking into account their spending power is pretty standard in research. Also janitor would likely be either self employed or from agency and focused on his own life today.

Richard Montañez did quite a few podcast interviews in the past few years: https://lnns.co/aQN_ukyM4J9

This story really stuck with me when I came across it here[0] last year because of the way it's written.

As a few have pointed out, the Twitter messages are just "paraphrasing" the article if you put it nicely. Putting a few references after doing the original sources injustice by telling just half of the story doesn't make it okay either.

Is this some kind of new tactic to grow your audience? I was raised to be honest, I worked in industries the consequences of being dishonest is supposedly absolutely unacceptable, but in most cases people who are dishonest usually get further ahead than most with little to no punishments. Seeing this get so much attention is very demoralising.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227175

I think you just have to be honest for the sake of your pride. The world hardly punishes dishonest people itself.

> 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.

Well, that would certainly make them sell better, but doesn't exactly make it an accurate test? I think I've heard of other companies doing this, although usually it's to inflate revenue and growth numbers pitching to investors or space in stores. I want to say some company did this recently but I can't remember exactly who.

But don't get me wrong, I love me some flaming hot cheetos and it's a great feeling story. Although I also remember the Wire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A

He juiced the sales to make sure the product didn't get killed prematurely. Anyone who came from his background and got that opportunity would have thought to do the same

I applaud both the janitor for his initiative and the executive for listening and giving credit where credit is due. I feel like in big companies today, including tech companies that are overly praised for their culture, there is little room for such a story to unfold. More likely than not, someone with initiative has donated their idea and strategy to the company for free, while someone else gets put in charge of executing it, and capturing the career benefits. It’s cynical I know and I’m sure there are counterexamples, but the vast majority of attempts at such initiative don’t go anywhere.

Another way this story could have ended:

CEO: Thanks for the idea! Goodbye, and don't forget your mop!

(CEO shares go up by $20M)

Janitor: Damn, I should have brought a lawyer. If only I had the money for one.

My father worked for GM as a tool and die maker. They had a program once where employees could submit ideas for efficieny improvements and would get a reward of 10% of the savings (or something along those lines). There was some process whereby parts were coming off the line and 100% needed additional work for final install (I believe it was hoods of Impalas or something). My dad had proposed this change to the stamping that would have made this extra work unecessary and had calculated a savings of nearly $30 million given the number of Impalas built, the hours needed for the part and the average wage of the employee. Management blew him off and low and behold, a few months down the road he was asked to build the tooling for the change. He is not $3 million richer.

You could be like Peter Roberts, who invented the quick release on wrenches: https://apnews.com/article/aed4a37bc719aba52db82cb96029fded#....

He did eventually win his lawsuit though. 20 YEARS later.

The story probably does end that way 99.9 out of 100 times.

Whose interest is it in that this is the story that gets repeatedly told as inspiration?

Lovely story and kudos to both Montanez (the janitor) and the company for their success but I can't help notice a bit of survivorship bias in these kind of stories. How many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of such ideas come to people at all levels in all companies and how many turn out to be duds is never covered. Although the story made me feel good, I can't really draw any lessons from it I'm afraid.

I think the lesson is that if you take the chance, then there is a chance. If you don't take the chance, then there is no chance.

> 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.

Sounds like Hampton Creek's mayo shenanigans: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hampton-creek-just-m...

I understand that from an economical perspective, this is brilliant, but the natural part of myself also think that this kinda of junk food is ruining this planet. Its more or less directly the cause of most pollution troubles (over-consumerism, transports, .., at the expense of organic local "good" food)

You can choose not to eat it. And plus, a bag of chips once in a while doesn't hurt anyone unless you are allergic to it or a heart patient perhaps.

If most people made this good choice to not eat it, then this article wouldn't exist

The plastic hurts _a lot_ of animals. And the microplastics are hurting us too.

Can anyone tell me about non-founder CEOs who has done a great job of creating innovative products for a company without using MAs?

I'm trying to think about if there's any correlation between the two. There are some posts in HN that was about founder ceos but I cant remember the context. I'll have to go look for those

Non-founder ceo usually is much more restricted on time on what they can do. Founder CEO has much less strings to hold.

Can you tell me more about the time restriction that they have? Is that about hitting quarterly targets?

The person just copy pasted an article they read a while back to their Twitter. Not sure why but I really hate it.

“Inventing a new snack” and coming up with a idea for a flavor for an existing snack are two different things.

Also, I imagine that a couple food scientists in a lab came up with the actual flavors.

Montañez took home unflavored cheetos, created a spice mix at home with his wife, and pitched the cheetos coated in his spice mix to the CEO and senior executives.

I imagine the final recipe was not the same as his home spice mix, but not giving him credit for the flavor is silly.

There are so many stories about how flaming hot Cheetos came to be.

Where else can one read end-to-end discovery articles as such? Anything better than regex title filters "* how by "

My gf loves spicy cheetos. What a fun story to share.

Richard Montañez has all my admiration for what he achieved. This is a beautiful story.

Unfortunately, those kinds of stories also play into the narrative: be a good model employee, make sure the floors shine and trust that hard work, and great ideas will make you deservedly insanely rich. Because there are smart CEOs who will see all of that

Cinderella, capitalist version.

Too rare to be significant as a policy. Most likely does not scale. Too often, dreams are useful to convince people to accept their fate.

100% absolutely true. I respect Richard for what he did and how he has viewed things, but I am much more cynical about the world. This is likely a small exception out of hundreds of thousands of times that "the janitor" got completely screwed over, if they were even given a chance to begin with.

I mean, it happens on the daily. The startup I previously worked for had this "test" API, I helped turn it into an essential API that brought the company a ton of money, and I saw 0 of it. My title got bumped, I guess.

And now, I work on something even less visible. If I do something at work that saves thousands of my coworkers thousands of hours a quarter, I don't see any of that. Nor can I show it, because the higher-up management people don't know what a Jenkins is or what an Artifactory is. How do I sweep these "floors" so well that the CEO can see any of it? Even the coworkers that use my stuff directly don't give a shit because they have code to write and my improvements save them ~20 minutes a day every other day or two.

> make sure the floors shine and trust that hard work, and great ideas will make you deservedly insanely rich.

Generally someone who is known for doing a good job of whatever it is that they are doing and has a lot of initiative are going to have more opportunities than someone who doesn't really care to do a good job and has no initiative.

Showing up for practice doesn't mean you will be a great athlete, but not showing up is a good way to dramatically reduce your chances.

> Too often, dreams are useful to convince people to accept their fate.

It's sad how right you are. And it's sad how trying to educate others and acknowledge the facade puts a target on your back, then suddenly the same people who you want to help now see you as the enemy.

Cheers.

It seems like these feel-good stories about benevolent capitalists get a little less traction now, although perhaps not in forums populated by the labor aristocracy.

“A cat may look at a king,” as the saying goes.

I didn't know it. [1] says it means "even a person of low status or importance has rights". The janitor in the story has rights, like he can certainly try to call the CEO to pitch an idea. Is that what you meant to point out? I feel like I'm missing out on the profoundness.

[1] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/a+cat+may+look+at+a+kin...

Related: It's funny how people are happy with <$1mn FAANG salary when there's oodles to be made fulfilling untapped markets.

$4.25, but close enough.

scarcity value

Two things I haven't seen anyone mention that seem important:

1. For the one person who has "made it" economically, there are countless others that haven't, that still live in one-room houses. What about them?

2. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that the product that he created, while popular and financially successful, is a junk food that has a significant impact on the health of adults and children worldwide. We should evaluate "success" holistically, not just financially or else we miss the downstream effects of our decisions. This blindness is the same mindset that has caused climate change.

That said, it's wonderful to see someone lifted out of poverty. I hope millions more have the same chance.

It’s sad to see that in the last 10 years this type of comment (tries to) ruin every single inspirational story.

Just because there’s shit in the world doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty and greatness and awesomeness sometimes. In fact that’s what makes it wonderful.

If you’re bitter and all you see is the shit, and resent any inspirational story, well, good luck to you but I definitely don’t think you’ll have a productive, or inspirational life.

I don't think the person to whom you're responding was trying to "ruin" anything, they were just pointing out a complicating fact that is objectively true, which is that Frito Lay is in the business of selling junk food. The inspirational part and the problematic part are both real things, and acknowledging one doesn't mean the other is unimportant.

wonderfully said, thank you!

Seconded. Yeah sure it's a junk food but it's not like he invented Opium or explosives or something. Give the guy a break!

Ooh! I'm happy to supply a feel-good story that is (as far as I can tell), unreservedly good: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200915-the-himalayan-in... "The Himalayan invention powered by pine needles"

TLDR: man and wife move to poor rural region of Indian, see wild fire problem caused by pine needles, invent a machine that turns pine needles into electricity and cooking fuel, employ villagers to pick up pine needles, deploy it to dozens of villages with help of the government and village entrepreneurs.

A success story that lifts people out of poverty with well-paying work, renewable electricity, and cooking fuel while cleaning up the environment in a scalable, decentralized, locally-suited way. Incredibly inspiring.

Two things I haven't seen anyone mention that seem important:

1. For the villages that have now "made it" economically, there are countless others that haven't, that still live in one-room houses. What about them?

2. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that the product that he created, while popular and financially successful, is still used in the same settings charcoal is. And while carbonized briquettes produce less emissions that charcoal, there are still a non-negligible amount of particulates generated. By introducing a new source of this type of fuel he could be creating a local maxima that's still far from ideal. Additionally what are the effects of the type of repetitive labor these people are up to?

That said, it's wonderful to see someone lifted out of poverty. I hope millions more have the same chance.

(Do you get why some people are pushing back on your comment above? You can come up with this kind of stuff for anything. You can't eat an apple today without possibly furthering child labor, our world is too complex to try and turn every feel good story into a dig for downsides, because they will always exist. It is in no way "important" to do suss them out. And it's fine to discuss them, but you don't need to make it a reaction to the feel good story, you're allowed to just discuss these topics independently of the story)

> (Do you get why some people are pushing back on your comment above? You can come up with this kind of stuff for anything. You can't eat an apple today without possibly furthering child labor, our world is too complex to try and turn every feel good story into a dig for downsides, because they will always exist. It is in no way "important" to do suss them out. And it's fine to discuss them, but you don't need to make it a reaction to the feel good story, you're allowed to just discuss these topics independently of the story)

There's actually a problem with "rags to riches" stories, specifically: they're used, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, to justify and reinforce unjust systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rags_to_riches#Criticism). Looked at objectively, they're often essentially a dramatic version of someone buying a lottery ticket and winning the jackpot.

If you look at half the top comments, they're actually productively talking about how this story exposes flaws in our economic systems (like how outsourcing has affected the odds someone would care enough about an employer to do this)

I'm not saying you can't look at the negatives of stories, far from it, but trying to bring a story to an extremely open-ended negative point is so easy, but adds nothing of value. You could have the conversation separately of the story and lose absolutely nothing, the story is just being used as a springboard then tossed.

You're getting very close to the much deeper question: what are these ("rags-to-riches") stories for? And even more generally, what are stories for?

Suppose you drop any and all negative criticism of the story. What's left? What's that for? What should anyone make of this story? What lessons can they learn? What true lessons can they learn? What invented lessons can they learn (because sometimes we tell stories to convey invented lessons, rather than ones rooted in truth)?

What is it that you want someone to get from a story like this, and do you believe that your desired lesson is useful and/or true?

I don't see why you read a comment saying that it's perfectly fine to look at negatives especially as the relate to the specific story and then want to imply someone is saying we drop all negative criticism.

At the end of the day this feels like such a HN thread. A story can't just be a moment feel good?

It has to be reinforcing systematic injustice or a looking glass for how terrible so many have it?

It can't just be something that makes you go "huh, neat, good for him" and you move on with life?"

Again, I'm not saying it has to be that, I once again reiterate it's fine to look deeper and for negatives, just maybe actually keep it relative to the story... but just "accepting the bait" as it were...

Would it really be so terrible if all someone got out of it was a moment of a smile rather than some grand philosophical prototypical mind twisting that defines a story?

Stories don't have some sort of "answer" there's no singular reason why they all exist.

I am entirely fine with someone saying "all that is intended for this story to do is to elicit a smile". That's an entirely valid thing to say and/or goal to have.

However ... having established that as the goal for this particular story, we can ask how well it does that, compared to other stories that might also have this as their only goal. We probably should ask this, because there almost innumerable stories whose primary purpose is to create a smile, and we may as well not waste our time on the less good ones given that we have (individually and as a culture) only a finite time to tell and/or listen to stories.

The ranking is necessarily personal (subjective), and incomplete (given the scope of possible stories). Even so, if I was looking for a story to just smile at, I'd rank this one fairly low (mostly because it butts right against the more difficult questions you've asked us to put aside (for a while, at least)).

Is this the "the world is hard, best to not try and let our corporate masters think for us" post that's in every thread on HN?

A story can have good parts and bad parts. It does not make you a bad person to like the good parts. It does not make you a bad person to pick out the bad parts. It does make you a bad person to take a dump on someone's comment to "own" them.

Oh please, the point is someone posted a story! You don't need to say "it's important to look at all the people who didn't make it"

It's not! It is literally the furthest thing from important in the comment section for that story! Certainly not in such an open ended way!

It's the laziest form of concern-baiting.

And don't project your own little weird need to "own" people like your comment is trying too hard to do onto me, I'm pointing out something that should be obvious: it's easy to go "what about the other guys" but not every story needs to be about "the other guys"

> For the one person who has "made it" economically, there are countless others that haven't, that still live in one-room houses. What about them?

Nothing stopping you from writing their stories. Glad you’re showing such a vigorous interest in them. Let me know when you start posting!

> Two things I haven't seen anyone mention that seem important

Perhaps because those items are either obvious or add nothing to the conversation.

> For the one person who has "made it" economically, there are countless others that haven't, that still live in one-room houses. What about them?

I think you're overlooking the miracle of capitalism. If it was just about one guy striking it rich, this would be no different than the story of someone winning the lottery or getting a big inheritance from a distant relative.

Instead this is the story of a man who worked hard, studied the market, took risks, and most importantly stayed 100% focused on the mission of delighting the customer. And the result was the creation of a product that improved the lives of millions.

This isn't just the story of Richard Montanez. It's the story of every Korean immigrant who opened a convenience store in an underserved neighborhood. Or the ambitious teen starting a landscaping service. Or the local property taking a gamble to build new housing in a fast growing. Or anyone starting a new restaurant, fashion line, or hotel. Or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founding Apple in their garage. Or Henry Ford building a car for the middle-class.

All of those improvements slowly but surely accumulate over time. The fortune Montanez accumulated is incredible. But we know his personal wealth is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is a a vastly greater amount of wealth that was generated in the form of consumer and investor surplus.

Because the reality is that your great-grandparents almost assuredly lived in a one-room house. And you almost assuredly do not. And almost none of us hustled our way out. Instead we just sat back, and enjoyed a constant stream of endlessly improving products- cheaper, faster, higher quality, more abundant. All powered by singularly-minded people relentlessly focused on delighting the customer. And living standards continue to rise, while global poverty continues to march towards zero That's the true miracle of capitalism.

Before capitalism you had Cinderella stories. It's no miracle that inequality is as bad now as then.

The percent of the world's population living in absolute poverty has fallen from 94% in 1820 to less than 10% today.[1] That's the greatest miracle in human history.

[1] https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072

Yeah, but we discovered oil. Humanity suddenly had unbounded energy to do what it needed to drive machines. Both capitalist and non capitalist systems brought over a billion people out of poverty. USA and Europe on one hand and USSR and China on the other. Behind it all is abundance of energy. It would be a mistake to attribute it to a system like capitalism which never really existed in anything close to a "pure" form anywhere ever.

I love that on the hacker news forum (sponsored by a venture capitalist), users are downvoting someone pointing out the possible meritocracy of capitalism. /s

dcolkitt - I wish I could upvote you twice.

> We should evaluate "success" holistically, not just financially or else we miss the downstream effects of our decisions. This blindness is the same mindset that has caused climate change.

Your comment is guilty of the very sin that it's pointing at.

It may be myopic (or blind as you qualified it) to try to frame success, but unless you have some special kind of sight that allows you to evaluate it yourself across time and space, the alternative you suggest, that hypothetical holistic grand evaluation, is itself a pointless exercise.

No one knows the future. No one knows what's ultimately "good" or "bad". The same people who keep thinking that they do are also the ones who operate under at least one of three illusions: (1) that something is wrong with the world, (2) that it's fixable and (3) that they know how to fix it. As Oppenheimer once said, it is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

Readable version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1341193051184611331.html

Even more readable, the source article from three years ago: https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/

This saccharine rags-to-riches, pro-corporate fairy tale makes me so sad and mad, all the more so for the unreflective adulation it has gotten.

[opinion to follow, my own]

Even in 2020, while the rich get richer (literally being subsidized by COVID "relief" bills) and the poor are looking to avoid being evicted, the flood of pro-corporate defenders is never ending. It is a true downside to having such a large, albeit fragile middle-class.

The fundamental premise of this story is flawed given how most board/c-suite positions are attained and how almost all wealth is acquired e.g. inherited.

And HN is not immune to the rallying cry of defending billionaires and our perverted version of a "free-market" (lol).

Anyway, I'm mad, too, internet stranger. I'm mad that we spend more time admiring CEOs than we do fixing real problems.

Cheers and I hope you read this before the downvotes cause it to fade.

The fundamental premise of this story is flawed given how most board/c-suite positions are attained and how almost all wealth is acquired e.g. inherited.

Citation needed. From a simple google search it seems 55.8% of Billionaires are "self-made" [1]. Sure some of them started off with silver spoons (i.e. Gates) but they did not inherit the billions they made from starting companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, etc.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-m...

You're comparing "almost all wealth" (from GP) to the number of people with self-made wealth, which doesn't make sense.

> Taken together, much of the best available evidence suggests that the median dollar of wealth in the United States has been inherited by someone in the richest 5 percent of families.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...

Wealth accumulation is exponential so starting with "mere millions" is deceptive. The first million is the hardest.

Most wealth is not inherited, unless you're using some weird definition that you made up.

> Taken together, much of the best available evidence suggests that the median dollar of wealth in the United States has been inherited by someone in the richest 5 percent of families.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...

And estate taxes just keep getting lower. Nevermind that you don't have to pay capital gains on inherited equity.

Many people aren't aware of just how bad wealth inequality has gotten in the last 25 years.

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This is why I can barely handle going on LinkedIn anymore. It's embarrassing how many of these stories there are there - they must appeal to some base human instinct.

Whats the punchline?

Are you asking for someone to copy the last tweet to HN, or do I misunderstand your comment?

$20 million in Rancho Cucamonga. So that's like $1 million in real money, right?

He only made 20mil in earnings? I feel like he got robbed. Should have started his own company and eventually sold to Frito Lay for 10x the amount he made.

Not sure if he was in a position for that. It's not like tech where you can just start coding in your bedroom after work. Psychical products are header and then health permits and stuff. Unless maybe he did it at events and trade shows small scale, but by time he could scale up to be in retail he'd probably be copied anyways if trying to bootstrap. Unless he could seek investments but I guess that depends on who you know. So many business ideas die in the parking lot of a bank.

I watch Shark Tank from time to time and it seems like retail and food is one of the hardest things to get into. slotting fees and can be really low margin too.

So maybe he could of went off on his own and done it, but part of me feels like that's a all or nothing bet. I know personally starting a food brand all by myself is not something I'd even try since it seems like a losing game to me and other businesses would be more suited for me to go after.

There's no mention about whether or not the flavor Montañez came up with was the one used in the hot Cheetoes, or if the CEO even tried one.

Not that it matters, but I think it's interesting that the actual product here we can safely hand-wave away, "The chefs in the test kitchen will make that part work."

The exact flavor isn't important. What is important is that he identified an unserved, high-potential, market and put together what was basically a minimum viable product. I'm sure it needed massive refinement, but that shortcoming is a normal piece of any product development.

Totally agree, I just think it's unintuitive how the actual literal product is often the least important part of the process.

Also, it sounds like his presentation skills provided management with a spokesperson/avatar/salesman for the project, possibly making it the right time to move forward with some ideas they already had but didn't have the right person for.

I think coming up with the final formula requires an understanding of not just taste/food science, but also manufacturing logistics, raw material sourcing, etc. There's probably a lot of trade-offs involved, as you can imagine as well. I agree with you that it's a team effort, but unfortunately the impact of such stories is probably diminished if they weren't about the janitor walking into the CEO's office and hitting a home run.

This is a good story that poses philosophical questions as what intelligence means. Regardless his social class and jobs he look for opportunities and achieved success. There is a movement in tech for underrepresented minorities. I would dispute that opportunities should be given to anybody regardless their social class race or background, just not only latinos, black or women

There is a movement in medicine to find a cure for breast cancer. I would dispute that research should be given to all cancers, regardless of the body part, not just breast, brain, or lung

The way this story is told, makes little sense. So he sprinkled some Mexican seasoning on plain Cheetos and gave a presentation, and they gave him $20 million for that? WTF? There's a lot left untold. Or if this is the entire story, the CEO basically decided to make this guy into a millionaire, but he didn't have to. Or this is a clever PR stunt with maybe a sprinkling of truth.

The insight isn’t “add some spices to cheetos”. It’s “you’re ignoring the entire Latin market, and we have different preferences in food than you do, and here’s what those preferences are, and here’s an example product for that.”

No, it says he went on to be a VP and amassed $20 million fortune, not that he was given $20 million for that one idea on the spot.

So presumably that's how much he worth now.

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