Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

This is an article about Walmart's program that has just two spots, two (and only paid them $65K/ea with a college degree). They had "over 1000 applicants" but had two spots, then they get free(?) advertising on their internal mobility.

Also, this is rather a mind bender of a paragraph:

> Around 75% of Walmart managers started out as hourly workers at the company. Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles, said Ms. Jordan, who is also building new internal training programs.

So most of your previous managers are internal hires, but in the future you're going to go with recent grads and outside hires instead..?

Also, the title's $200K only appears in the body as: "often pays more than $200,000 a year." Often? Want to qualify that a little? Hard to read this article as anything more than a Walmart ad with little substance. There's no real store manager shortage, since they just had enough applications for this program to replace all of their current store managers per the article itself.

Sounds like they want to hire more "college grads and outside hires" and THEN fast track them for management. So idk, make them get a feel for what most of the everyday work is before moving them up. I do think it's good that managers have some idea of what their people are having to deal with regularly.

I agree. However, from my observations these types of programs are used more to attract talent than to develop it.

Yeah for sure, I mean anyone they feel like isn't going to be good management material they can just not promote until they leave.

> Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles

So it takes a college degree to be an hourly worker at Walmart now?

Specifically, they want to maintain the perception of internal mobility. So they’ll hire overqualified people, promote just those, and be able to use the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year.” Which they can dangle as a carrot when they need to. What I find surprising is that they actually admitted publicly to this strategy!

> the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year"

Aside from the problem of induction, why would this be a fallacy? (I'm assuming you meant to implicitly apply the 'each year' modifier to both or neither, because otherwise it would be such a boring and obvious fallacy that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.)

It omits "with degrees" after "floor workers".

Yep, a population statistic isn’t predictive for an individual if the population is heterogeneous. And in this case, designed to be heterogeneous.

Ah, right, thanks! That wasn't actually part of the statement they quoted (/posed within quotation marks), whence my confusion.

Edit: Or is the point that 20% of floor workers in total do become managers, but that's precisely (or very strongly correlatedly) the subset containing those who have degrees? If so, that makes a lot more sense. I don't really think it's fair to describe as a fallacy, though - it's a function of the philosophy of probability, which doesn't describe the world but our knowledge of it. You could make an analogous statement about roulette wheels, with perfect knowledge of their physics.

Walmart recruits at the University I graduated from. When I graduated, around 10 years ago, they were very aggressively courting new business undergrads for Walmart corporate. They revealed in my second (and last) interview that starting pay was around $25k annual. Even 10 years ago, that was a joke.

The internal track isn't that uncommon. when I was at Domino's Pizza it was the same thing. The path to management and franchisee was through the hourly funnel. There is a lot to be said for having management that started in the trenches as hourly staff and had to do and learn "all the jobs" before they become the boss telling other people what to do.

Modern journalist are narrative fiction writers. Articles should come with a disclaimer "based on a true story". You don't exactly know which part is true.

I'm willing to bet 'managers' doesn't mean 'store managers'

Probably not, but managers make good pay. Store managers require someone who is both able to do the job (which is complex), and willing to move where the company needs a store manager. If you want to manage "a department" you can get promoted at any store, but if you want to manage the store there are only a few positions, so you move to assistant manager at whatever store needs it, then move to store manager at a different store - these may both be out of state moves.

It was 20 years after leaving McDonald's before I'm no longer sure I wouldn't have made more working at McDonald's than as a programmer. The job path all the way up was known to me. Even now I'm not sure - it depends on if I was willing keep competing for the more and more rare positions above store manager, and how I did compared to the others. I'm glad I didn't go that way - for me it the money isn't worth it.

Jail time for writing such trash articles seems fair.

It is because Walmart is either not offering $200k per year, and/or the $200k is based on working 80 hours per week with variable schedules where one should expect to be interrupted during dinner and weekends and nights.

It is always the same story with restaurant/hotel/airline/retail/hospital work. Complaints about struggling to hire while paying peanuts relative to the shit quality of life of those jobs.

Especially for any “manager” or “supervisor” level position, which is just code for “you are the person responsible for filling in when someone calls out”. And someone will call out because the pay for the subordinates will always be insufficient to attract reliable, quality line level workers.

Yeah, it mystifies me. One of my ex-boyfriends worked at a chain coffee shop. He was paid minimum wage, as the manager of several branches, for working insane hours, and (as he once said to me) the person three levels above him was paid about £50k (~$60k). That guy was in his 50s - that's how long it took to get promoted. And he was a smart guy: excellent programmer, wrote an emulator for some old games console, wrote and managed his own email servers and VPNs, filled in as an engineer for a few months at my former startup (for no pay, very kindly) when we were understaffed, etc. Could've easily worked as a programmer for 10x the pay, in other words. He was a massive coffee fan, and had tens of thousands worth of coffee equipment at his house, and I think he genuinely loved it and did it for that reason, but someone like that must be one in a million for them; I never had any fucking clue how they filled all the other positions... (I'd be fascinated to hear anything anyone else knows!)

Easier than putting the Sacklers or Jones in jail, I bet.

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