7 ms·

This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the

This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed limits and accomplished something phenomenal. One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses to see the good idea at the core. Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.

deleted 7y ago
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WalterBright 7y ago
> plagiarizing parts of his presentation I don't agree. He copied parts of it from examples in a book on marketing strategy. One writing a book with samples in it would expect someone to use those samples. It's the whole point. Otherwise, it's a useless book describing things you can't use.
- notatoad 7y ago
  Yeah, if this was for a school assignment on marketing, that would be cheating. If it was something he was publishing under his own name, that would be plagiarism. But if you're giving a presentation to your bosses, pretty much everything is fair game.
  - bshipp 7y ago
    If my programming tasks--comprised of Github snippets and Stackoverflow answers--were graded by any University TA I'd certainly fail too. But I'm getting appraised by different standards in the workforce than in school. The workplace doesn't care what I've learned, they care what I've done. if I choose to spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch instead of recycling work that has already been published I wouldn't last very long.
    - GuiA 7y ago
      It depends. Eg if you’re copying GPL code in your company’s proprietary code base, the lawyers are going to insist that you spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch.
      - bshipp 7y ago
        Oh absolutely. there are definitely situations where you cannot take shortcuts. I'm just saying that most workplaces weigh productivity far higher than originality.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      I get annoyed with programming books where they present sample code demonstrating a technique, and then straitjacket that code so you can't use it.
jackcosgrove 7y ago
> jealous that someone less qualified was being successful He was less credentialed but was he less qualified?
ei8htyfi5e 7y ago
If you think buying your own product is unethical, you must love central banks and crypto startups. This is a great story and a good read. Happy he exists. Lord knows I've eaten my share of Flaming Hot Cheetos.
bonestamp2 7y ago
> having friends and family buy out the products in the test market It is ethically wrong, however given the fact that he was facing an unfair fight within the organization (other executives trying to make him fail) I believe it was a fair way to combat that.
- arkis22 7y ago
  It might be less then that. If they are limited time products that the purchasers enjoy, they might just be front loading their consumption and eating the products over a period of time. I mean, corn chips last a long time before they go stale.
wutbrodo 7y ago
(Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them) > Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult. This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my parents' minor annoyance). Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg, when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc). After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger (adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from an implicit position of power that I didn't have before. I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting. People are weird. [1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my immediate family [2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic supporters among those being hurt by it the most
johnvanommen 7y ago
> One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. In business, I think this is incredibly commonplace. People have a bad habit of looking at what the competition is doing and copying it. That isn't a bad strategy if you're in an industry with big margins. For instance, Microsoft spent a lot of time telling people how SQL Server was competitive with Oracle. With their large margins, it made sense to go head-to-head with a similar product. But if you're selling a commodity like potato chips? You gotta figure out some way to differentiate yourself from the competition, break out of the "commodity" mold.
rchaud 7y ago
Steve Jobs told engineers to hardcode a full signal strength indicator on the iPhone for his launch presentation, because the actual phone couldn't maintain full bars. In the real world, speed, timing and practicality matter. I can't get too worked up because a janitor didn't use APA citations for an internal business proposal.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 7y ago

> plagiarizing parts of his presentation I don't agree. He copied parts of it from examples in a book on marketing strategy. One writing a book with samples in it would expect someone to use those samples. It's the whole point. Otherwise, it's a useless book describing things you can't use.

notatoad 7y ago
Yeah, if this was for a school assignment on marketing, that would be cheating. If it was something he was publishing under his own name, that would be plagiarism. But if you're giving a presentation to your bosses, pretty much everything is fair game.
- bshipp 7y ago
  If my programming tasks--comprised of Github snippets and Stackoverflow answers--were graded by any University TA I'd certainly fail too. But I'm getting appraised by different standards in the workforce than in school. The workplace doesn't care what I've learned, they care what I've done. if I choose to spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch instead of recycling work that has already been published I wouldn't last very long.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    It depends. Eg if you’re copying GPL code in your company’s proprietary code base, the lawyers are going to insist that you spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch.
    - bshipp 7y ago
      Oh absolutely. there are definitely situations where you cannot take shortcuts. I'm just saying that most workplaces weigh productivity far higher than originality.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I get annoyed with programming books where they present sample code demonstrating a technique, and then straitjacket that code so you can't use it.

jackcosgrove 7y ago

> jealous that someone less qualified was being successful He was less credentialed but was he less qualified?

ei8htyfi5e 7y ago

If you think buying your own product is unethical, you must love central banks and crypto startups. This is a great story and a good read. Happy he exists. Lord knows I've eaten my share of Flaming Hot Cheetos.

bonestamp2 7y ago

> having friends and family buy out the products in the test market It is ethically wrong, however given the fact that he was facing an unfair fight within the organization (other executives trying to make him fail) I believe it was a fair way to combat that.

arkis22 7y ago
It might be less then that. If they are limited time products that the purchasers enjoy, they might just be front loading their consumption and eating the products over a period of time. I mean, corn chips last a long time before they go stale.

wutbrodo 7y ago

(Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them) > Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult. This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my parents' minor annoyance). Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg, when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc). After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger (adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from an implicit position of power that I didn't have before. I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting. People are weird. [1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my immediate family [2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic supporters among those being hurt by it the most

johnvanommen 7y ago

> One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. In business, I think this is incredibly commonplace. People have a bad habit of looking at what the competition is doing and copying it. That isn't a bad strategy if you're in an industry with big margins. For instance, Microsoft spent a lot of time telling people how SQL Server was competitive with Oracle. With their large margins, it made sense to go head-to-head with a similar product. But if you're selling a commodity like potato chips? You gotta figure out some way to differentiate yourself from the competition, break out of the "commodity" mold.

rchaud 7y ago

Steve Jobs told engineers to hardcode a full signal strength indicator on the iPhone for his launch presentation, because the actual phone couldn't maintain full bars. In the real world, speed, timing and practicality matter. I can't get too worked up because a janitor didn't use APA citations for an internal business proposal.