11 ms·

The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry leve

The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays. From the article: "After getting his first position as a shipping assistant, Walter showed outstanding skills and willingness to learn, always doing more than expected. [...] Shortly after, he was promoted to a position in sales. Then, he became a successful Sales Manager." I once spoke with a professional baker who started off as a machine operator for a bakery in his late teens, then earned promotion to become a production supervisor and then distribution manager. He then moved companies to become a plant manager, and later an operations director involved in baking formulation, until becoming an account manager (sales) for large baking firms. The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally. Instead of promoting internally like in the past, I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. They perceive that internal candidates lack "leadership qualities" from past interactions with them, and/or perceive that they produce more value in their current positions. When asked how they account for these people changing jobs for promotions to lead elsewhere, the response was that they would say they understood the former employees' positions and would wish them well (without openly reconsidering whether they were under-weighing the value of internal promotion).

Tepix 4y ago
Not necessarily. I encountered a coworker who retired after having worked for 50 years at the same company. He was not in management.
radu_floricica 4y ago
Well, hiring from outside is a solution to the Peter principle. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it has its justifications.
- ftlio 4y ago
  There is no solution to the Peter Principle. That's actually the thesis of the book. I'd argue that management that can't promote from within has likely already reached the position of their incompetence as well. There are lots of reasons and every situation varies, but my experience is that the reason people don't get promoted has way more to do with bad management than bad potential managers in the pool.
cperciva 4y ago
Part of this is due to the increased career-orientation of higher education. A century ago, someone could start in the mailroom and gradually learn how a company worked; maybe at some point they would take a night course in accounting or some similar business skill, but the vast majority of what senior management needed to know was learned from experience -- and experience at that company in particular. Now business undergraduate students don't just sit in classrooms learning about accounting practices and labour law; they're expected to study existing business, take co-op positions, and otherwise gain "real world" experience. A student graduating from a 4 year Undergraduate business program should know far more about business than someone who started in the mailroom 10 years ago. Meanwhile the other side of business schools -- research -- has also acted to reduce the advantage of gaining experience at any specific business. Researchers study successful businesses, learn what works, publish papers... and eventually teach it to their students. Whereas a century ago, businesses fundamentally did things in different ways, most large businesses follow the same general approaches to things, because those are what the PhDs say are the best ways of running a business. As a side effect, the experience someone gains in one company becomes far more transferable to another; for all that companies talk about getting "fresh ideas" from external hires, external hiring has increased because external hires are now less fresh than they used to be.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I think it has to do with what people think university is. It used to be academic training, now it's seen as job training, and I'm not sure it's justified, having done time at a business school. Really, it's so different studying business to doing business there should be some sort of advertising standards label on the course description. So now people think that you need to have gone to university to work in ordinary shops, and it cuts out a huge swathe of people from certain jobs that they'd be totally fine at. Sales type jobs like this centenarian was doing is one of them, you really don't need a degree to do it, but now there's a gate.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  The biggest reason why promotions are becoming rare is because it actually isn't in the interest of the company to do them. If you're filling an opening by promotion you'll still have to find someone new to fill the position that has been vacated with that promotion: and now you've got 2 new people vs 1 when hiring from outside.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jwilber 4y ago
As one counter data point: Amazon has plenty of programs that promote people from warehouse roles into tech/corporate.
jolmg 4y ago
> The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally. This could also be a difference in the country's working culture. Not all countries need to be the same in this regard, and it may still be common to rise through promotions in Brazil. It could probably depend on other factors, like the industry, too.
noufalibrahim 4y ago
Can't say for sure but I think the industry and time has a lot to do here. My father is a mechanical engineer who worked for a well known plastics company in the early 70s. He had a technical supervisor who started as a casual labourer at the same company.The supervisor couldn't write and used a thumbprint instead of a signature. However, he could interpret and analyse the designs for the moulds very well and was highly respected for that. It was the reason he was promoted to that level from that of a labourer. Perhaps his illiteracy was the reason he didn't rise any higher but the fact that the company was able to recognise his skill in a certain area and promote him to a level where it could be completely utilised says something about management philosophy. Equally, his ability to teach himself technical skills to be useful without a formal education says a lot about him too.
gambiting 4y ago
Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi - hire early, usually before people even finish uni, and then get them up through the ladder. It promotes career growth, loyality, personal development and job satisfaction - I'm literally surrounded by people who have been here for 15+ years(29 is the record currently) - personally I'm at 8 years, went from intern to junior to intermediate to senior to lead in that time, and I have no plans on going anywhere really. >>I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. That's absolutely not the case for us, in fact I'm struggling to think of examples when this happened recently.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  > Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi Interesting, because the public perception of gamedev companies is opposite: "hire-crunch-downsize-repeat"
  - gambiting 4y ago
    Because it's true for a lot of places. We do have an extremely strong anti-crunch culture and value work life balance a lot. In those 8 years here I worked maybe like.....2 weeks of overtime? Around launch of one of our biggest games, I stayed in longer to make sure things were running smoothly. But like outside of that? 8am till 4pm every day. Never worked weekends or anything like that, and I don't know anyone who has. (well, that's not strictly true - I know from those old timers that 20 years ago that was pretty much bread and butter and people lived in the office more or less. But that was before I ever started here).
    - xiphias2 4y ago
      Which company? I mean if you say so good things about your employer, I guess it won’t get angry of you naming it :)
varjag 4y ago
This is skewed a lot by webdev shop stats, where average tenure never exceeds the prime time of an average JS framework.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  While this is true - there's a lot of "magpie developers" out there that will jump ship before they have to live with the consequences of their own technology decisions - there's other factors at play as well, like changes in management (because they too want to move up the ladder) or corporate reorganizations. I once worked for a company - a big bank - that during a three year stint did three reorganizations, forcing every team to work as scrum, then in devops teams. They forced the 'old timers', people in their fifties and sixties who had been working there for all their life, to learn Java and to reapply for a job. And for the project I worked on, the original was built in Flex but that didn't work on the new ipads at the time. We rebuilt it in Backbone, then Angular came out and we slowly transitioned to that one - that took nearly two years all told. Then some new CTO came around, an ex-googler so of course his words weighed more heavily, who Decided everything should be rebuilt in Polymer. Of course, right when they were almost finished with making their existing Polymer components work with v2, they introduced v3 and lit-html and everything was Different again. Gee, switching to experimental software has Issues, who would've thought? But it's proven technology because McDonalds used it in their menu screens. Sigh. Anyway, that's the kinda thing that will make people walk out as well.
  - tibbydudeza 4y ago
    Reminds me of the eternal sage of the Duke Nukem follow up. First their own 3D engine - then a version of the Doom engine which they needed to "improve" - then Unreal - then by the time the game was close to done Unreal shipped a major upgrade which they needed to "upgrade" to.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  So have you heard of JQuery Plus ???.
dugmartin 4y ago
The dad started as a draftsman apprentice at the phone company when he was 19. He retired at 52 as the Director of Engineering for Illinois at the same phone company (after turning down more promotion offers in this mid 40s as he didn't want to move again). He never went to college. He loved his job until the early 1980s when, as he said, "the MBAs took over". The company took care of its employees before that, promoting from within and thinking long term. One of his final "fights with the MBAs" was their idea to replace the company apprentice linemen program with contractors as it would move costs around and look better on the balance sheet. He told me he stood up in a high level meeting and asked something like "do you think you could get contractors to come out in the middle of the night in a storm and climb on a pole to help restore service? What about 20 years from now, who is going to teach the apprentices then?". He was a "company man" and I think he was both happy and sad to retire after nearly 35 years of service when those same MBAs offered a buyout for executives like him.
- dugmartin 4y ago
  Post frozen edit correction: I just realized I started this with "The dad" instead of "My dad". I originally had a couple of sentences starting with "The article ...". I guess I shouldn't post so early in the morning.
  - yaseer 4y ago
    Funnily enough, my own dad had a quirky idiolect where he referred to every family member with 'the' definite article: 'The wife', 'The son', 'The daughter' etc. Your mistyping sent me down memory lane!
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I believe you mean the memory lane?
- anonu 4y ago
  We're in the "gig economy" now. Company men still exist, but they are rare.
camillomiller 4y ago
That is still better than promoting to management as a mean to increase compensation, which is kinda common in the EU tech scene and sucks big time. Unless the promoted people are humble enough and try to actually learn the new job, which in my experience is a rare occurrence.
Stratoscope 4y ago
My cousin George did exactly this. He started his career working the overnight shift at a regional bank in the lowest level position, sorting and processing checks. (Remember those?) When I asked him about it back then, his answer was a bit like Willie Sutton: "I want to learn how money works." Over the years he rose through the ranks, and a couple of mergers and acquisitions later, he became president of Wells Fargo!
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > My cousin George List of Wells Fargo presidents - Ransom M. Cook, 1962-1964 - H. Stephen Chase, 1964-1966 - Richard P. Cooley, 1966-1978 - Carl E. Reichardt, 1978-1984 - Paul Hazen, 1984-1995, 1997-1998 - Richard Kovacevich, 1998-2007 - John Stumpf, 2007-2016 - Timothy J. Sloan, 2016-2019 - C. Allen Parker (Interim), 2019-2019 - Charles Scharf, 2019-present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wells_Fargo_presidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wells_Fargo_presidents
  - oblio 4y ago
    :-))) "That student's name? Albert Einstein."
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      I was thinking maybe cousin George was president in 1996.
  - Stratoscope 4y ago
    Thank you for the fact check. George was president and regional chairman of Wells Fargo Oregon, and a Federal Reserve board member. In my Oregonian family we just thought of him as "president of Wells Fargo", thus my overstatement last night. In any case his story did have some parallels with the 100-year-old Brazilian: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Man+about+town-a075960746 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Man+about+town-a075960746 https://www.google.com/search?q=george+passadore+wells+fargo https://www.google.com/search?q=george+passadore+wells+fargo
pid-1 4y ago
My grandpa (also in Brazil) studied until he was 11. He started his carrer cleaning the floor of a store that sold radio equipment. Learned radio electronics, started fixing stuff for the store, was hired by an airline, travelled the country designing and fixing communication systems for airports. He had copies of technical books and manuals originally written in English, German and Japanese he translated himself. Everytime I see modern hiring pipelines I think why the fuck we don't believe in people anymore.
- oblio 4y ago
  The funky thing is that companies blaming it on "being hard to fire people". Even in the US, where many jobs are "at will employment", where people can just be fired on a moments notice...
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Have you ever been an employer or otherwise responsible for hiring/firing people? Even in "at will" states you'd be a moron to not dot your Is and cross your Ts. The cost of fending off a wrongful termination suit is high enough the wages you pay in the meantime are usually the sensible way to go even though a wrongful termination suit is not a sure thing while the wages are. The only people who can fire fast anymore are big national franchises who can incur the high up front cost of having a legal department figure out how to streamline the dotting and crossing process for their specific case.
- brnt 4y ago
  Learning on the job: it's cheaper to outsource that to (publicly funded) schooling/academia. Also, which co is actually keeping people for that long nowadays anymore?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    My response to the last is what if you don't train people and they stay anyway?
_trackno5 4y ago
> The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays. I call BS on that. Yes there's sometimes this pattern of favoring external hires, but most people nowadays are unwilling to just do the work and be patient. Especially in tech, most people switch jobs every few years to get a promo and salary bump. Everyone wants immediate results nowadays and end up with mediocre careers. I doubt people like the man in the article think like that.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > unwilling to just do the work and be patient. Especially in tech, most people switch jobs every few years to get a promo and salary bump" Capitalism for me but not for thee?
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Yes. The "MBAs" saw cost cutting in draining worker loyalty and workers have been catching up slowly since loyalty and hard work is a cultural phenomena. When the workers catched up strategy wise there was a lobbying push for STEM crisis, "good people are hard to come by" or lazyness. Instead of both way loyalty we see this push for "values" and cultural fit or what not. Very hallow compared to boring old 20 years of service. My former employer a 100 yo company had these old rules for gifts to employees that had stayed 10, 20, 30 and 40 years. It was like a joke nowadays when engineers hardly stayed 3 years, including me.
- nebulous_two 4y ago
  I don't know what rock you've been living under, but licking the boot and bring patient leads you to be stuck in the same position because "you're too valuable right where you are" for 33 years until the company gets restructured and you get laid off with nothing more than a "sorry!" before you could get your full retirement package.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Where is your proof that in tech your career is better if you stay at a place longer than a few years? That hasn’t been the case in a decade or more imo. People who stay at a place a long time are looked at suspiciously at being incapable of leaving.
mmcgaha 4y ago
It still happens at the company where I work. Of course it is a family owned business so they get to apply their own values without answering to outsiders.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
spicymaki 4y ago
Like everything there are pros and cons. If you only promote from within, you create a barrier for anyone wanting to join. This makes the culture conservative and fragile due to lack of change. Imagine if the only way to get a job is by starting in the mail room and working your way up to CEO. On the other hand, loyal workers who are treated right by the company, have a good chance of maintaining the company's values and strong relationships with customers.
oneoff786 4y ago
Many people are suggesting this is due to culture change. I think that’s wrong. The lat century was a period of intense growth which was coupled with growing headcounts. This century is growing much less, while tech is reducing headcounts across the board. And lowering skill requirements and skill acquisition on the job. A shipping assistant when Walter began probably did a lot more than a shipping assistant starting now. A baker machine operator too, potentially.
scarface74 4y ago
It’s not just that. Now the lower level jobs are often contracted out.
rospaya 4y ago
Gail Evans started as a janitor in Kodak in the 80s. She rose to the position of CTO. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...
banannaise 4y ago
I would argue that this is fundamentally fine, because "management" is itself a unique job with unique responsibilities... except for one problem. Managers are (almost) always paid significantly more than individual contributors, in every industry, and are given power over the employment prospects of those ICs. There is no inherent reason for this. Product owners and agile delivery leads (scrum masters) are both types of managers, but they don't have that power and they're not paid disproportionately to ICs. This relationship works really well! Why can't all management work this way?

Tepix 4y ago

Not necessarily. I encountered a coworker who retired after having worked for 50 years at the same company. He was not in management.

radu_floricica 4y ago

Well, hiring from outside is a solution to the Peter principle. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it has its justifications.

ftlio 4y ago
There is no solution to the Peter Principle. That's actually the thesis of the book. I'd argue that management that can't promote from within has likely already reached the position of their incompetence as well. There are lots of reasons and every situation varies, but my experience is that the reason people don't get promoted has way more to do with bad management than bad potential managers in the pool.

cperciva 4y ago

Part of this is due to the increased career-orientation of higher education. A century ago, someone could start in the mailroom and gradually learn how a company worked; maybe at some point they would take a night course in accounting or some similar business skill, but the vast majority of what senior management needed to know was learned from experience -- and experience at that company in particular. Now business undergraduate students don't just sit in classrooms learning about accounting practices and labour law; they're expected to study existing business, take co-op positions, and otherwise gain "real world" experience. A student graduating from a 4 year Undergraduate business program should know far more about business than someone who started in the mailroom 10 years ago. Meanwhile the other side of business schools -- research -- has also acted to reduce the advantage of gaining experience at any specific business. Researchers study successful businesses, learn what works, publish papers... and eventually teach it to their students. Whereas a century ago, businesses fundamentally did things in different ways, most large businesses follow the same general approaches to things, because those are what the PhDs say are the best ways of running a business. As a side effect, the experience someone gains in one company becomes far more transferable to another; for all that companies talk about getting "fresh ideas" from external hires, external hiring has increased because external hires are now less fresh than they used to be.

lordnacho 4y ago
I think it has to do with what people think university is. It used to be academic training, now it's seen as job training, and I'm not sure it's justified, having done time at a business school. Really, it's so different studying business to doing business there should be some sort of advertising standards label on the course description. So now people think that you need to have gone to university to work in ordinary shops, and it cuts out a huge swathe of people from certain jobs that they'd be totally fine at. Sales type jobs like this centenarian was doing is one of them, you really don't need a degree to do it, but now there's a gate.
411111111111111 4y ago
The biggest reason why promotions are becoming rare is because it actually isn't in the interest of the company to do them. If you're filling an opening by promotion you'll still have to find someone new to fill the position that has been vacated with that promotion: and now you've got 2 new people vs 1 when hiring from outside.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jwilber 4y ago

As one counter data point: Amazon has plenty of programs that promote people from warehouse roles into tech/corporate.

jolmg 4y ago

> The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally. This could also be a difference in the country's working culture. Not all countries need to be the same in this regard, and it may still be common to rise through promotions in Brazil. It could probably depend on other factors, like the industry, too.

noufalibrahim 4y ago

Can't say for sure but I think the industry and time has a lot to do here. My father is a mechanical engineer who worked for a well known plastics company in the early 70s. He had a technical supervisor who started as a casual labourer at the same company.The supervisor couldn't write and used a thumbprint instead of a signature. However, he could interpret and analyse the designs for the moulds very well and was highly respected for that. It was the reason he was promoted to that level from that of a labourer. Perhaps his illiteracy was the reason he didn't rise any higher but the fact that the company was able to recognise his skill in a certain area and promote him to a level where it could be completely utilised says something about management philosophy. Equally, his ability to teach himself technical skills to be useful without a formal education says a lot about him too.

gambiting 4y ago

Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi - hire early, usually before people even finish uni, and then get them up through the ladder. It promotes career growth, loyality, personal development and job satisfaction - I'm literally surrounded by people who have been here for 15+ years(29 is the record currently) - personally I'm at 8 years, went from intern to junior to intermediate to senior to lead in that time, and I have no plans on going anywhere really. >>I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. That's absolutely not the case for us, in fact I'm struggling to think of examples when this happened recently.

orthoxerox 4y ago
> Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi Interesting, because the public perception of gamedev companies is opposite: "hire-crunch-downsize-repeat"
- gambiting 4y ago
  Because it's true for a lot of places. We do have an extremely strong anti-crunch culture and value work life balance a lot. In those 8 years here I worked maybe like.....2 weeks of overtime? Around launch of one of our biggest games, I stayed in longer to make sure things were running smoothly. But like outside of that? 8am till 4pm every day. Never worked weekends or anything like that, and I don't know anyone who has. (well, that's not strictly true - I know from those old timers that 20 years ago that was pretty much bread and butter and people lived in the office more or less. But that was before I ever started here).
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    Which company? I mean if you say so good things about your employer, I guess it won’t get angry of you naming it :)

varjag 4y ago

This is skewed a lot by webdev shop stats, where average tenure never exceeds the prime time of an average JS framework.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
While this is true - there's a lot of "magpie developers" out there that will jump ship before they have to live with the consequences of their own technology decisions - there's other factors at play as well, like changes in management (because they too want to move up the ladder) or corporate reorganizations. I once worked for a company - a big bank - that during a three year stint did three reorganizations, forcing every team to work as scrum, then in devops teams. They forced the 'old timers', people in their fifties and sixties who had been working there for all their life, to learn Java and to reapply for a job. And for the project I worked on, the original was built in Flex but that didn't work on the new ipads at the time. We rebuilt it in Backbone, then Angular came out and we slowly transitioned to that one - that took nearly two years all told. Then some new CTO came around, an ex-googler so of course his words weighed more heavily, who Decided everything should be rebuilt in Polymer. Of course, right when they were almost finished with making their existing Polymer components work with v2, they introduced v3 and lit-html and everything was Different again. Gee, switching to experimental software has Issues, who would've thought? But it's proven technology because McDonalds used it in their menu screens. Sigh. Anyway, that's the kinda thing that will make people walk out as well.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Reminds me of the eternal sage of the Duke Nukem follow up. First their own 3D engine - then a version of the Doom engine which they needed to "improve" - then Unreal - then by the time the game was close to done Unreal shipped a major upgrade which they needed to "upgrade" to.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
So have you heard of JQuery Plus ???.

dugmartin 4y ago

The dad started as a draftsman apprentice at the phone company when he was 19. He retired at 52 as the Director of Engineering for Illinois at the same phone company (after turning down more promotion offers in this mid 40s as he didn't want to move again). He never went to college. He loved his job until the early 1980s when, as he said, "the MBAs took over". The company took care of its employees before that, promoting from within and thinking long term. One of his final "fights with the MBAs" was their idea to replace the company apprentice linemen program with contractors as it would move costs around and look better on the balance sheet. He told me he stood up in a high level meeting and asked something like "do you think you could get contractors to come out in the middle of the night in a storm and climb on a pole to help restore service? What about 20 years from now, who is going to teach the apprentices then?". He was a "company man" and I think he was both happy and sad to retire after nearly 35 years of service when those same MBAs offered a buyout for executives like him.

dugmartin 4y ago
Post frozen edit correction: I just realized I started this with "The dad" instead of "My dad". I originally had a couple of sentences starting with "The article ...". I guess I shouldn't post so early in the morning.
- yaseer 4y ago
  Funnily enough, my own dad had a quirky idiolect where he referred to every family member with 'the' definite article: 'The wife', 'The son', 'The daughter' etc. Your mistyping sent me down memory lane!
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I believe you mean the memory lane?
anonu 4y ago
We're in the "gig economy" now. Company men still exist, but they are rare.

camillomiller 4y ago

That is still better than promoting to management as a mean to increase compensation, which is kinda common in the EU tech scene and sucks big time. Unless the promoted people are humble enough and try to actually learn the new job, which in my experience is a rare occurrence.

Stratoscope 4y ago

My cousin George did exactly this. He started his career working the overnight shift at a regional bank in the lowest level position, sorting and processing checks. (Remember those?) When I asked him about it back then, his answer was a bit like Willie Sutton: "I want to learn how money works." Over the years he rose through the ranks, and a couple of mergers and acquisitions later, he became president of Wells Fargo!

dotancohen 4y ago
> My cousin George List of Wells Fargo presidents - Ransom M. Cook, 1962-1964 - H. Stephen Chase, 1964-1966 - Richard P. Cooley, 1966-1978 - Carl E. Reichardt, 1978-1984 - Paul Hazen, 1984-1995, 1997-1998 - Richard Kovacevich, 1998-2007 - John Stumpf, 2007-2016 - Timothy J. Sloan, 2016-2019 - C. Allen Parker (Interim), 2019-2019 - Charles Scharf, 2019-present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wells_Fargo_presidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wells_Fargo_presidents
- oblio 4y ago
  :-))) "That student's name? Albert Einstein."
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    I was thinking maybe cousin George was president in 1996.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  Thank you for the fact check. George was president and regional chairman of Wells Fargo Oregon, and a Federal Reserve board member. In my Oregonian family we just thought of him as "president of Wells Fargo", thus my overstatement last night. In any case his story did have some parallels with the 100-year-old Brazilian: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Man+about+town-a075960746 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Man+about+town-a075960746 https://www.google.com/search?q=george+passadore+wells+fargo https://www.google.com/search?q=george+passadore+wells+fargo

pid-1 4y ago

My grandpa (also in Brazil) studied until he was 11. He started his carrer cleaning the floor of a store that sold radio equipment. Learned radio electronics, started fixing stuff for the store, was hired by an airline, travelled the country designing and fixing communication systems for airports. He had copies of technical books and manuals originally written in English, German and Japanese he translated himself. Everytime I see modern hiring pipelines I think why the fuck we don't believe in people anymore.

oblio 4y ago
The funky thing is that companies blaming it on "being hard to fire people". Even in the US, where many jobs are "at will employment", where people can just be fired on a moments notice...
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Have you ever been an employer or otherwise responsible for hiring/firing people? Even in "at will" states you'd be a moron to not dot your Is and cross your Ts. The cost of fending off a wrongful termination suit is high enough the wages you pay in the meantime are usually the sensible way to go even though a wrongful termination suit is not a sure thing while the wages are. The only people who can fire fast anymore are big national franchises who can incur the high up front cost of having a legal department figure out how to streamline the dotting and crossing process for their specific case.
brnt 4y ago
Learning on the job: it's cheaper to outsource that to (publicly funded) schooling/academia. Also, which co is actually keeping people for that long nowadays anymore?
- bluGill 4y ago
  My response to the last is what if you don't train people and they stay anyway?

_trackno5 4y ago

> The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays. I call BS on that. Yes there's sometimes this pattern of favoring external hires, but most people nowadays are unwilling to just do the work and be patient. Especially in tech, most people switch jobs every few years to get a promo and salary bump. Everyone wants immediate results nowadays and end up with mediocre careers. I doubt people like the man in the article think like that.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> unwilling to just do the work and be patient. Especially in tech, most people switch jobs every few years to get a promo and salary bump" Capitalism for me but not for thee?
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Yes. The "MBAs" saw cost cutting in draining worker loyalty and workers have been catching up slowly since loyalty and hard work is a cultural phenomena. When the workers catched up strategy wise there was a lobbying push for STEM crisis, "good people are hard to come by" or lazyness. Instead of both way loyalty we see this push for "values" and cultural fit or what not. Very hallow compared to boring old 20 years of service. My former employer a 100 yo company had these old rules for gifts to employees that had stayed 10, 20, 30 and 40 years. It was like a joke nowadays when engineers hardly stayed 3 years, including me.
nebulous_two 4y ago
I don't know what rock you've been living under, but licking the boot and bring patient leads you to be stuck in the same position because "you're too valuable right where you are" for 33 years until the company gets restructured and you get laid off with nothing more than a "sorry!" before you could get your full retirement package.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Where is your proof that in tech your career is better if you stay at a place longer than a few years? That hasn’t been the case in a decade or more imo. People who stay at a place a long time are looked at suspiciously at being incapable of leaving.

mmcgaha 4y ago

It still happens at the company where I work. Of course it is a family owned business so they get to apply their own values without answering to outsiders.

deleted 4y ago

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spicymaki 4y ago

Like everything there are pros and cons. If you only promote from within, you create a barrier for anyone wanting to join. This makes the culture conservative and fragile due to lack of change. Imagine if the only way to get a job is by starting in the mail room and working your way up to CEO. On the other hand, loyal workers who are treated right by the company, have a good chance of maintaining the company's values and strong relationships with customers.

oneoff786 4y ago

Many people are suggesting this is due to culture change. I think that’s wrong. The lat century was a period of intense growth which was coupled with growing headcounts. This century is growing much less, while tech is reducing headcounts across the board. And lowering skill requirements and skill acquisition on the job. A shipping assistant when Walter began probably did a lot more than a shipping assistant starting now. A baker machine operator too, potentially.

scarface74 4y ago

It’s not just that. Now the lower level jobs are often contracted out.

rospaya 4y ago

Gail Evans started as a janitor in Kodak in the 80s. She rose to the position of CTO. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...

banannaise 4y ago

I would argue that this is fundamentally fine, because "management" is itself a unique job with unique responsibilities... except for one problem. Managers are (almost) always paid significantly more than individual contributors, in every industry, and are given power over the employment prospects of those ICs. There is no inherent reason for this. Product owners and agile delivery leads (scrum masters) are both types of managers, but they don't have that power and they're not paid disproportionately to ICs. This relationship works really well! Why can't all management work this way?