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I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see thro

• Ekaros 4y ago
  I think a week in warehouse might do good for them. Or as delivery driving...
  • wodenokoto 4y ago
    I worked at a small (in Amazon scale - still the largest in the country) home grocery delivery service and everyone pre corona had to spend their 2 first weeks in the warehouse. Everyone had done it, including managers and c-level
    • richiebful1 4y ago
      I figure that's a much better place to work than an Amazon warehouse then?
      • kube-system 4y ago
        The couple of people I personally know that have worked at Amazon warehouses says they're pretty well ran in comparison to other warehouses. And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny. Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.
  • brentm 4y ago
    Historically I think they all did around the Christmas rush but probably not so much any more.
    • happymellon 4y ago
      In the UK I did some work with HMV doing Dev work on their stock systems. Similar situation where they would send everyone in the company to work in the store, so you would actually use the system you've developed in the real world and understand why everyone always hates the software.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    They want them to understand customer frustrations, not employee devastation. Plus, make the C-suite realize how they treat the "lowest" employees of the company and they might not want to work there anymore, have to tread carefully there.
    • _aaed 4y ago
      Ignorance is bliss, very mature strategy
  • dataviz1000 4y ago
    My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the restaurant that hired me when I was 17 as a dishwasher was also one of the most prestigious restaurants in California in the early 90s which lead to years cooking in Michelin Star restaurants. Good advice.
    • harimau777 4y ago
      Reminds me of something that my father told me: "Always be nice to nurses and janitors. Nurses run hospitals. Janitors run buildings. Secretaries run offices."
      • ksec 4y ago
        It is basically the bottom half of the triangle that runs everything, anything else are mostly management.
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        Right. In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc. A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.
    • methodin 4y ago
      Can you elaborate a bit on how the dishwasher role gets the restaurant out of jams?
      • germinalphrase 4y ago
        Can’t cook if your tools aren’t clean?
  • makestuff 4y ago
    Jeff Wilke (former ceo of amazon retail) used to do that during Q4 peak. It was also pretty common for engineering teams to signup to do a day in the FC so they could see what it was like. Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
• newsclues 4y ago
  It also helps leadership understand employee frustrations, which translates into improved customer experience.
• zvonimirs 4y ago
  Absolutely! And that's what leaders should be doing.
• dobladov 4y ago
  In this documentary about Kawasaki, they also mention that everyone has to expend some time in the production line, it seems like a great way to motivate your engineers to improve the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg32DlveFiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg32DlveFiE
• dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  IIRC McDonalds still does this for some subset of its corporate workforce.
  • dataengineer56 4y ago
    I know of several restaurant chains who do this - it's seen as very important for restaurant head office workers to understand exactly how the restaurants work and the problems that they experience.
  • kotaKat 4y ago
    And depending on the franchise owner, could also be the franchise. My first McJob was at an owner-operated McDonalds where the owner would roll in at lunch on a Saturday in his BMW Z4, see the lunch rush, wash his hands, throw on some gloves, and call out to turn on the other side of the grill for assembly and start packing orders himself on that side to help out the workload. Gained a lot of respect as an impressionable young adult on what a good leader looks like at that job because his efforts trickled down to his store manager and the managers underneath them.
    • screwturner68 4y ago
      I don't know if it's still the case but you used to have to go to Hamburger U before you could own a McD's so you knew how to do the job. I actually see it all the time and you can always tell who the owner is, instead of some really uninterested 17 year old you get a middle aged man in a pressed (insert fast food name) polo who is super happy to take your order.
      • greedo 4y ago
        HU is still mandatory, though I didn't feel it was that challenging. A lot of rote memorization basically.
    • greedo 4y ago
      Our Owner/operator was a former bicycle salesman who knew hot fries, and that was it. I wouldn't say he was hands off (he insisted that I violate civil rights/labor laws may he rot in hell), but he really didn't understand much more than squeezing out every penny. The worst thing was that Ray Kroc's wife live in the next town over and routinely came through our drive thru. Once the lot was being re-surfaced and she was royally pissed that the drive thru was closed and she had to come inside and mingle with the hoi polloi.
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoying manual billing process that's error prone or looking up customer information by logging into 5 different systems. Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
  • thenipper 4y ago
    When i started at Shopify we had to setup a store and do some customer support. It was a great way to understand the product, especially since my role wasn't going to be customer facing at all.
  • jackson1442 4y ago
    This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.
    • wincy 4y ago
      When I worked for a large logistics company we’d have a few days a year where we’d go downstairs and shadow someone using our software. It was very informative. The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information. It was very eye opening.
      • sebzim4500 4y ago
        >The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information. That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onboarding.
• gitfan86 4y ago
  The main reason you do this is to weed out executives who are mostly interested in the prestige. People like that are much more likely to be good at shifting the blame for problems than actually fixing or preventing problems.
• TheDesolate0 4y ago
  [dead]
• setgree 4y ago
  as always, Silicon Valley covered/predicted this https://www.vulture.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-4-episode-2.html https://www.vulture.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-... > “You’re doing what Bob Iger does at Disney!” Jack tells Gavin. “He makes every manager wear the Goofy suit one day out of the year.”
• codyb 4y ago
  That's what I asked my boss to do for me. Pair me with someone using our tool so they can ask me to do real world tasks and see how I can handle it. Should be later this month. And will try to do one session every month or so.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• screwturner68 4y ago
  The issue in my opinion is their day or two on the job really doesn't give them a good picture of what's going on. Sure they might see a few things but they could just as easily be an anomaly as they could be systemic. I wish upper management that are brought in from the outside would be required to work a month or two in the field and live on those wages. For example at Starbucks in the 2 days he works he might see that the espresso machine is getting loaded wrong 40% of the time slowing up the line. Seeing this he might go back to the mothership and decide everyone using the espresso machine needs more training to reduce the failures. What he is missing is that there are supposed to be three people working not two and the person making espresso is working his fifth double shift this week because the wages are so low they can't pay their rent and is making errors because he's tired. He would have also missed that the manager had sent a worker home that day and the day before because it wasn't busy and the manager wanted to improve his margins. He also missed the next day when it was really busy that same manager was demanding that an employee on their day off come in and work because they were busy and if they didn't come in they would be fired (leaving them even more short of people and creating more delays). It's like a person who fasts for 24h saying they know what it's like to be starving. If you really want to see what's going on a day or two simply won't cut it you need some time for things to sink in and if you don't know what's really going on how can you run a business properly?
  • flappyeagle 4y ago
    You’re making a lot of assumptions about how dumb he will be. Like you think he will just overfit on every detail instead of asking the store manager or employees about what he experienced? You think he will not work in more than one store, in more than one geography? Cmon man.
    • quacked 4y ago
      Honestly I think you're making as many assumptions as the parent commenter--I agree you're right that the portrayal of the exec is really biased towards assuming stupidity, but it really depends on the quality of the executive and the people that hired them. It's completely possible to get a total dumbass, and also possible to get a genius.
• maxk42 4y ago
  I would believe that's the case if Narasimhan were working a full shift, but he's only working half a shift once a month. At that point why bother? What are you going to learn in 4 hours a month where all the employees are on their best behavior and the store is made immaculate prior to your arrival?
  • naniwaduni 4y ago
    What are you going to learn on a full shit that you won't learn at least half as well on half a shift?
• MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  I have a dumb question related to this. The new Starbucks CEO is Laxman Narasimhan. Google says he's worth about $20m. The previous Starbucks CEO was Howard Schultz. He's worth about $3.7b Can somebody who is worth between $20m and $3.7b really just... hang out broad daylight behind a counter at a Starbucks from a security perspective? Obviously I get the gap between $20m (he's just starting out, I'm sure his net worth will grow to at least $50m shortly if he does well at Starbucks) and $3.7b is huge. But at what point is going outside (without security? where people know you will be?) kind of a risk?
  • alexanderchr 4y ago
    There are very few people in the US that need security to walk outside just because of their net value.
  • glasss 4y ago
    I think you're overestimating the danger of being outside.
  • takinola 4y ago
    What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? There are lots of very rich people walking around in public all day long with little ill effects? The most you can get by robbing him is the stuff he has in his wallet, which is pretty much going to be similar to someone with a much lower net worth. If you walk around in Palo Alto, you will likely bump into a billionaire or two on a typical day.
    • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      > What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? If I was worth $3b (like the previous Starbucks CEO), I'd be worried about being held up at gunpoint/abducted/held hostage for ransom. I am lead to believe Tim Cook doesn't just walk around like you and I?
  • snowwrestler 4y ago
    CEOs of major corporations have private security details and they will undoubtedly be part of the planning and execution of this project.
• Tiktaalik 4y ago
  If they were paid the minimum wage too it might drive home a greater understanding of their employees as well, though unfortunately the large existing bank accounts of the CEOs ensures that any lesson that might come with that small paycheque is not likely to sink in.