
The McDonald’s Quotient - pavornyoh
http://themacro.com/articles/2015/12/the-mcdonalds-quotient/
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grandalf
Ironically most of the "out of touch" high achievers have just managed to
avoid the misfortune of having to waste moments of their life in menial
servitude to some big corporation in exchange for a disgracefully low wage.

The experience is dehumanizing, and I have a hard time buying into the idea
that having that experience benefits all but the least empathetic people.

One is likely to come out of such a mechanized experience 1) never wanting to
eat the food there again, 2) having committed theft or graft by giving
freebies to friends and acquaintances, or 3) feeling like an insignificant
cog.

Much of success has to do with believing you are right in spite of others'
doubts, and seeing the world in a novel way. In my opinion, oppressive
institutional environments crush those aspects of people... Poverty and
financial desperation crushes them too. Both force a kind of mental toil and
constant stress.

So I'd advise a young person to perhaps find a way to do a job like that for
about a week to gain that empathy and then never look back. The soul is
enriched by addressing high quality problems, not low quality ones like
someone in a hurry who wants french fries that need to be carried from the
machine to the drive-up window.

~~~
jheriko
have you worked such jobs yourself? i'd guess not from the tone and content...

... there is a lot of value in learning to be common. you might also come out
of such experiences with 4) an understanding of day-to-day terms that prevent
you from giving away your origins in conversation, 5) good friends who will
bring joy to your life long after you leave the job, 6) understanding the
benefits of speaking up at the right time in an oppressive environment, 7)
understanding how privileged people with desk jobs are etc. etc...

~~~
grandalf
Those are valid points. There is a lot to learn from any job, I think it's
just a question of how quickly you learn those things and start to stagnate...
Stagnation happens in any job, and becoming friends with coworkers also can
happen in any job.

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rezashirazian
"[Mcdonald coefficient] In Silicon Valley and the larger startup and VC
investing world, I often find that it’s surprisingly low, or even non-
existent." Source?

That was a self congratulating article filled with cynical judgments on people
the author doesn't really know.

Many successful and wealthy people come from humble beginnings. Even many of
the people I know who were well off since birth, do have their share of
working in low wage industries. In Canada where the author is from, you cannot
graduate from high school without 30 hours of work experience which will most
likely be in "blue collar" industries. This is way before your shinny degree

This is in fact one of my favourite attributes of the American Culture and
perhaps the main reason why US leads economically around the world. Work is
valued and is not beneath anyone.

~~~
xiaoma
>>"I often find that ..."

>Source?

His personal experience, clearly

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xyzzy4
I worked at a Regal Cinema when I was 16 for a year, so I guess that counts.
There was a lot of monotony, but the experience still managed to be relatively
interesting for my younger self. And I got to participate in a different
social circle outside of my school.

My favorite times were cleaning out the theaters with the other guys, who were
slightly older and would sometimes discuss abandoned houses they wanted to
explore. And I remember optimizing how to rip and count movie tickets, having
authority over who can go into the theaters, coordinating with other
employees, counting inventory. The endless minutes I waited for the clock to
slowly tick forwards so I could leave... It was a very memorable experience.
In a strange way I kind of miss it.

It's kind of funny how the amount of money I made there over a year is like a
stock market fluctuation over a single day now.

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stillsut
"majority of entry level jobs didn’t hire people who looked like the people I
worked with. At McDonalds there were people with disabilities, overweight
people, people who weren’t conventionally attractive, people that couldn’t
speak much English, young teenagers, and a lot of racial diversity." [0]

But the above quote doesn't really work for Starbucks. They hire the
acceptable people, people that would seem at home on a college campus - as
students or as teaching assistance.

I'd say _that 's_ your opportunity (and something you didn't express well in
your essay). That there are people who are good workers but wouldn't pass the
conventional smell test at more artisinal entry level jobs. Your online
application can filter the worker that "has it together" from a work history
and appearance that would suggest otherwise.

[0] [https://medium.com/@katenorquay/what-i-learned-
from-4-years-...](https://medium.com/@katenorquay/what-i-learned-from-4-years-
working-at-mcdonalds-f278ad27faee#.6ochagagq)

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abraae
We're in this industry too, and I believe the HR/talent management/recruitment
space is potentially huge and still nascent.

But after going to your web site and clicking "start hiring now", I'm afraid
that I too don't get it. Unless I'm overlooking it, the site is entirely
content free as to how/what your product actually does.

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rtpg
super pedantic but the coloquial usage of "working class" is not "middle
class", but lower-earning wage brackets.

Even more OT but there's a pretty interesting study about how something like
80% of Americans think they're middle class when they're much poorer (or
richer, sometimes) than the median household income.

Which gets you to the slightly absurd WSJ inforgraphic that showed a "Middle
Class family" with $150k of income...

~~~
kbenson
There's a lot of conceptual baggage that comes with the term "middle class",
which makes it non-trivial for people to agree on. For example, is home-
ownership important to being considered middle class? If so, how does any
median income number make sense when there are areas where entry-level houses
cost 3-4 times what they do in other areas? Cost of living is different in
different areas. It's very easy to feel middle class with $150k a year in
income when you work it out and find that after all expenses (mortgage, non-
obscene car payments, utilities, insurance, food) you have a few hundred
dollars each month to do with as you like, and you can live semi-comfortably,
or you can save, but doing both doesn't seem to be in the cards. The common
refrain of "move somewhere cheaper" doesn't look all that appetizing when it
also means a massive pay-cut, and moving away from all friends and family.

So, can a person that makes $150k actually be middle class? I think so.
There's so much more than just salary that goes into it.

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jheriko
this guy is clearly not very good at explaining things. even though he says a
lot of stuff here there is nothing to substantiate why - specifically, he
didn't really explain why this potential investor having not worked a normal
job in his life was preventing him from understanding what the deal was.

i agree with the sentiment, but it seems much more likely that the author is
actually terrible at explaining things.

~~~
robhunter
Thanks for the feedback :)

One challenge of writing an article for a large audience is trying to keep
things brief. Since I wasn't really writing about the investor experience - I
was writing about tech having a blind spot for the way a giant part of America
lives - I didn't want to spend too much time on the investor anecdote.

A more detailed way to explain it would have been that the investor absolutely
"got what we did" \- it really isn't that complicated.

But at the same time, he didn't "GET IT" \- he didn't grasp the massive
opportunity in front of us (millions of brick-and-mortar retail locations with
no HR technology in place, 75 million hourly workers having to put up with
terrible online applications, etc), or why what we've built is so useful for
our specific market - and I think that's reflective of a larger blind spot in
technology for this slice of the world.

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princeb
not related but I noticed this website is ridiculously fast to load.

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lefnlkewf
It's funny how we've let success become something for rich people.

But hey, as long as I self-sacrifice to make sure that the wealthy can create
more jobs, the good karma will eventually come back to me, right?

