
Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked - adwmayer
https://www.fastcompany.com/90219582/this-company-hired-anyone-who-applied-now-its-starting-a-movement
======
ChuckMcM
The key is the onboarding program. Bakeries are nice, they have a range of
jobs that go from very simple (sweeping up and cleaning) to very complex
(scheduling different products for baking). If you have that range you can
absorb a lot of different people.

That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how
janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting
firm, this is very relevant. There _are_ a lot of jobs at even a high tech
company like Google or Apple that could be filled by someone with a high
school degree and nominal fine motor skills, but those jobs are currently
firewalled behind a general contracting company. That perversely misaligns the
end employees motivations and the company motivations.

It was interesting to me to see the remnants of a system like this at IBM
which had 10 "bands" of employment level, where band 1 was janitor level, and
band 10 was principle engineer/senior manager type level. But it seemed like
these days they only used bands 6 - 10 because that was where 'entry level
engineer' started (band 6). Many if not all of the jobs in the lower bands
were outsourced as far as I could tell. And a lot eliminated when they sold
off factories or other parts of the business that had a lot of technician
level labor.

I will be interesting to see if we could get back to a more reasonable way of
managing these things.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-
risi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-
inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html)

~~~
Retric
A significant potion of this is an end run around immigration law. Cleaning
companies need to compete with companies willing to employ illegal immigrants
for very low wages which drives down the costs below what companies like IBM
would pay people.

Change some of these loopholes and the outsourcing overhead becomes far more
significant. Though employing large numbers of part time workers works better
at scale so the practice has some advantages.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I have heard variants on this as well but haven't seen any actual data or
research that supports this notion. If you come across any I'd be interested
in reading that.

There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company
and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who
do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal
department I'm pretty sure they run audits on any company they employ to
insure they comply will all laws (they are _really_ fussy about that stuff).
In the New York Times article the Apple contract janitors weren't illegals
either just under paid.

Now the 'gig' economy? Sure. People who hire day laborers from the parking lot
of the home improvement store? No question. But running a contracting
business? I've not seen anything that backs up that assertion, and certainly
nothing that is 'significant.'

~~~
lliamander
Well, in some states it is illegal to ask a potential employee about their
citizenship status.

There are definitely industries in which hiring (suspected, but very likely)
illegal immigrants is standard practice.

~~~
ChuckMcM
In _all US states_ you are required to fill out an I-9 form if you are hired.
That form requires that you "prove" to your employer that you have a legal
right to work in the United States and you are required to provide a valid
Social Security number or Tax ID number.

If you fail to do that, you violate the Immigration Reform and Control Act
(IRCA) which was passed in 1986 and subjects the business to fines, penalties,
potentially the loss of business licenses and prosecution under the RICO act.

~~~
lliamander
And it's not uncommon (in certain states, in certain industries) for forged
identities to be used. As I understand it, so long as the SSN is "valid" and
goes with the name provided, employers don't (and possibly can't, legally
speaking) go beyond that.

------
aturley
I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it
work you'd need:

1\. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks
succeed. 2\. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they
aren't working out.

I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring
processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.

~~~
teilo
You forgot #3: A company with a lot of cash, and a lot of time to waste.

I really don't think this can work. Whenever we post for a position, I get
flooded with a bunch of garbage resumes from people who barely have an idea
what programming is. We have work to do, and deadlines. We literally can't
afford to turn ourselves into a technical training school.

~~~
andrewla
The idea here seems like it would be best suited to a working environment that
has a deep pipeline, from unskilled to semi-skilled to skilled or specialized
workers. People can be hired unconditionally to the unskilled pool, from which
they can move up to the higher tiers either through training (either
internally or externally) or through natural ability.

A bakery, like in this example, seems like it could pull this off, since
janitorial work at a bakery is straightforward but unlikely something you'd
want to subcontract, and presents a natural place to interact with other
workers in more specialized positions, through management or through learning
more.

In software this is more difficult, because there's no longer a pipeline for
things like data entry, assembly, or basic IT support (traditional inroads),
especially at a smaller company, much less janitorial or food prep work that
presents an opportunity to advance.

I think the hidden cost here, though, is that progression from one stage to
another starts to resemble interviewing at a new company, with all the same
biases and problems that result from hiring processes in general, with the
possible exception that there's more direct information on personality and
work ethic that can feed into the pipeline (for better or worse).

~~~
le-mark
A lot of companies used to actually do this. Let the mail room or call center
people apply for the cobol training program and become developers. It's
unheard of today for obvious reasons (a lot more demand for high skilled jobs
makes it easy to get training and leave).

~~~
jacquesm
> Let the mail room or call center people apply for the cobol training program
> and become developers.

That is _exactly_ my story ('85 or thereabouts), with the added caveat that I
didn't learn anything from the Cobol training program. The bank where I worked
did not even have a way for mailroom people to get into IT, it was mostly
because they got sick of my continued applications to IT jobs for which they
though I wasn't qualified that I got the chance to do the course (with the
qualifier that if I didn't succeed they never wanted to see me again).

So, I passed (and was the quickest person to complete the course) and ended up
making a very rapid career in the IT department and after that started my own
company.

Some observations:

\- the entry level IT job paid four times as much as what the mail room job
did

\- work went from 5:30 am to 2 pm to 9'ish to 4'ish (ish because nobody ever
checked who appeared when and when they left again whereas in the mailroom
attendance was very strictly policed)

\- in the mailroom you felt part of critical infrastructure, in IT there was
zero pressure to perform

\- bringing the mailroom attitude ('let's get some work done') to the IT
department was not appreciated by the rest of the department

\- the mailroom had zero office politics, if you stepped out of line you would
get chewed out and that would be that, by comparison the IT department was a
huge web of intrigue, and quite a few of the people there were downright mean
and backstabbing each other all the time

\- the mailroom was all guys, the IT department had exactly two women
programmers on a total crew of about 120, the only other woman was a secretary
to the head of IT

\- There were a few talented people there but on the whole the talent level
was rather low, but they were big on process and that really helped to get
stuff out the door

------
barry-cotter
> People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go
> through a 10-month job training and life-skills course. Around half the
> people who begin an apprenticeship choose to complete it and stay at
> Greyston, and when they do, they’re then assigned an entry-level job–working
> the mixing machines or overseeing the slicing and packaging of different-
> sized brownies for distribution.

They pay minimum wage to the apprentices. I can see how a system like that
would work. Just being able to show up and do the bare minimum to pass the
apprenticeship period is more than an awful lot of low skill workers are
capable of, whether due to life circumstances, low conscientiousness or other
characteristics that make keeping a job difficult. The population of job
seekers for badly paid, low skill jobs is full of the unemployable.

[https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/who-wants-the-
job/](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/who-wants-the-job/)

~~~
pc86
Who is TheZvi and why should we care about what he's talking about? Especially
when the about page is still the default WP about page...

------
ilovetux
As a felon myself working in tech, I find this attitude refreshing. It could
work in IT...but would require significant changes to how things currently
work. I can't say for sure whether it would be worth it to restructure entire
organizations to benefit the disenfranchised, but my instincts are telling me
that it would add a reddish hue to the bottom line and thus is unlikely to be
adopted.

I do think that this sort of attitude could add value and blacken the bottom
line if applied to many other types of industries (eg. construction,
manufacturing, machining, food service and much more).

~~~
munchbunny
I suspect with IT you run into a general trust issue, since IT often operates
in an information-privileged environment.

I would love to see better tools and technical infrastructure for requiring
authorization to touch sensitive data, so that people in companies can operate
with access to "the information you need but no more." Something like that
would both protect customer privacy and de-risk hiring at the entry levels.

It would most definitely make getting access to data tougher for lots of
people, but as engineers who are often handling customer data, I think it's a
generally more responsible (ethics-wise) approach.

~~~
ilovetux
> so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you
> need but no more."

I think SELinux addresses this problem pretty well, but there is no real
requirement to give access to developers for a production database when a
development database could be setup with test data. I'm not arguing that this
is a great idea for IT, but trust has been an issue from the beginning and
there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality.

~~~
munchbunny
> there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality

I think you raise a good point. If I were to phrase my wish better, I think it
comes down to your implication that "varying degrees of quality" means some
solutions do the job better (like SELinux) and some that do it worse. The more
work it takes, the more you end up with startups where everyone has the
passwords to the production database because it's just easier operationally.
But when you do that, then you start to get into institutionalized risks like
Uber employees stalking exes. I'm well aware that this is a case of
engineering a solution to cover the 0.01% case, but when it comes to sensitive
data, you're usually guarding against a tiny number of bad actors who could do
a lot of damage.

As an example, let's say you want certain developers to have access to non-
sensitive parts of a Postgres database, and you want to be able to temporarily
authorize developers with worthy exceptions to touch sensitive data, and you
want to leave an audit trail. Let's say you're doing it this way because of
HIPAA. It's currently a pain to do, and you'll have to write a bunch of
automation to make it work. Now let's say you also have some S3 stores or ETL
pipelines using Kinesis, and you have potentially sensitive data in there too.
In the ideal case, you could manage the roles and groups and elevations in a
more central place, federate those identities over to the Postgres cluster,
SSH permissions, etc. That way data and privacy controls could actually be
lightweight, which I think would be an overall win for the industry.

~~~
ilovetux
I understand your argument and have heard it first-hand, but from my
standpoint (a felon working in IT) I usually push for a workable and sensible
security posture because I do not want any more access than I need.

A non-felon might not share my (perhaps) paranoid view, but I have a family
now and need to pointedly avoid any possible controversy or scandal especially
related to security and access. To that end, I feel the need to push for
sensible and workable solutions.

------
tessi3r
If pay started at $10 per hour and you had an incredible amount of staff to
find actually talented people, this is maybe a bad idea. If you thought you'd
"disrupt" hiring at your small company this could be a solid company-ending
idea...

------
tareqak
A choice quote from the article:

> People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go
> through a 10-month job training and life-skills course.

I found the part about life-skills pretty interesting. I have long thought
that occupations keep specializing and populations keep growing the way the
have, that some people will no doubt miss out learning about things that
others may take for granted / learn from their own life experience.

------
bluedino
The companies who hire illegal immigrants do essentially the same thing. No
background check (how could they) or drug test. They just shuffle people in,
pay them minimum wage, and they if they mess up or quit showing up they just
find some more people off the street. Just bodies to do low-skill, low-paying
work.

------
nathanaldensr
Can we not replicate click-bait headlines on HN?

~~~
pure-awesome
Is it really click-bait, though? The title seems to pretty accurately describe
the contents of the article.

~~~
ainiriand
The title should tell us which company did what in order to know if we are
interested or not.

~~~
d0lph
If they don't mention a name in the title it's probably not someone big.

