I remember when this story(the lie) was first circulating there was one thing that didn't really make sense to me, although the person who said they created it took inspiration from hispanic foods he grew up eating, flamin' hot cheetos has a cayenne flavor which to me reminds me of the US south and Tabasco sauce and nothing like anything anything from Mexico(besides that its spicy).
Right, but the pepper is the key ingredient in Tabasco sauce. It's like saying a soy-based sauce invented in the US is "nothing like anything anything from China" when soy sauce originated there.
Follow the incentives! Which option has more opportunity for the lizard brain to feel good watching the number in the top right go up?
There is much more opportunity to earn virtue points with a rags to riches story (regardless of the truth of the story) because it naturally breeds all sorts of "this could never happen at BigCo" contrarian take which then lends itself to all sorts of tropes and anecdotes about perverse HR policies, evil capitalists, inept bureaucracies, internal politics, team churn, etc, etc. There are tons more virtue points up for grabs in that type of circle jerk than there are in response to an article that debunks the story.
When I had a corporate job, I wrote a proposal and a new manager essentially took credit for it and botched the implementation so badly I didn't want my name associated with it.
Life frequently looks like Pinky and the Brain where who really did what is unclear.
> The Times spoke with 20 people who worked at the Frito-Lay divisions responsible for new product development 32 years ago, when Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were first extruded into existence. None recalls anything like the episode Montañez describes taking place.
I could have sworn there was a submission with comments. I can't find it.
Maybe I'm misremembering that.
¯_ (ツ)_/¯
Edit: There's also a phenomenon known as lying. I've seen underprivileged people hurt by more "reliable, upstanding" sorts taking advantage of the other's lack of credibility.
Last, group think is a thing. Everyone agrees X is the truth, they all swear that's the truth.
My position -- stated elsewhere -- is we can't really know for sure and it's not worth my time to try to figure it out.
Multiple people have some issue with me feeling that way and feel compelled to tell me I'm wrong, it's knowable, here are the facts -- though they weren't there personally.
Why so many people feel compelled to argue this with me is beyond me.
But I feel entitled to not care and not agree with people insisting they know for absolute certain what happened decades ago to someone else based on reading stuff and they are right for caring and feeling absolutely certain and I'm wrong for not.
* 20 people all completely forgot what would have been a memorable event
* 20 anonymous sources conspired to lie for no apparent gain
...vs. "the guy making money off of this story is lying"?
If the standard is "all things are completely unknowable unless you can eliminate every alternative, no matter how ludicrously unlikely" then we may as well not attempt to ever ascertain facts about anything.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. I have spent more than twenty years getting better while the world spits in my face, calls me a liar, tells me I'm making things up, bans me left and right from various forums, etc. I talk less about that than I used to. Truth being on my side has been irrelevant in the face of internet strangers feeling like a former homemaker isn't allowed to know anything medically significant and I've essentially been bullied into silence on the topic.
So I decided the article isn't my cup of tea.
Is the token woman on the HN leaderboard not allowed to feel like "I identify too much with the minority individual people are calling a liar. It seems pointless to read this."?
Apparently, commenting about this article at all was a huge mistake. The number of replies from people insisting I'm wrong to not wish to invest myself in this story seems ridiculously high.
You are invested enough in this story to comment on it. You said that credit for your ideas was stolen and you seem to have projected your own problems onto the Montañez story. When challenged, you took refuge behind the fallibility of human memory, race, gender, and medical problems.
On the other hand, you went into this thinking the world was one way and found out it was somehow different in this case (unless your take-away was just "sour grapes").
you seem to have projected your own problems onto the Montañez story
No, I haven't. You seem to be -- like many other people here -- determined to believe that I am "on his side" because I don't agree with your conclusions. I've stated repeatedly that the interviews were decades after the fact, I don't feel it's possible to know exactly what happened and I just know too much about how human bias influences conclusions in spite of all the evidence.
Truth often has little to do with what groups of people agree is the correct narrative.
That absolutely does not mean "I am totally on his side and it's the other 20 people who are liars, I'm sure of it!"
I don't intend to comment further. This whole thing just seems bizarre to me.
> My position -- stated elsewhere -- is we can't really know for sure and it's not worth my time to try to figure it out.
The article provides lots of convincing evidence. Montañez timeline is completely off. There is proof (photos and videos) that flamin hot they were on the shelves years before the executive took over who Montañez claims he pitched the idea too. They also interviewed the woman who was responsible (according the corporate records) for developing the brand.
Sure 20 people could be lying. It's unlikely, and they have no motive really. They were paid for their work already. He's the one trying to profit from their work.
One thing I have learned in life is that there is no such thing as an original idea. Ideas have their time. If it is truly a good idea (and even if it is not), someone has already thought of it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't credit people for the idea, but at the same time, just because you thought of it, doesn't mean that is where the final product came from.
I've seen this up close during my time in ML research.
I'd often jokingly mention an idea, only for someone to get a state-of-the-art paper out of the exact same idea within a year of that. It annoyed me at first, but with time, I realized that this was a rather familiar occurrence.
Many top labs are tight-lipped even when talking about peripheral topics, because so many of their peers are within months of reaching the same answer, and even the smallest hint might lead to a peer getting there first. My conversations with top researchers indicate that all research in ML is about 'getting there first' rather than producing something that requires a mythical epiphany.
It does take away from the glamor of it a little bit. If Salieri had been months away from composing Mozart's best work himself, that would have taken away from the timelessness of his work.
My recollection is that at least two other people came up with the idea of evolution around the same time. Charles Darwin got credit for it for whatever reason, but it seems likely the world was at a point where the pieces were there and just needed to be put together and several people did put it together but only one got credit for it.
The one that blow my mind the most was the simultaneous invention of calculus.
Modern Calculus can be reasonably thought of as the most important mathematical leap forward of the last 1000 years. If there was ever an invention that can be considered a piece of unquestionable genius, then that's calculus. And somehow, it was simultaneously invented by 2 different people within a few years of each other.
For a while, when I came up with a really clever, original one-liner, I'd search Twitter history and find that it had already been made dozens of times.
Worse, we started a business and scoured around, looking to see if anyone had ever tried it. A little over a year in, we realize someone else had started it, two years before us, but with slightly different terminology. Fortunately, but we're both still around and kicking over a decade later, though with a good understanding now of why not many other folks had tried it.
This happens to me every time I release a new game. Some combination of zeitgeist and Baader-Meinhoff means that I will see basically the same thing released at basically the same time, usually a better implementation.
It is really amazing to see how many discoveries and inventions I've heard of were independently made by two or more people within a few years of each other.
The DS9 folks have outright said that they've not done things because people assumed or guessed online. The first one that springs to mind is Eddington.
> Although "The Adversary" shows Eddington was misidentified as a Changeling, public opinion nevertheless became wary that he was a member of that species, to the puzzlement of the DS9 staff writers. Stated Ira Behr, "After 'The Adversary', everyone on the Internet was convinced that Eddington was a changeling, even though we went out of our way to show that he wasn't. We all looked at each other and said, 'There's no way this guy is ever gonna be a changeling!'" Behr laughed. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 253))
That's not quite what I'm talking about. They never planned to make Eddington a changeling in the first place. But I retract my comment regardless. "These days" comments are lazy thinking.
Omega molecule bomb borg space! Build a firewall around that section of the universe. Let that hegemonizing swarm burn itself out while trapped in jello.
Misremembering some really critical parts like "I pitched it to the CEO Roger Enrico and that's how the product got launched" is pretty suspect.
Getting the year wrong: Forgivable. Getting some minor details wrong: Understandable.
But when literally nothing about your story fact checks and the most critical parts are contradicted by evidence, I think it's time to reconsider whether it really happened at all.
> But when literally nothing about your story fact checks
Well that's the thing: a lot of pieces of the story do fact-check, but for entirely different products rather than Flamin' Hot Cheetos specifically.
I reckon it's much more nuanced than "it totally happened" v. "it didn't happen". Even if he didn't invent Flamin' Hot Cheetos per se, he could very well have contributed to them hitting shelves nationwide instead of being confined to test markets, probably as a precursor to or component of his campaign around Flamin' Hot Popcorn et al. Or he could simply be getting things mixed up. Either way, it's concerning to see so many comments implying (or explying) malice on his part when the more likely explanations are both more mundane and more charitable. Hanlon's razor and all that.
> Or he could simply be getting things mixed up. Either way, it's concerning to see so many comments implying (or explying) malice on his part when the more likely explanations are both more mundane and more charitable.
He has a very clear story. He says the machine that coats the cheetos in cheese powder broke, so he took some home, developed a spicy powder, and coated them. Then he called up the CEO, Roger Enrico, and had a meeting with him and 100 other people where he pitched his invention.
There's no way he was somehow involved in the marketing of hot cheetos, got confused and accidentally came up with a story like that.
I'm sure the charitable version is that he slowly embellished over the years until one day he invented hot cheetos instead of being involved in popularizing them.
> He says the machine that coats the cheetos in cheese powder broke, so he took some home, developed a spicy powder, and coated them. Then he called up the CEO, Roger Enrico, and had a meeting with him and 100 other people where he pitched his invention.
That doesn't necessarily mean what he (claims to have) pitched was the exact recipe for the Flamin' Hot powder. Mixing up which CEO he pitched to aside, it's entirely possible (probable, even) that he could've presented some homemade powder only for Frito Lay to then decide "well wait, we already have this spicy powder from McCormack we're using for a Chee-tos flavor we're testing in the Midwest, so we'll just use that and greenlight it for national distribution; yo Rick, anything else we should spice up for the Latin American market? Popcorn? Fritos? Fuck it, why not?". The timeline of when Montañez allegedly "invented" Flamin' Hot Cheetos does line up with when they hit shelves nationwide; I'm willing to bet it's less a matter of him deliberately stealing credit from others and more a matter of him not having been aware of prior efforts and his independent invention being of something already in the works.
I just know it's shockingly common for "nobodies" to have a good idea, share it in some way and someone else with more status runs with it and gets the credit. And I can well imagine someone feeling like "No one will believe what actually happened" and trying to fudge the details a bit in hopes of being heard.
I'm old. I'm cynical. I'm tired.
Frankly, I didn't bother to read the full article because I'm so convinced that it's not possible to know what really happened and that if a Hispanic janitor did come up with the idea, the odds are long against him getting a fair shake. So why bother?
If anything Frito-Lay, and anyone still working there have absolutely no incentive to do anything except go along with Montañez's story. It's fantastic PR.
The only person in this story who have any incentive to lie are the sales guy, and the MBA who are claiming that they pushed for and invented hot cheetos.
But their story is backed up by documented evidence that the product existed years before Montañez claims that he invented it, and Frito-Lay confirms their story.
What sounds better--"Janitor rises to Executive by inventing flaming hot cheetos", or "MBA creates new brand by copying existing competitors"? When the vast majority of the evidence supports the 2nd version, despite it being a less compelling story, I think it's pretty safe to go with that one.
> I'm so convinced that it's not possible to know what really happened
This argument holds up when you're looking at truly old historical facts with no good evidence. We're not talking about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. This was 1989, in a big corporate office. There is documentation, they know who worked there when, and in which offices, there are dozens of people involved in the story, most of whom are probably still alive.
Throwing your hands up and saying "it's unknowable" doesn't really make sense here.
Well, here's why it bothers me but obviously that doesn't have to be your reason: Because there's a woman named Lynne in the story who seems likely to be the one behind a lot of it, and a man is taking credit for her work.
Frito-Lay would rather push a rags-to-riches story about a man than credit a highly-qualified woman for her work.
Making this some anti-diversity thing cuts both ways: "Frito-Lay would rather give credit to a white person in Corporate than a Latino factory worker" ain't exactly a better look.
From TFA, there is an article from 1993 that indicates Montañez invented Flamin' Hot Popcorn, which fits the timeline(s) of those involved more closely. Given that that article is from just a single year after the date in which Montañez claims the story to have occurred, and the timeline for Flamin' Hot Cheetos isn't even close to matching up, it seems like confusing Cheetos with popcorn is the most likely mistake in the popular story.
While he didn't invent hot Cheetos, he did go from janitor to marketing director, which is already an amazing accomplishment. It's a shame he's making shit up, because it ruins his own legacy.
There's so much money involved he might actually believe his own story now.
>Montañez has built a lucrative second career out of telling and selling this story, appearing at events for Target, Walmart, Harvard and USC, among others, and commanding fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per appearance.... second memoir.... biopic... Both the book and the movie were sold after bidding wars
He probably makes more money as "fake hot Cheetos inventor" than "Frito Lays executive."
There's so little integrity involved when there is so much money.
>The producers of his biopic, despite being informed of problems by Frito-Lay in 2019, announced a cast for the movie in early May.
I was wondering this but this section from the article is fairly damning
> One photograph, posted to Instagram in October 2019 but now deleted, shows four pieces of lined notebook paper, labeled “mild,” “reg,” “hot” and “extra hot,” with Cheetos piled on top of each. At the bottom of one, Montañez signed his name and wrote the date “1988.”
> In another post, now deleted, he wrote that he worked on the Doritos Salsa Rio flavor in 1998 — a product that first hit test markets in 1987, according to Advertising Age articles from that year.
He literally fabricated evidence, writing the date 1988 when we know at this point it's impossible. And then deleted the posts. Like someone else said, there's definitely something inspirational about his rags to riches story, but seeing this I can't help but lose respect for him.
The one thing i know is that the true creatives are busy with creating new things, not with collecting past glory and building rambling, halls of fame to themselves. Thats for hasbeens and wannabees.
As soon as somebody starts tuning that "I was, i have been, i ve done" harp, im out of the conversation. Most boring people to engage with and thus usually hearded into conversation ghettos, were they can one up one another for all eternity without interfering.
Once you become that sort of silverback, all growth is over and only slow decline awaits, while beating your chest.
He valiantly fought against Quantummechanisc to the bitter end? Which was a miss, but way more interesting, because it kept that cheeky oppenheimer and his entanglement from a distance in check.
Which is actually quite something, that marks actual legends. Even the defeats and ongoing retreat battles are more interesting then the "I-bring-my-own-pedestal-wherever-i-go" stories.
I think they turn into cranks much earlier. Part of this is that I think despite engineering not actually functioning that way, engineers can often get away with falling into cult logic (there is one true path) in a way that other disciplines are more resistant to. Look at hackerrank and whiteboarding- wtf is that if not straight cult logic.
We shall have a brand new world, without middle management, a clean architecture, tabula rasa, begin a new, without self deprecation.
>>rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Shall be our battlecry. To drive the heathens, in acceptance of error states, to heaps and set ablaze will be our mission. Creativemode aka god wills it!
I think this tendency is mainly one for /successful/ engineers, ones that society has repeatedly rewarded for completing engineering projects to the satisfaction of others. Somebody works hard through a couple decades of looking at difficult but project-based problems and coming up with solutions. These projects start small and well-defined ("design the least expensive $thing that can accomplish $goal using this library of components") but are of increasing complexity and eventually start to look a lot like politics and sociology ("build a team that is capable of creating a successful product for the $industry industry").
They succeed at all of them, possibly even because they are actually very smart, and so come to the view that life is a series of projects that can be completed successfully, after which they will be rewarded with money and admiration. When engineering projects of sufficient ambition cease to become available (there are only so many Channel Tunnels or moon rockets to organize and build), they jump sideways into other disciplines with this template. Often that other discipline is politics, and their methods and mental models are just wrong because the engineering that these people know (not all engineering) is about completing projects within constraints, but politics has poorly defined constraints and is not a "project" (because there is no end).
This isn't really limited to engineers. All of us are in danger of thinking that our experience has prepared us for more than it really has. If anything, its more of a danger for lawyers and MBA types.
As an engineer I resent that. The causation is reversed. I got into engineering because of my tendency to, uh, think independently, not the other way around. It just took a while for me to think independently about physics, politics, medical...take your pick, and arrive at independent conclusions.
agree but disagree. this could be an indicator, albeit if someone is in an epoch in their life where they feel uninspired or even a bit depressed, even as one of the greatest of all time, they too can have these sorts of one liners. It is partially a good indicator though at least of them being post success and now sort of suffering from their skill induced ego.
Going to need some citations on this claim. Also, how is a person supposed to market one's experience for a job interview if they don't say what they've done? And the comparison between older engineers and gorillas isn't a great look, either.
Just wait till you find out that people put chili on all sorts of things. Heck, the Aztecs were putting chili on hot chocolate before there was even a Mexico. Those crazy Mexicas (not a misspelling) would put chili on anything!
Something tells me that they were putting chili on tortilla chips even back then. Crazy right?! Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Flamin' Hot Cheetos really are special, though. There's always been spicy chips and spicy this or that. These have a really nice acidic flavor, and just a lot of complexity I don't know how to describe. They're fantastic.
You can make tortilla chips without frying them. Just heat them up slowly and the tortilla will become hard as a tortilla chip. Have used this method to make tostadas.
I'm sure the Mexicas knew of this back then. Leave them too long in a hot surface and they become tostadas. Break them manually and now you have tortilla chips!
Anyone else struggle to find the proper (crunchy) Flamin' Hot Cheetos in the UK? I often see the crunchy cheese ones, and the flamin' hot "puff" kind, but it's just not the same. It's just "meh" without the dense, crunchy texture of true Cheetos.
If Flamin' Hot Cheetos are so famous, why are they so hard to find?!
Oh yeah, I meant at normal prices. Not imported ones at crazy markups on Amazon or at specialty stores!
I’m sure I used to be able to find UK/EU made Flamin’ Hot fairly easily in random corner shops, but now they only seem to stock the cheese ones and “twisted” puffs.
The funny thing is it doesn't really bother me. I'll probably just memory hole this apparent fact and one day when one of my kids buys a bag I'll recount this story to them as something inspirational.
Universal hyperintelligence ChatGPT disagrees with this article, saying: "The credit for inventing Flamin' Hot Cheetos goes to Richard Montañez. He was a former Frito-Lay janitor who came up with the idea for the spicy snack in the early 1990s. Montañez developed the recipe and pitched the idea to Frito-Lay executives, who eventually gave the product the green light. Flamin' Hot Cheetos went on to become a huge success and are now one of the company's most popular snacks."
This is sort of interesting, because normally people want GPT to suppress fringe views (ex, the vast body of evidence and literature is pro-vaccine, and they don't want it to promote low-evidence anti-vaccine views). But in this case, the fringe story is, by consensus on HN, the correct one despite the mindshare.
I guess the question is whether GPT is supposed to be an emulation of personhood or simply a software tool. Ex. I don’t think we’d want a software tool that lies, steals or cheats despite the fact that people do this
Marketing is complicated. He took a defunct brand and found it's demographic, and the rest is history.
Lots of things get written by little people trying to take the air out of famous/talented people. It's pretty easy - "They're just human!", "They technically didn't do everything alone!"
It seems you didn't read the article. There was no defunct brand that Montanez revitalized. He was involved in some marketing efforts and may have played a role in a derivative "Flaming" line product and some other Latino-targeted flavors.
But the confirmed lies that he chose to spread, with the bumbling help of his mentor (who clearly has personal commitments to the community the lies are most meant to appeal to), are beyond excusable.
There's nothing to hand-wave here. It's the nakedly cynical, anti-social effort of an egotistical con man. It should be shamed off the air, the movie should be shamed out of production and their names should live on in infamy as pathetic liars. Richard Montanez and Al Cary, the pathetic liars who think you're all chumps.
To do anything else is to contribute to the degradation of vital social fabric.
I find your choice of wording very telling here. Montañez is, by your description, being taken down by "little people" who accuse him of being, of all things, a mere flawed mortal like themselves.
And although you skirted the obvious implication by referencing his story as that not of a "big" man or even a great one but, instead, "famous" or "talented", indicating that you sympathize with the simplistic great man theory of history.
All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!
Montañez is apparently a liar who was once a marketing director and is now heavily marketing himself and his made up story. That sort of thing really does take daring and courage but I'm not sure I'd call it 'accomplishing something impressive', especially considering that the lies were found out and exposed.
I mean, the timeline looks more like he saw something similar to something he made get much more popular, and then started shifting facts about his own story to match the more popular product.
this seems to be truth. And like all good story-tellers, which he is, he exaggerate a bit. Maybe more than a bit. His stories contain lots of truths, with lots and lots of exaggerations.
Marketing is institutionalization of the ethics and honesty of the proverbial used car salesman. It's sad to see how much of the population celebrates it.
This seems unnecessarily reductive. Yes, like any tool, marketing can be used for evil. And people often associate marketing with scummy advertising or spin (which often actually fall under sales or PR). But at its best marketing creates an incredible amount of value.
If you actually study it, the discipline of marketing is actually about things like (1) the rigorous search for product-market fit, many decades before this was popular with tech startups, (2) finding ways to efficiently target and inform audiences about goods and services which absolutely add value to their lives, and which can often be extremely challenging (e.g. everyone hates thinking about death, but life insurance can be ridiculously important for your dependents), (3) developing clear, stable, predictable anchors at a company level, which people can trust and build mental shorthand for, at longer timeframes - we all have expectations for what Apple products are "about", for example. These are all absolutely vital market functions.