100-year-old Brazilian breaks record after 84 years at same company
guinnessworldrecords.com
guinnessworldrecords.com
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).
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.
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.
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.
The only thing that's the same across companies is some broad generalizations, basically coming down to GAAP and HR. Everything else varies a whole lot.
Even with GAAP there is a large degree of variance, like - how does project accounting work, is it paid at the end or percent of completion? Do you capitalize engineering costs, or is it considered an operating expense?
Ordering and ERP is another huge source of variation, do you use dummy (sales) part numbers? Is internal listed cost fully burdened - or is that accounted for separately? How are part numbers organized?
Expense and reimbursement policy is another source of variation, a wild amount. Just nuts and bolts about how you book, are all different. Do you use a corporate credit card or get reimbursed?
Nevermind entertainment policy.
Basic stuff like is your org chart people orientated, job oriented or process oriented?
IT policy, internal communications styles and policy, how sales works, it's all different.
Business have needed to solve mostly the same internal structural, reporting, accountability and accounting issues since the industrial revolution - none of this is really new.
The first great change was double entry bookkeeping, then the telegraph and telephone increased the size and scope of businesses, and allowed centralized control, then tabulating machines allowed easier data processing and statistical analysis, computers came and allowed higher complexity, then teleconferencing allowing more distribution, and so on.
If you have an example of what you're talking about I'd love to read it.
> Businesses reporting GAAP vs before GAAP existed.
> Businesses working towards ISO / SOC type certifications vs before these existed
Just those two things, financial regulations and compliance frameworks have made businesses operate much more similarly in broad strokes than before these existed. The original argument you replied to is that over time, businesses have become more similar, and I think these things have made businesses way more similar. You're a public company you report on the same metrics now. Before there was any regulation or even a stock market, businesses operated way more differently and you would have to learn everything by being there.
ISO 9000 (I think 9000, it might be 9001) is less about standardization and more about documentation - you can use any process you want to produce a result provided it is adequately documented, and reproducible, the process can be anything you like so long as its a documented one. Similarly, you can deviate from that process all you like, provided you document those exceptions and why they were made.
>Nevermind entertainment policy.
You’re describing incredibly superficial differences because you’re used to a world where businesses all operate very similarly.
Those “broad generalizations” like GAAP you hand-waved over did not use to be standard. One of the early appeals of a company listed by the NYSE was an attempt to standardize some of that so you could even try to guess what you were buying into. That still had to be tweaked after Enron with SOX.
The fact that you can generally count on there being an HR or accounting department/role at companies is a form of this standardization.
GAAP based on my reading is as much an outgrowth of regulation post 1929 as it is anything else. It's less about standardization and more about accountability. Even now though, with good reason one does not have to comply with GAAP, so long as you have a good reason to depart from it.
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.
So when we started using AWS, we really made a lot of mistakes by trying to replicate how we did things on-prem. And there was a lot of resistance to using cloud services; some people viewed it as a threat to job security. Others simply had a difficult time adjusting to the change in operations/procedures and philosophy.
This held us back quite a bit until we hired a few contractors who helped us better understand where we needed to change, which features worked well in the cloud (and which sucked). We brought the best contractors onboard as FTEs, and it's been a much better experience.
One of my employers 60% of the company had spent all or most of their professional career there - and things were scrolerotic at times - because there was a huge amount of group think, and a strong NIH/"the way we do it is fine" problem - simply because of a lack of indexing to how other players did it.
You ideally want around 50/50, 50% lifers, and 50% new blood, its even helpful to encourage employees to leave go get knowledge elsewhere and then come back later if they desire.
Yes, but our society changed to see every inefficiency as a fault to fix, which makes situations like this increasingly rare
It turns out the inefficient places tend to get out-competed and are forced to change or wither and die.
It turns out that a lot of 'efficiency optimisation' is done inconpetently, like removing 'un-needed' parts from a car: seatbelts, airbags - they just add extra weight!
Lika federal aviation authority hiring engineers from boeing to check their own work to 'improve efficiency'
If you want less fragility, there has to be a way to be paid for providing reliable supply in times of disruption.
Oh and greed? Yup. Look at the profit margins for the Exxon this year. For any of the Fortune 500. Last year and this year will be banner years for big corporations that have raised prices either directly or through "shrinkflation." They're loving it, while consumers get the shaft, and the Fed gets the blame.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish
In the last year as RTO has started to replace WFH, I've begun to consider whether it's worth looking for a new position. My minimum calculus is that is has to at least pay me as much as I make now, be remote, provide me with the amount of autonomy I currently have, and have workers and managers I enjoy working with.
Remote isn't hard to satisfy now, at least for the near-term future. Pay, I can probably get a 10-15% raise. Coworkers and managers I like? Who knows. Autonomy? Who knows. Both of those are a roll of the dice, no matter how carefully you investigate prior to taking a position.
So for a 10% raise? That's a pretty big risk. Now if your current compensation sucks, or you hate your boss, sure. But I think that most people are risk-averse (at least I am), and most will stick with a less than optimal situation.
It is only good for the company if you stay and don't take the position you're earned.
A lot of work has been compartmentalized, and it's created additional barriers.
When one of my friends did her work placement at a large bank she said the only useful thing from the 2.5 years of business undergraduate study she’d done before that was knowing what Sarbox was. As evidence that business degrees aren’t that useful consider that GS and similar bulge bracket banks have no discernible preference for business undergrads. They assume that by the end of six weeks of analyst training everyone is at the same level.
Maybe the main part of this is because companies will fire older and more expensive employees to hire cheaper junior ones. Cost cutting all the time.
The quickest way to increase your salary is to change jobs.
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.
>>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.
Interesting, because the public perception of gamedev companies is opposite: "hire-crunch-downsize-repeat"
(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).
There are some old school companies left in the world. Almost everyone at my company has been here at least eight years. I'm currently at 28 years myself, there are several who have been here almost 40 years, and the longest run employee we've got currently is at 51 years (although, to be fair, he's the founder, and at 83 years old now only works a few hours a day, a few days a week).
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.
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.
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.
Almost everything in this story is impossible to reproduce today (we can definitely reproduce just the "don't go to college part").
That being said, I agree that many corporate mindsets make it seem like this is impossible. A lot of us here at HN are likely going to end up in leadership positions, so a thought for everyone is, if you don't like the idea of "the MBA's" outsourcing everything, or contracting, push back against it.
Even small things like pushing to train someone on your team instead of hiring externally can start to snowball when everyone does it, and you've got more power than you realize to change your company culture.
Having an MBA on your resume is a slight negative for me when I'm on hiring committees for peer positions. It's likely to remain the same when I start hiring reports.
It's not going to happen. Every time there's a working conditions post on HN like the recent one about Nintendo, half the comments are to the tune of "if you didn't want to get treated like dirt you shouldn't have been a contractor" as if they foolishly pushed the wrong button on the career vending machine.
But it's the only option because leadership makes it that way. And saying it's not going to happen is a good way to make sure it never does. Airplanes ain't gunna fly, you can't never land a rocket standing up, and there's no way you can fit a mobile phone in something smaller than a brief case.
I'm not saying it's easy but if you think it's a problem, you can work to change it. I personally think it's a problem, and now that I'm a Manager I'm doing what I can to try to change. Will I be successful? Maybe not perfectly but already the company is better than it was.
edit: So some people try to compensate this by increasing rates and that means their rates become on par with what big consultancies ask. So some bigger clients see this as no longer worth bothering with and they simply get managed teams from big firms rather than taking independents.
The guy who pushed these changes in the UK has a wife that owns substantial shares is Infosys ;-) also the biggest consultancies were involved in crafting the legislation...
I imagine it's extra overhead but if it's not too much extra it seems worth it?
change_my_mind.jpg
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!
> My cousin George
- 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
"That student's name? Albert Einstein."
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.google.com/search?q=george+passadore+wells+fargo
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism for me but not for thee?
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.
Note: I am about to start my 4th job in 6 years. My pay went from 55k to 200k in that time. Way less than many others on this board make but an unthinkable number for me and if I had stayed at the first job I would probably be making 70k maybe.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...
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?
This guy might just ask how content you feel now, or are you already looking out for that next paycheck jump?
It seems a common attitude these days that all workplaces are temporary and ripping you off if you stick around. Such ego.
Someday these job-hoppers won't be so lucky to have such a market available and will wonder what happened. They might find out they're not as desirable as they think they are.
If loyalty was that valuable, companies should reward that appropriately by paying them at least as much as an equivalent new hire, maybe even more because they’ve been around longer. Or companies can prioritize putting their most long standing employees in leadership positions, valuing the insight and knowledge of company operations. There are a bunch of things that can be done that often aren’t.
Raises and promotions were a much more certain path for better compensation in his circumstances.
Context: I'm from the Itajaí Valley (where Brusque is located), which has a strong textile industry - one of the main drivers of the local economy. It used to be much stronger until the disastrous Collor government caused a number of them to go bankrupt or severely reduce their production due to some serious mismanagement of the Brazilian economy.
Edit: His original employment contract can be found here (in Portuguese, a bit difficult to read): https://www.brusquememoria.com.br/acervo-imagem/2057
Brusque - Sta. Catharina
That h looks so out of place to me. It looks like etymological ch, ph, and th (for vocabulary derived from Greek) were abolished in 1943
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formul%C3%A1rio_Ortogr%C3%A1fi...
So not exactly news... still impressive, and some quotes worth considering:
> Walter believes that the best part about having a job is that it gives you a sense of purpose, commitment and a routine.
> He comments that the best professional advice he can give is to try to work for a good company and in an area where you feel motivated.
> "I don’t do much planning, nor care much about tomorrow. All I care about is that tomorrow will be another day in which I will wake up, get up, exercise and go to work; you need to get busy with the present, not the past or the future. Here and now is what counts. So, let’s go to work!"
An Eckhart Tolle fan? :)
It reminds me of how sad I find the idea of working 84 years. This is the paroxysm of how humans are trained and educated to work.
Personally, I love what I do and would be delighted to be still able to work at his age.
The issue is that a large portion of jobs are repetitive and uninteresting work that people only do as a way to get money. But for others, work can be something that gives them purpose and they enjoy. If anything, I would wager the reason he's lived so long is partly due to staying active with his work.
However my parents are in their late 60s and I can see that there is a joy to be gained from being able to put your skills to work. They’re both great parents but now we’re all grown up and they can do whatever they want and despite traveling the world and everything they are still most satisfied when they’re operating (apart from when they’re with us, obviously).
That’s definitely something I want for myself. It reminds me that the Polgar sisters still enjoy chess. Their parents early drive for them to excel at the game did not hurt it for them.
I decided that retirement was bad, better to keep working and enjoy life at home he same time rather than saving it up for the end.
It’s a joy. I work on the stuff I want to work on, at my pace, and using my development techniques.
Works a treat.
Throughout my career, I developed theories and opinions, on the best way to develop software, but was seldom allowed to put them into practice. On the few occasions that I was allowed to do so, things worked out great.
So a big part of “retiring,” has been putting these ideas into practice.
It’s worked out wonderfully.
I didn’t actually “retire” by choice. This industry is quite blatant about institutional ageism.
Not everyone finds themselves in the kind of job that they are happy to do through old age, but it is nice to see when it happens.
What an incredible amount of change to witness. I just get to see a continuous rollout of technical solutions to mostly questions not asked or understood :/
4/5 stars, room for improvement.
That's something I want to do but find it extremely hard to do.
Larry Ellison comes close. He founded Oracle in 1977 and he is still the CEO.
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Chris_Espinosa
https://news.microsoft.com/2005/09/21/qa-members-of-microsof...
https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
I worked at Cincom between 2006-2012. Eliot Miranda summed it up best when he said “Cincom is where software goes to die.” It is the geriatric retirement center for aging software.
Hard to wrap your head around someone working at the same place from before 2. world war. Both him and his employer must have been quite good at adapting to a changing business landscape.
I went to work for Bell Labs in 1978 after getting MSEE,
then went to work for a start up with a bunch of Labs buddies about 5 years later
that company got bought out by one of the "baby Bells" that went on a spending spree of acquisitions after the break up of ma bell, they bridged my service as if I had never left, hey, thank you very much !
then, a few years later I went to work for another startup working on this new cool technology you may have heard of "cellular" wireless phones duh. K, again, guess what, airtouch bought us out, they bridged my service again, hey thank you very much dudes.
Then, (tired of this yet) after working for those dolts for a while I left and went to work for another start up which will go nameless but has to do with fiber stuff. Those guys got bought out by the Big V company, they bridged my service again ! thank you very much again (tons of vaca time).
I have worked for, but my count 5 different companies and yet, never lost a day of service! 44 years and counting.
So anyone out there who would like to get bought out by a big company, simply hire me and they will buy you to get me back. Probably, I am thinking that has to be it. right ? it's all about me :)
1 is a machinist started in 1962 and is half retired. Comes in Monday - Wednesday from 7am-11am. The other is sales and works a full 40 hour week. Started in 1960.
C for a long time but then SAP ABAP when the company implemented it 11 years back. After the layoff I picked up JS/Python and doing that now.
And why not.
(I sometimes think we threw the baby out with the bath water.)
He needs to make a shipping label. No problem. No computer. No printer. No special labels.