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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

> Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles

So it takes a college degree to be an hourly worker at Walmart now?

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Specifically, they want to maintain the perception of internal mobility. So they’ll hire overqualified people, promote just those, and be able to use the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year.” Which they can dangle as a carrot when they need to. What I find surprising is that they actually admitted publicly to this strategy!

> the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year"

Aside from the problem of induction, why would this be a fallacy? (I'm assuming you meant to implicitly apply the 'each year' modifier to both or neither, because otherwise it would be such a boring and obvious fallacy that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.)

It omits "with degrees" after "floor workers".

Ah, right, thanks! That wasn't actually part of the statement they quoted (/posed within quotation marks), whence my confusion.

Edit: Or is the point that 20% of floor workers in total do become managers, but that's precisely (or very strongly correlatedly) the subset containing those who have degrees? If so, that makes a lot more sense. I don't really think it's fair to describe as a fallacy, though - it's a function of the philosophy of probability, which doesn't describe the world but our knowledge of it. You could make an analogous statement about roulette wheels, with perfect knowledge of their physics.

Yep, a population statistic isn’t predictive for an individual if the population is heterogeneous. And in this case, designed to be heterogeneous.

Walmart recruits at the University I graduated from. When I graduated, around 10 years ago, they were very aggressively courting new business undergrads for Walmart corporate. They revealed in my second (and last) interview that starting pay was around $25k annual. Even 10 years ago, that was a joke.

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