Why a job at McDonald’s could be the key to tech success

Amazon founder and the third richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, celebrated his 60^th birthday in style last week, throwing a lavish space-themed party that reportedly served guests a juxtaposition of McDonald’s meals and caviar.

It’s thought that the McDonald’s was added to mark Bezos’s first job, which was summer work at the fast-food restaurant, aged 16.

The digital retail giant’s boss is in illustrious tech company: Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, started out in fast food as a Pizza Hut dishwasher, working his way up to waiter in high school.

And while software guru and former Google principal engineer Kelsey Hightower may be more associated with Kubernetes than double quarter pounders with cheese, he too worked for McDonalds before commanding a million-dollar tech salary.

When we briefly met at a tech conference last year, I asked Hightower (now a committed vegetarian who appears to be enjoying his very comfortable early retirement) how his old job at the golden arches prepared him for tech success.

“I think a lot of people learn customer service from McDonalds and that customer usually pays the very minimum and they expect a lot for that in some cases,” he notes.

TechInformed’s very own multimedia journalist Ricki Lee, agrees with this, having spent the first day in his McDonald’s job trying to fish a pair of lady’s spectacles out of a food waste bin.

“You see people at their best and at their worst in the span of half an hour. People, rightly so, can get very upset when their food isn’t what they want or expect.

“And then the grill might stop working. And then one of the toilets is flooded. Then when you just think you’ve had enough, your delivery of fresh produce hasn’t arrived. You must learn how to pivot and adapt on your toes, quickly, or face repercussions later,” Lee adds.

Tech in action

Bezos himself later acknowledged that dealing with customers at McDonalds had been “really hard.” But it must have had an impact: with customer-focus ingrained as one the first of Amazon’s leadership principles.

Speaking to CNBC in 1999 – two years after taking Amazon public – Bezos says “If there is one thing that Amazon.com is about, it is obsessive attention to the customer experience end-to-end. What matters to me is to provide the best customer service.”

There’s a common image of tech entrepreneurs starting their businesses from their garage (as Bezos did) or huddled over a computer in their bedrooms working on code, or, for more industrial or chemical applications, in a lab, or a shed even.

But to learn about the industrial application of tech, there’s no better start than by flipping burgers.

According to reports, Bezos spent his summer studying McDonald’s automation improvements, such as beeps and signals for when to scramble eggs, flip burgers and pull fries out of a boiling vat.

“At a typical McDonalds there’s a lot of technology in there that allows someone with very limited training to almost contribute from day one,” Hightower observes.

“I think a lot of people who were paying attention to the details, when they wanted to go run their own businesses and lead communities, thought about it this same way: how can I structure my company to allow – in the case of Amazon – a million employees to come into a factory and just make it just work?” he adds.

How many of us have started projects – whether it’s a book, a piece of code, an ESG initiative – but then just parked them when life got busy? What McDonalds also teaches you, says Hightower, is how to get things done.

“That drive-thru needs to move. It does change the way you think about getting things done because there are no excuses.

“When there’s something not right you have to improvise and then you have to come back and do it again; There are lessons to learn from any job, but fast food particular, for a lot of us that’s our first job so it’s shaped our concept of what work is,” he says.

Client-facing skills

There’s snobbery around working at fast food chains, particularly among the white, educated middle class.

It pains me to admit that, for a long time I thought that working in McDonalds wasn’t a real job. But, in the thrall of Generation X writer Douglas Coupland and his coining of the phrase ‘McJob’, I’d kind of missed the point and ended up in a boring but non-greasy admin job as I worked my way through uni.

I remember mocking a friend at college for his part time McDonald’s job, but in those early years he’d banked way more transferable skills than I ever had by the time I’d landed my first ‘real’ job.

That guy is now leading a major digital transformation project for a London Council. Like many who have had service industry jobs, he’s always been a brilliant problem solver and is great at dealing with demanding clients. He brings projects in on time and to budget. He knows how to get things done.

At one point in my own career I covered the postproduction and special effects industry, where the managers at several high end VFX facilities all told me the same thing: they preferred to recruit their runners – many of whom would go on to become digital artists working on top Hollywood films –  that had experience of working in the service industry.

That ability to be client-facing, and deal with challenging behaviour and demands was valued as much as a fine arts degree from Oxford or someone’s ability to code.

And where else are you going to mix with such a diverse group of people? (Clue: the answer isn’t in your typical Silicon Valley start up).

As TI’s Lee notes: “In fast food you will work closely with people from all over the world. And, because many of those people are dentists, lawyers, teachers, who can’t work in their fields until they get their qualifications translated into English/US equivalents, you end up working with people from different socio-economic backgrounds too.

“Working on such diverse teams really prepares you for managing diverse personalities when you reach leadership positions and I’ve found it to be invaluable,” he adds.

And it’s clearly something Bezos values too, as he chomped his way through birthday Big Macs with the likes of Oprah, Beyonce and Bill Gates, his culinary choice represented his journey from a modest but informative start, to the pinnacle of tech success.