> I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring

Pay low wage, get low motivation. No one's going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.

I sure did. Harder than I worked at some better paying jobs, for sure. Wage itself does not seem to be the determining factor in motivation.

I'd say it's more about barriers to entry and the work environment itself.

> No one's going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.

I've always done what I agreed to do at every job I worked. And I've had some pretty awful jobs. I'm not a hero. Doing what you've agreed to do doesn't make you a hero. It's the minimum requirement if you want to call yourself an honest person whose word means literally anything at all.

Don't do that for anybody else. Do it for yourself.

Pay higher wages and your customers go somewhere else to save a dollar. Some businesses don’t have the luxury of customers that will pay more than the lowest prices.

I busted my butt as a 16 y.o. minimum wage worker, didn't you?

Give an inch and they take a mile. You could pay a McDonalds worker all you like and he'll still just try to get away with doing less work.

It really depends on the person; for a lot of McJobs, the people doing them never really pursued the job; they wanted / needed A job, any job. They work for money, not for love of the job.

I mean you can learn to love a job, but that kind of loyalty has to be earned - by good pay, working conditions, career opportunities, and being valued.

But there's too many jobs now - Amazon warehouse employee being one of them - where you are a number in a system, and very much replaceable.

Bring back good jobs. Restaurant worker is not a bad job, but it's underpaid and unvalued.

Underpaid, undervalued, exceedingly stressful, and often poorly managed at the shift level. Turnover and variable quality in co-workers aside, there's intense pressure on shift management to cut labor, such that stores are usually understaffed for the workload. Work throughput expectations don't change, however...

I'm not sure what the answer to this is (McDonalds Corp will just introduce more automation if they have to raise wages, and a lot of people will go from stressful, low paying jobs to no jobs at all). But I don't think this occupation is in a good place.

Many people, maybe most, take some pride in their work. You pay people decently, give them trust, and treat them like adults, most of them will give good-to-great effort towards what they do. If you approach them with the attitude you currently have, then your prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

Then make your own profitable company that takes advantage of this. I don't want things to be this way. It doesn't make me happy to say it, but all of the evidence is on my side. I suppose all companies start out with good intentions like you have. But the successful ones always end up like Amazon. The others are confined to your imagination.

It's good were on the same page: your employees will be motivated to further their work-related skills and efficiency, thus doing less work.

My deployment process at work used to require a ton of work, but I spent a few afternoons to automate it and now I get to do much less work.

> Do you not see how absurd that sounds?

Not absurd at all. The people in the front lines understand the nature of their work better than anyone. When the engineers and the front line workers can actually communicate, and the workers feel like they're being heard, then great things can happen. Not only can productivity go up from making processes more efficient, but the hard-working front line people can feel a certain amount of ownership in their positions. Which will contribute to making them even better.

I've seen this in person. Once worked for a teleco's internal training department. We somehow ended up making quick access utilities for the call center desktops. When we first deployed the tool, it rarely got used. This was because we made assumptions about what they needed. So we ended up talking to the call center reps. The people stuck dealing with the front line calls all day. They had very clear ideas about what they needed and what we should do. We listened. Followed their ideas. Had them give further feedback on the betas. And it ended up probably saving the company many millions per year in terms of efficiency gains. Plus it was a huge morale boost. These people finally got someone to listen to them and helped implement changes that made their job easier. Which gave them a sense of ownership and pride. And upped employee retention.

So you just did your job and went and collected requirements from your user base? I really don't see how this is the same thing. I worked in a large insurance company with its own call centre and we did the same thing. It's great for the business but I just don't see how this is connected to giving workers more money and freedom.

> My deployment process at work used to require a ton of work, but I spent a few afternoons to automate it and now I get to do much less work.

Clearly you're just like the majority of HN readership: living in a bubble a million miles away from what is reality for very large swathes of the population. Do you truthfully believe that someone flipping burgers in Burger King is capable of inventing machines and automating processes, but they refuse to do it because they don't get paid enough? Do you not see how absurd that sounds?

No, but I don't think your response warranted anything serious. You said that any mcdonalds worker is inherently lazy, so I sidestepped that ridiculous sentiment.

Also it's hilarious that you, the guy out there roasting all minimum wage workers, is somehow connected to the average working man.

Now that's just unreasonable. Please don't lump all McD workers together and assume they lack integrity as a whole...

I believe that the In-N-Out experience proves this wrong.

> I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring.

As often as not, this is a failure of management. Of course no manager wants to admit to this. A great example is the turnaround at the NUMMI GM plant after drastic changes to the manufacturing process[1]. The same employees going from drinking on the job and creating tons of defects to a model of efficient manufacturing in North America.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010