[somethingAlex]

They did this at chick-fil-a corporate as well. An extremely competent product manager described the yearly experience as “standing around not knowing what I should do and trying not to get in the way.” Those kitchens get hectic, super different than being in the office.

[alexktz]

I wonder how society would change in general if we were all forced to step out of our comfort zones once a month? Make me become a garbage man for the day, or a barista or a gas station attendant.

Perhaps it would engender some empathy between different areas of society and reduce the overall sense of entitlement some folks seem to have.

[azinman2]

Personally I’d like to see a return of mandatory draft or civil service. I think merging people across all boundaries to forge common experience could only serve to improve society.

[dylan604]

Something I was thinking about where if I was the day-to-day employee suddenly forced to work with a brand new employee that you know will only be working there for one day (meaning they won't be super motivated to really dig in), I'd be pissed. Lots of comments in the thread about low morale for those engineers being forced to do this, but not much discussion about the reverse direction. (Makes since since this is a site focused on those engineers.)

This person claiming to standing around not knowing what to do just shows that they really are trying to do anything. You've been assigned a task, do it. If you don't know, ask. They aren't trying to be better because they know at the end of the one day their nightmare will be over.

[tyingq]

I assume you were supposed to watch the employees interact with the technology, and ask them a few questions on their break or something. Trying to see if there's anything about the point-of-sale, employee scheduling, payroll, or other tech that seemed like a good idea back at Headquarters, but doesn't work well in real life. Or new ideas that would make things easier, etc.

[Brian_K_White]

That extremely competent product manager lacks imagination. I always learn things from watching users.

If anything the problem is I get too many ideas for things that could be improved and in reality you can't actually do a fraction of them.

But all this "extremely competent" guy gets out of it is "standing around not knowing what I should do"? What a joke.