synzero

One of the things I judge engineering candidates on when I interview them is whether they can figure out WHY a system is designed the way it is, not just WHAT the design is. That is a much more rare skill and very valuable in tech. I would be willing to bet $1000 that my explanation is correct and this is intentional, if it were possible to get an answer from Hyatt (which it won't be for obvious reasons.) Just "open up more award availability"? Come on. There is no such thing as a free lunch - like I said before, you are totally ignoring the tradeoffs to doing any given tactic.

As for your script, congrats that it works but it doesn't change my point. The Hyatt design is clearly intended to make it difficult to automate this stuff. It doesn't have to be perfect, they just want to make it more difficult. And as I said before that is as it should be.

Regarding $500K salaries - you clearly don't know what the difference is between top tier and next tier talent. 10 top tier engineers and designers will outbuild 1000 mediocre engineers and designers every time. You can't spend your way to great results. It's just a reality that very few top candidates will be wanting to work for any hotel chain. There isn't the excitement, there isn't the large equity upside, there isn't the nimble environment of a startup and there isn't the prestige of working at a FANG company.

In fact $124M is a ridiculous amount for Hilton to be spending on IT. If anything that just points to the fact that they're ridiculously inefficient with their technology spend. What do they have to show for it? That's the sort of thing you often see big corporations doing - banks do this kind of thing too. You'll never get a great result with that sort of spending. But again I don't blame Hilton because I can't see an obvious way they could attract top talent even if they wanted to and knew how to hire top talent. Maybe you can get a handful of top people but overall it's not a desirable destination for top engineers and designers.

WasKnown

You keep on citing your experience as an early stage startup employee as something that gives credibility to your claims. I literally made $100M+ analyzing companies in this exact way. Let's focus purely on the logic of the discussion. We can agree to disagree without insults.

I really don't get what your point is here. HFTs don't have any of the excitement, large equity upside, startup environment, or FAANG prestige and have no trouble spending their way ($500K for 22 year olds) to top talent. The introductory programming class at CMU was straight-up named after Jump trading lol. Equity upside doesn't substitute cash salary btw. You gotta pay tax on RSUs so any top firm is paying $150K+ cash for entry level fresh college grads anyway.

But again, only one side is insulting the other. Very revealing IMO. Not even sure what you are trying to say here because I already have stated that I do NOT think Hyatt needs to pay competitive salaries against companies like Facebook. So arguing against Hyatt paying that amount seems redundant...

Hilton lets you choose your room from a floorplan, confirm connecting rooms automatically, and has automated the upgrade system entirely.

Hilton Revolutionizes Hotel Experience with Digital Check-In, Room Selection & Custom
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilt...ing-rooms.html
Upgrades in Advance for Lifetime Diamond, Diamond, and Gold Members

I'm sure more will come. Time will tell who is right.

synzero

It's not an insult to observe that someone isn't an expert in a given field. Of course, I'm not claiming that I'm right simply because I'm an expert, but I am claiming that experts would not say the things you're saying about talent, etc., as though Hilton could just make up for the fact that they're not going to attract top talent by just hiring a lot of mediocre talent, or saying that HFT companies pay more in cash so that makes them automatically more attractive than FANG jobs etc. These are simply really only things that someone who doesn't really understand how tech talent works would say - not an insult at all. We're all equal on the internet but we're not all equally knowledgeable or experienced in every field. If you style yourself an expert and think of my comments as an insult, I'm sorry you think that but I don't there's any shame in not being an expert.

In any event my main point is Hilton is not going to be able to attract the top tier for the most part. I agree that fintech firms that pay only cash comp are not interesting to a lot of folks, I certainly have zero interest in that sort of job, but there are some people who go for it. There's some sort of allure I suppose to high speed trading. But hotel IT doesn't have that and it doesn't have the sky high salaries.

WasKnown

I'm just going to quote all of my comments where I say it is NOT about comp because you keep replying to that for some reason. And there is no top talent that is choosing RSUs over cash. The best SWEs get both.

Time will tell who is right.

synzero

Okay, let me take a step back and try to explain what I'm saying with a bit more detail, because again, as expert as I'm sure you are at analyzing companies from the outside, that's not the same thing as being INSIDE tech companies and seeing how we function and what it takes to build and design things, what motivates top talent, etc.

There are lots of different sorts of companies and projects top talent is attracted to. Many are attracted by the technology itself, what the company is actually building; many want high equity potential upside and are willing to forgo cash comp for that lottery ticket, many want the prestige of a FANG job because they think it will help them longer term, many are attracted to early stage because they want to make a big impact, many are attracted by high cash comp, but it helps if there is SOME sexiness to the company and what it's doing.

I'd say the paradigmatic example of being able to spend to get top tier is the fintech companies you're referring to - similarly banks and so on also do this, as I'm sure you know. But they HAVE to do this because they don't have any of the other things that normally attract the top. And for some people, financial services is still somewhat sexy even if it's not as cool as, say, self-driving cars or something.

But I am really making two points - the first is that you drastically underestimate the impact of not being able to attract a lot of top talent. That is really the key thing I meant by saying you can't spend your way to getting top talent. You just re-quoted yourself saying Hyatt "doesn't need" to spend $500K, and I disagree. I think if they really wanted to do something revolutionary they WOULD need to spend $500K on salaries because that's probably the minimum you'd need to spend to get a top tier candidate to look at working on a hotel IT project. And I'm not even sure that would work, but even if it would, we all know it's very unlikely Hilton or any other hotel chain is going to do that. So that's really the crux of our disagreement. Hiring a bunch of mediocre designers and engineers might get you more features or something but it isn't going to build anything revolutionary or exciting. It'll just be a somewhat better hotel site.

Which brings me back to my original point which is simply that while I can imagine hotels building something amazing, I don't think any of them will. Including Hilton and it's $124M/year spend. I'm sure they can build out some more features but honestly, it's a lot to spend for very small marginal improvements. Hyatt already has a pretty nice app checkin process, a nice electronic room key thing, a pretty nice ability to cast from your phone to the TV, and so on. They seem to be doing just fine to me. Yeah, adjoining room reservations online is great, but come on. How often do you really need to do that? I can just call the hotel and ask them to do that. It just doesn't seem like Hilton is going to revolutionize hotel stays. And given that they can't attract the top talent in the numbers they'd need to really make a huge difference, I don't expect all that much from them or any hotel.

Yes, we will see who's right, I suppose. If Hilton's $124M suddenly make some monumental difference in a few years, I'll be here to admit I was wrong.

WasKnown

I think we disagree on so many things (ie I do not think banks have spent their way to the top as firms like GS + C1 largely get b tier talent and pay B tier salaries). But all of this is secondary to the fact that, as I repeated multiple times already, my issue is with Hyatt not investing money into its tech (not only talent). Hilton has invested money and that has manifested itself in the ways I pointed out above. Hilton has already fundamentally transformed as a company and what we see today is the result of one of the most legendary/lucrative deals in REPE history. We can agree to disagree because this is clearly unproductive.

synzero

I have little interest in bank IT so I haven't kept up with it, but back when I lived in NYC I knew some top software architects who were working for banks doing incredibly boring stuff for cash comp that was 2x the going rate. No idea what it's like at GS but the main point is simply that financial companies need to pay more cash because they don't have the other things that attract top talent.

>not only talent

Yes, we do fundamentally disagree about the importance of top talent; because you don't know how big of a difference top talent makes. It's a common misunderstanding of people outside the tech industry, and I suppose that can include analysts. 10 top designers and engineers can make a monumental difference that you cannot make up with 200 mediocre people. That's why it doesn't make as much a difference as you seem to think that Hilton is "investing" so much in IT. It will make a difference but it's not nearly as transformative as it would be if they spent 1/5th as much on top tier.

Concretely what does Hilton have to show for all that spend? Just being able to reserve rooms on a map? I could implement that with a few top people in a few months. Is that what they're getting for their $124M?

Let me just finish with this; there's a reason tech jobs have not all been outsourced to India. Because the difference in impact of top people is an order of magnitude or more on results. For some reason the US, as weak as we are educationally in many ways, still produces far more top talent than most other countries. That's why top tier can get half a million dollar total comp packages. They're worth it.

WasKnown

I don’t disagree with the idea that top talent is important. No idea how this is at all relevant to my post though. I do not think I in any way suggested that top tech talent isn’t worth it. If anything, I criticized companies that don’t value this (ie Hyatt which is literally a client of one of the most notorious IT consulting h1b farms). Either way, it seems like you are arguing for the sake of arguing. If you want to justify things like no availability in pints calendars with reasons other than IT, that’s fine. We can just agree to disagree.

Re your comments on me personally: we are the primary people that need to live with the consequences of our life choices. Nothing that anyone says online can change what those consequences are. We can let these consequences stand alone in determining who ultimately chose correctly. So far, I think I have done OK. Good luck.

synzero

It is often rather odd how difficult it is to communicate what seem to be very simple points. You have said that you think Hilton is investing a lot into IT, and Hyatt is not, and that is going to make a big difference. I am simply saying that neither of these companies is going to see a transformative impact of their IT, because they can't attract enough top talent, and top talent is a necessary condition of making a transformative impact. For that reason, my expectations for hotel IT are low, and as long as a hotel is basically meeting the basic bar of - the IT mostly works, when there are problems they're fixed fairly easily, and the site stays up the vast majority of the time - that's really all I really expect of a hotel. I don't believe Hilton's $124M is going to make that much of a difference. All it's going to do is allow them to develop a lot more features but the impact of any 1 feature is likely to be a tiny marginal gain in user experience. That's a pretty straightforward argument, it seems to me.

I have not at any point made any comments about you "personally". Saying you don't understand how tech talent works is not an insult, it's just an observation, and I'm not really sure why you think that everyone has the same level of understanding of how tech talent works, unless you think that there are no other people in the world who can possibly understand how this stuff works better than you, which seems a very odd thing to believe. I don't presume to understand your world of expertise (which appears to be business analysis), why do you presume you understand what it means to build things in tech? There is such a thing as expertise, which you get from experience.

Think of it this way: do you think you would be an expert in internal medicine if you analyze hospital financial performance? You can be very good at the latter without deeply understanding the practice of medicine or what motivates doctors to choose hospital jobs.

WasKnown

Ok time will tell. Let’s wait and see.

nsx

Given how long the repricing exercise is taking I'm certain that it's mostly manual. In the OP's case someone was supposed to check category change and didn't.

peteropny

Ok let’s stop bickering and get back to the topic of the thread!!!

peteropny - co-mod - Hyatt

Matt4200

Yes, I’d agree. So most repricing was done automatically, but whenever was missed is being done manually, in my case (and some others) the agent forgot to check that the category had been changed.

Wondering if a similar issue will arise when/if Hyatt does Category downgrades in March 2022.

Colin

i found the IT discussion elucidating.

WasKnown

Sounds like yours was manual, as we discussed initially. For whatever reason, Hyatt did not (or could not) automate it entirely which allows for errors like this