Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising? | Hacker News Reader

Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

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173 pointsJumpCrisscross243 comments

"the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the American economy isn’t necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally assumed. ... Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets"

The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.

"Drive" is right. It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many employers have come to believe that cheap labor is a moral principle. If employers would rather hire lower-skilled workers than pay over $35k/year, the pastry chefs should unionize.

Or perhaps Americans are OK with the pastries produced by lower-skilled workers. Maybe they can't taste a difference.

There are actually customers for both, quality for a price, and cheap mass production.

There's definitely something to this:

I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot, and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot.

In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful.

It is changing though: it's possible to get real Italian Parmigiano cheese at the Costco here in Bend, Oregon. Growing up, all I knew of "parmesan cheese" was that green crap that comes in a can, where they were apparently using wood pulp to bulk it up.

EDIT: BTW, this book by Tyler Cowen has some interesting stuff about "why food in the US was so bad": http://amzn.to/2dNxksx

It seems he's retitled the book to "An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen (2013) Paperback Paperback"

I do like yours better, but suspect that'd be less popular stateside

That wasn't the title, I just quoted it as a subject that the book covers. Sorry for the confusion.

I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.

I think each person values the increase in food quality differently. You could rate the difference between a store-bought packaged croissant and a freshly baked French croissant at 10-20%. I may say that the French one is 95% better, as the a store bought one is inedible for me.

Neither one of us is inherently right or wrong. It's a matter of personal opinion, and even though we try to, it is not really possible to quantify the difference as a percentage in any meaningful way.

I think the discussion here is trying to highlight that many people in the US value better food less than many people in some countries on the old continent. For a given choice, an American will not think that the difference is worth the price (or effort) while a Frenchman or an Italian (I'm trying to use example s from this thread) will not even consider eating the lesser version.

I speak from personal experience. I've spent most of my life in the US and six years ago moved to Europe. My tastes have changed, and whereas before I like American food, now my tastes have shifted and a lot of American food does not taste good to me. Now, when I go to the US, a lot of food is at best flavorless and at worst disgusting. Most glaring examples are breads, cold cuts (a.k.a sandwich meats) and tomatoes.

BTW, this is not universal across all foods. I still find American hamburgers (not fast food) to be better than their European alternatives.

I'm not sure I'd limit it to 10-20%, there are some classes of things that are hugely different... I find that making my own stock/broth is at least twice or three times as good as pre-prepared, and even among pre-prepared there's a huge variation. This becomes much more pronounced when used as a sauce base.

I find some things I don't notice as much difference (cream, butter) as I will others (milk, eggs)... There are other things that are a matter of taste (grain, grass, grass-finished beef). I wish, for that matter, that more labels contained what they were fed especially for milk and eggs, as the difference between brands/containers and locations is huge.

I try to cook at least once a week, and sometimes that means spending a day making broth/stock (mushroom is an absolute fav, but the most expensive where I live). I find that there are just a few things that make a huge difference, and others not as much... others still are a matter of preference. I also find that mouth feel is as personal as anything else in terms of enjoying a particular food.

Maybe they can't afford a difference. :(

Or take steps to demonstrate the difference in quality and value. Do pastry chefs who make more money make demonstrably better pastries? Does every employer need that demonstrably better quality? Will enough people buy the pastry for the resulting price?

"It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many customers have come to believe that cheap pastries are a moral principle."

I think that's the gist of the issue. People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience.

"People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience."

My local pâtisserie doesn't charge 5$AUD for a whole range of pastry ~ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559456

The high prices you quote come not from materials, display or worker pay, more probably property location and market they position themselves in.

The prices seem a bit low for 2016. A pastry shop I frequent (not really frequently given my family went low-carbish a few years ago) had their eclairs go from $4.50 to $8 in over the past 5-6 years. :S. Granted they also became a lot more famous.

"The prices seem a bit low for 2016."

there are dates on the various shots. Haven't noticed price increases since then. The shop is owned by French owners who grow the fruit/veg (sans exotic). Famous in my town.

The point is that there's an upper bound for how much you can charge for a pastry. This induces an upper bound on how much you can spend to make it.

It doesn't matter how skill or how rare the worker is, if you can't sell their work for a higher price.

I'm not sure that's the whole picture. For instance, in many European cities, I can get a better quality product for $5 at a corner shop than I can for $35 at some artisanal hipster place here in the States. It's one of the things I love about visiting Berlin; I've never eaten simultaneously so well and so cheaply.

To think that people yell at me when I say that the US's higher-than-Europe GDP doesn't mean that the US has a higher quality of life...

Haha yelling is a sign of confusion...

Good point! People -- including people who should really know better, like government economists -- have been sold GDP as the economy's high score. (Think of Il Sorpasso, when Italy's GDP first passed England's.) It was never intended as more than a best guess, and is one of the many temporary measures for WWII that are still with us today...

I have to agree with the user "douche" who also replied to you. Depending on where I've gone and how much of a baking culture the locality had, I've often had very cheap, very good food, especially vegetables and baked goods.

(Actually, I'm constantly frustrated that baked goods, especially bread, in the United States aren't made fresh and sold in bulk. The good life was five fluffy pitas, still warm from the oven, for about $2, shelved alongside sweet croissants and savory burekas selling for roughly $4/lb. By comparison, basically everything in America is just crap, especially when I'm paying for the $35 artisanal free-range organic crap.)

Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs.

With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer (high-impact) bugs.

Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand.

Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)!

Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?!

Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.

Bad chefs create negative value just as easily. Wasted ingredients. Bad product that looks ok and leads to unhappy customers. Etc.

Poor hygiene leading to food poisoning too

This comment made me think of Chipotle. I haven't eaten there since all the food poisoning problems.

Chipotle is a big chain and got national attention for the poisonings, but in the age of Yelp a few people getting sick can tank a small local business.

Better to pay a little more for decent employees that care about their job and also give them benefits so they don't come in sick and spread disease.

Don't you think it's likely to be a supply chain problem in this case though, seeing as multiple locations were affected simultaneously?

Cheap, inexperienced pastry chefs can also ruin a restaurants reputation if they screw up too badly. You get the quality you pay for.

Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions. The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users.

That's a lot of dough!

What do you mean? I don't believe there was much indication that that cost yahoo anything at all? The stock didn't respond. I doubt many customers left. The page rank has not changed. And there is no indication from previous large breaches that the customer cares or at least thinks anyone else is doing it better.

So what leads you to think that the impact to a business (especially of comparable scale) would cause more financial impact if it was your average dev job vs a chef?

The stock was being held up by Version's offer. They've asked for a discount of 1B, and are considering backing out altogether. The stock will probably respond then.

> "We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact they believe it's not," Silliman said. If Verizon concludes the breach had a material impact on Yahoo's business, then a key condition of the deal would not be met, he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13...

Yeah, Yahoo was already dying of attrition anyway. I suspect the majority of those accounts were not active.

That doesn't affect the alexa ranking. They still have a lot of traffic, and there's no indication it slowed in the month following.

Ask Chipotle if that matters.

Are you familiar with Amy's Baking Company? Sometimes disappointing one customer can have catastrophic consequences.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/12/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy%27s_Baking_Company

They disappointed a lot of customers! It was a pattern of behavior that blew up in their faces, not one incident.

Slightly harder to kill or physically harm someone with a software bug though. Bad food can be catastrophic, although fatal results are rare.

Never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

This is true and there are others too. However everyone eats, not everyone gets a zap to the brain. The below link suggests nearly 40 million cases of food poisoning and 3,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Obviously that isn't all from pastry chefs, but it's vastly more than I'd have guessed. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/

Interesting statistic. Let's say the 3000 are certainly due to bad chefs. What would be interesting: How many of the 40 million are due to bad chefs? From my own cooking experience I'd say you cannot always say before if some food is bad, so probably "only" a percentage of that 40 million is due to chefs failure, but which percentage ..

I'd imagine that food-born illnesses are mostly attributed to unclean surfaces at various points in food logistics. From the farm that grows and distributes, say, lettuce to the cutting board and dinnerware used by chefs.

I'd imagine that most restaurants/food distributors employing pastry chefs have other people to do the cleaning. So the likelihood that one could point a proverbial finger at a pastry chef as the source of a food-born illness is probably extremely low.

I had to call 911 recently, and I was really upset to discover that some idiot had pushed a software update to my phone that replaced the dialer with an "improved" version that changed the way the keypad worked -- in particular, they hid the keypad interface behind a tiny grid icon that I'd never seen before, which made it much harder to figure out how to dial.

If my circumstances had been different, that update could have killed me!

>Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once.

Bad food incidents tend to travel by word of mouth, and they can even hit the papers (bad review etc).

Besides, a pastry place has a much smaller client base than an internet service.

I'm not so sure. I'm the sort of person that quite enjoys going to expensive restaurants and tries to keep up with what's happening in that world. And I've never heard anyone say "don't go to restaurant X, they might have a good wine list and the starters and main courses was great, but their deserts are terrible". At worst they'll say "when you go to X, don't bother ordering deserts".

The truth is that while having a great pastry chef is a really nice perk, for the vast majority of restaurants the quality of the deserts are near the bottom of the list when people priorities which restaurant they want to go to.

In terms of reputation, you may well be correct, but then thinking of the restaurant's bottom line, the generally agreed-upon admonition , "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.

Are desserts that big a part of the bottom line? Surely as long you order drinks and a few courses I doubt the restaurant cares too much one way or the other if you then order desert.

the generally agreed-upon admonition , "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.

Is it? I would say that about many of my favorite places to eat.

There was actually a (NYT article iirc) HN post about it a while back - deserts are apparently often very high margin and main courses loss leaders.

EDIT: apparently I was wrong and it was the other way around! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/why-r...

With that in mind, my earlier post there, about the devastatingly horrible status of restaurants where desserts become known as bad, well, that's likely inaccurate, I must apologize for being mistaken there! :)

> Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand.

> Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)!

Why are you assuming the problems of Yahoo and LinkedIn were caused by cheap, inexperienced developers? From my experience I think the problem was more likely that someone implemented a basic, not-for-production system to scaffold the larger system and was not permitted to change it by management that demanded it be released yesterday.

Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords.

Ultimately, the "ignorant fools" responsible for such mishaps are almost always at the management level.

I'm noticing that you are asking a question, and then ask another question, put forward a straw man, and then say:

> With software development it's a little different

without having answered any questions with facts nor citing any references or even anecdotes to support the notion that there is a difference in the jobs or the impacts to the businesses in their respective industries.

I'm noticing that they effectively used a series of rhetorical questions to try to make a point. The point is that the curve of worker skill to product cost doesn't have to be the same between a pastry chef and a software developer. That concept is more interesting to me than any references would likely be.

Without any support there's no way to evaluate it, interesting or not.

I don't think that truth evaluation should always be the point (at least not initially). More like...a comparison to push into the list for deferred evaluation, as the discussion evolves later in the thread.

If the comment were a stand-alone work, I'd agree, there's no point without framing it as a complete argument with a thesis and supporting statements. However, it's a component of an evolving body of work (the entire comment tree for the story). It can provide an interesting thesis, and it'll either be supported or refuted by other comments.

In that case, I don't think the challenge to this argument is any less valuable.

I'm not sure that your two scenarios are as different as you suggest. An expensive pastry chef may produce fewer pastries (I don't see why it would be more expensive otherwise if the ingredients are the same), but the higher quality may also yield more sales. I can bake you a muffin, but you definitely wouldn't want to pay for it.

For the second scenario, most companies don't need the mythical 10x programmer. The correlation between code quality and profit isn't any clearer to me than the correlation between pastry quality and profit. Most businesses survive on "good enough", and aren't willing to pay a dime more than what's required to meet that threshold.

Also, consistency. Producing high quality baked goods that are consistent is not an easy task. Applies to endeavors like brewing beer too. I think most good artisans are pretty severely undervalued in the US.

Surely you see a correlation between pastry quality and profit? I can name a couple of places that I go out my way to visit (and a couple I avoid). Surely most people can? The places I like have queues, sell out of stock and one has opened in a second (more expensive) location. The ones I like charge premium prices.

You left out a plausible (and common) option: a more expensive pastry chef can make pastries that sell better.

This is what's in play when you see a line out the door at some shop. The prices may not be that much more expensive, but the quality is that much better.

I can imagine an expensive chef to setup processes that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot (eg: different floor that requires a diff cooking, but cheaper labour can't figure it out), also innovation will suffer.

I see the exact same thing in dev envs, and even more so in ops/sysadmin. Cheaper unskilled labour going through old fashion processes without questioning and never trying to improve.

I was really puzzled for a while, trying to figure out how a different floor could at all effect the cooking (and whether I would want to eat any food from a shop where it does) until I figured out that it was a typo and that it was supposed to spell floUr... :)

"...that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot."

I'm not so sure. I think its binary.

I think there's always a touch, a qwan, assumed knowledge, skill & craft, or something that's not captured in the SOP.

The master baker in the shop next door made the most delicious brioches. Left to start her own catering company. Whereas her trained replacements, using the same recipe, ingredients, and gear, just made adequate dinner rolls.

I spent years perfecting my sunday morning pancakes. Big and fluffy. While best ingredients help, there's still a touch to make them just right. I can't even delegate flipping the pancakes to untrained family members.

I've seen this with other trades too.

You and me, we're too close to our work (tech) to fully understand the value add we bring to our work. But you miss it when it's gone.

Maybe this is why the master / apprentice setup seems to work well for knowledge transfer.

50, or 60% of the time, the food I prepare is really good (CMM 1)

A good cook can repeatedly make a really good meal (CMM 2) but not necessarily being able to explain how and why.

A Chef can setup processes and direct any cook to repeatedly prepare really good meal (CMM 4).

A Master will improve existing recipes and invent new ones, will invent new processes to make better meal and make the kitchen work more efficiently etc... CMM 5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model

Joel Spolsky spoke about this several years ago, using Jamie Oliver as an example. In a nutshell, as long as everything stays constant, the process can turn out excellent food. The problem is that unless you manage the living hell out of your supply chain, the inputs change all the time and it takes a lot of skil to compensate.

Continuing with your pancake example: the way I make bread in summer is different than in winter. In summer, I expect the dough to rise faster. If it's a really humid or dry day, I'll do things differently. If the flour isn't the same as last time, I can compensate for that, etc...

Process either requires tight feedback to work well, or all variables have to be minimized.

Do you make Sourdough? If yes, I've had success rising it in the fridge - takes longer (1.5-2 days) but conditions in their tend to be fairly constant. As a bonus, you get a ton of oven rise.

I used to have a starter but not now. Never tried a fridge rise, but it does sound like the consistent conditions would make for a consistent rise. I'll have to try that!

That might be true for a shop, but fancy restaurants have limited upside. If they're filling the seats, more demand doesn't matter that much - it just makes it harder to get a reservation. So above a reasonable level of quality, profit margin will matter more to the business.

This analogy also applies to software development. The bigger the company, the harder it is to justify a high priced incremental software hire.

They can raise the prices until the backlog of reservations is still respectable but not hopeless. That's in fact what many of them do.

Many other factors help drive demand, e.g. social proof, marketing and branding, newness, location, PR, etc. There are diminishing returns to food quality.

right, a higher quality pastry chef produces higher quality pastry and as a consequence of that the higher quality pastry chef should also be the more expensive pastry chef.

Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.

The business of pastry sales saturates pretty quickly relative to other products. So "better pastries" can keep on scaling but you can't keep charging more for them. The regional food/dining marketplace can only bear so much, so "better pastries" can't draw from a much larger group of customers.

If that were the case here, then surely the demand for pastry chefs would also saturate and there would be no paradox?

There's nothing inherent in software that makes it so that can't be the case for software products either. I anticipate the response here is that some products are more complex than others -- true enough, but how many people buy a wedding cake at the grocery store?

My wife and I did in fact buy our wedding cake from the Publix Bakery near the church. We were extremely satisfied with the quality and the much more affordable price. Enough cake for a couple hundred guests for about $400.

To expand my point, we had a really tight wedding budget but still wanted to have friends and family. We had our reception in the Church's Fellowship Hall, not some fancy venue that cost 10x more. My wife and I had to make some hard decisions (harder for her than me, I could have gone much cheaper), but in the end we stuck with the plan. Are more expensive designer cakes worth the money, absolutely! And the pastry chefs who make them are worth their wages. We met with one of the local bakeries that won on Buddy the Cake Boss. But! We didn't have the money. No amount of wishing could make us have the money at the time. We loved our wedding cake from grocery store bakery. It was yummy with good icing and our guests said nice things. Maybe its just because you always say nice things at weddings.

In software, startups can be the same way. Do they need the super scalable, secure, best in breed software? Sure! That'd be great. But sometimes you just have to get out the door now and do improvements later.

My wife and I are just as married as we would be if we had an expensive cake. There are startups in business because they started with what they could afford and then got traction.

I had a small wedding too. But this isn't typical.

> Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries?

That makes sense, but after a certain level of experience, their contribution to quality of pastries will likely reach a plateau and it will only increase further with better ingredients.

Presumably less wastage leads to more profit and a growing customer base means higher prices can be charged?

I don't find it hard to believe, but if a regular line cook can do the job "good enough", why hire a dedicated pastry chef? If using a bonafide pastry chef makes a real difference, the higher end restaurants will hire them and have a competitive advantage.

I don't know. Perhaps many diners can't tell the difference, or restaurants don't think they can. Perhaps restaurants aren't that interested in desert because it's often a money loser for sit-down restaurants. But you can't tell me no software project has ever operated under similar assumptions (in fact the article says as much, pointing out that there are plenty of places hiring five-figure boot camp grads over more experienced developers).

An experienced worker can work faster at the same level of quality, or at the normal pace or even slower but with a much higher quality, or a combination of these. Not being a domain expert, I can't tell for pastry chefs. (E.g. for sushi chefs, increase of speed seemingly dominates increase of quality, quality as experience grows.)

Let's be honest. Making pastry is not really hard.

You can spend 30 minutes learning on youtube, and you will be able to make some basic pastry. It will not be glorious but it might be edible.

Otherplace in this thread somebody was quoting some pastry chef claiming that "it takes months" to learn to do cupcakes or whatever.

That "months" is a definition of low-skill job.

Which is why pastry chefs have minimum-wage salaries basically. Btw, the "chef" moniker here is kind of silly.

I have to disagree with you completely.

From your first line to your last, I can't disagree more or more strongly.

"Edible" is not a sufficient performance by a decent amateur baker, let alone a pastry chef who likely also knows things quite intimately beyond cupcakes like working with sugar and various frostings, fondants, meringues, flans, pies, tarts, cakes, puddings and custards and so on...

When you add that to razor thin profit margins intolerant to waste such that a "recompile" is completely unacceptable then you start to talk about the real aspects of skillful pastry chefs.

Dude. You bought, hooker and sink, some bullshit ad from the local 'artisanal bakery'.

Sorry but there are no 10-generation artisans labouring endlessly to bring you your $5 cupcake. Its just 15-year old kids working to get some money towards college.

It doesn't meet your 10 generation bar (not sure there would be even 4 generations of non Maori baking in New Zealand) but I can name 3 second generation bakeries/kitchens and the staff work very hard and have high standards. The things they make get high prices and they appear to be doing very well. I went to school with 4 of the younger generation and they now mostly run one of the companies.

>Dude. You bought, hooker and sink, some bullshit ad from the local 'artisanal bakery'

The world is larger and has far more tradition and expertise in food that your local USA neighborhood, "dude".

Another way to stay below those razor thin profit margins is to hire cheaper chefs. Nobody is denying that better educated chefs make better pastry. But if 'edible' pastry is good enough for your average customer, then it might be a more profitable strategy to cut down on the labor costs.

Let's be honest. Writing code is not really hard.

You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.

The arrogance is bleeding out of the text itself, I'm not even sure how that's possible but it's happening.

I am not saying that pastry chefs and baristas are useless.

What I am saying is that, according to industry data, any random person can be trained to the degree of 'pastry chef' of 'barista' with something like several weeks of training.

And that is basically indistinguishable from 'no-skill worker'.

> You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.

Mmmmmmmaybe if you're writing boring CRUD (and any non-YouTube educated engineering would probably think of automating this). Fortunately there are much more interesting problems that can take an entire team of world-class engineers to solve, working gloriously or just barely.

Some code really is hard to write.

How many companies need "basic code"? Many need much more than that. Your phrasing makes it seem like advancing beyond that point is just as easy, but it's not.

What happens when you need to debug, and you don't understand anything because you copy-pasted from a tutorial? How long would an employer be willing to wait while you google for the right tutorial telling you how to fix the problem?

Have you ever looked into how many businesses do nothing but set up WordPress sites for customers with light customization? Quite a lot of companies want such services.

"Writing code is not really hard" isn't the same thing. Maybe you can bang together such a site without really coding, as soon as you do, even simple PHP or HTML it gets harder. I'd also take "writing code" to mean writing code, not just a subsection of particularly easy code - you can't advertise as "software developer" in general if all you can do is wordpress.

You can't advertise as a "pastry chef" if you just know how to bake cupcakes either.

I'm not sure this is relevant to my point that coding isn't easy. I don't know anything about pastry-cheffing.

I think you're missing the point of my post -- I don't think writing code is easy.

I feel like if it were really that easy there wouldn't be any need for the elaborate system of culinary schools and apprenticeships at restaurants that teach high-level versions of these skills.

I just want to say that there is a misconception here. 'Chef' indeed needs to go to school and may take years to earn the title. 'Pastry chef' is not a 'chef'. There is no culinary school involved, or required to be pastry chef.

Like "software engineer", "chef" is a pretty much unregulated title. You can be hired as a "chef" as a fairly low skilled short order cook, or as a highly skilled, highly trained master of fine fusion cuisine.

And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.

You keep using this word "pastry". I don't think it means what you think it means.

For one, pastries are not relegated to the simple stuff a 6-month training guy that put on an apron can make.

There are pastry shops that produce stuff as hard, if not harder, than what the best restaurant chefs produce.

In fact, pastries can be challenging even for top chefs otherwise very knowledgable in regular cooking.

> You keep using this word "pastry". I don't think it means what you think it means.

Um, what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastry

I don't see a great controversy brewing here. Pastry. What do you think it means?

I'm sorry, but what you are thinking of is a baker. A simple baker.

Most folks can make a simple pastry, which is what is more common in homes and such. A lot of folks can make a simple cake. Not everyone can make the puff pastry themselves, get delicate things to come out correctly, and so on. Not everyone can successfully make a 4-tier wedding cake, be able to tell the cake itself has enough structural support, nor can they effectively decorate it - on top of producing the myriad of other desserts needed. Folks take some months getting good at the decorating itself, actually.

Add in there bread and any sort of savory item that might be in a pastry shell as well. Knowing the spices and stuff like that.

"It will not be glorious but it might be edible" : Is this truly enough for you if you are paying for it? Getting married? Would you pay a premium for something simply edible? Yeah... Neither would I.

Additionally, pastry chefs (and other chefs) often have some education in business practices and margin producing sorts of things. Would you have thought of ordering grade b potatoes to mash? How about onions? Could you take some leftover food and make it into some wonderful-tasting special the next day?

The bigger reason chefs have bad salaries is because it is kitchen work. It is a service job. And service pays badly.

The real value of an experienced chef is in the creation and perfection of a recipe. Once that is achieved, a less experienced chef can churn the pastries out indefinitely - assuming they stick to the recipe.

ditto programming.

lots of value differential between a "coder" and an "engineer".

It's not that easy. Ambient temperatures change, humidity levels, flour retains more moisture. Small changes in these things can make huge differences in the finished goods. A skilled baker will read these factors and adjust.

Reminds one of that Breaking Bad episode...

>Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs.

Yeah, god forbid the actual quality of the pastry comes into play, and that the restaurant/bakery/etc takes pride in its output.

This is exactly the worst part about the kind of capitalism that’s been popular in recent decades.

It’s all about profits now, and pride in quality is gone completely.

In the US it’s already in all aspects of life, in Europe it has only caught the large companies yet, but it’s something we’ll have to fight globally.

You have to fight people's acceptance of slightly lower quality if it means slightly lower prices? Maybe we can call it the Global War on Mediocrity? Like other global wars, it will result in a massive increase in mediocrity.

BTW when has capitalism not been about profits?

>BTW when has capitalism not been about profits?

At the era when industrialists took pride in their creations.

E.g. to the point to refuse to put out something that they know is subpar or to sweat the details beyond what the ignorant layman will immediately appreciate -- even if those things means reduced profit margins.

Of course that presupposes companies that listen to people and their vision, not shareholders screaming to maximize value.

The current attitude that its all about the profits is why we can't have nice things...

Profits come from satisfying people's values [1], if more "higher quality" doesn't lead to more profits, it isn't valued.

As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers.

[1] negative externalities aside

>Profits come from satisfying people's values

Even bigger profits come from selling crap to people.

Especially if you help build and sustain a whole culture that teaches them to have low expectations from what they buy, lure them with BS ads that tout unsubstantial products to high heavens, etc...

>As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers.

So like van Gogh who died penniless?

>Even bigger profits come from selling crap to people.

Apple sells a premium product and has a higher standard of quality than their competitors. Their products are priced accordingly.

They sit on the largest pile of cash out of any company in the U.S.

Don't necessarily disagree (although Apple makes some crap too of course, generally the take pride in their products and try to do the right thing even if it hurts their volume sales or margins).

And they might even prove that putting something good out matters -- like several other companies do.

But the general mode of production in 90% of the industry is not Apple (which always catered to the more expensive "high end" of the market).

It's companies selling half-arsed products or knowingly bad products (like tons of crappy food stuff), even when they have tons of margin available to produce something better.

One man's "crap" is another's fine dining.

I believe values are subjective and we choose what we value with our wallets.

> teaches them to have low expectations from what they buy

Do you not think that this is a paternalistic view of the world? What makes your opinion on what's "good" better than mine or anyone else's?

> So like van Gogh who died penniless?

I'd bet that there are several artists who died penniless who aren't as well remembered, skepticism is not the same as condemnation.

>One man's "crap" is another's fine dining.

And some crap, everybody agrees it's crap.

This is not about McDonalds vs Mortons.

It's about the Ford Pintos or Dell Dittys.

Few customers care that much about the quality of a pastry. A marginal decrease in quality won't result in an appreciable decrease in customers; likewise, a better quality pastry probably won't bring in enough money to cover the better chef.

At least in the USA. Here, most people equate "pastry" with something on the level of Dunkin Donuts, and are oblivious to the quality of something like an Austrian "konditorei".

The restaurant/bakery/etc may take pride in its output, but if the customers don't care in kind (a thing is worth what another is willing to pay for it) then it's unsustainable. Diminishing returns matter.

Problem is price for pastries is more or less elastic.

I'll pay $2 to $4 for a croissant/crescent but I'm not going to pay more than that. An $8 croissant isn't going to be any better because the preparer gets paid more. It may taste marginally better with more expensive ingredients, but not because the chef/baker/baxter is paid more.

I think you're giving away another reason. In general, Americans don't value high quality food. A croissant is a croissant to us. Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting book speculating why. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/

I think by that logic no one values high quality food? A croissant in Paris is probably about 2 euros as well. If we both agree the French tend to do croissants better, and care about it more, so how come theirs don't cost significantly more?

Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. There's a lot of economic levers to push.

>Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly.

True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries.

Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cooki...

(Mind, I might be an edge-case, since I've practiced baking since I was five years old.)

Would be much easier to try out recipes on the net if people would use scales for flour and sugar instead of a cup...

After reading enough American news I can only joke that they are afraid that the ownership of marginally precise scales would automatically summon a police drug raid against them.

They are not uncommon, I have an electronic metric/imperial scale (they are sold in most home appliances shops). I prefer just scooping quantities out over weighing.

In any case lots of times, after you get to know the recipe, you just eyeball the proportions. No need to be super precise in most instances. We're not making alloys.

I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard it said that some types of pastry are very hard/impossible to make in some climates due to humidity. French pastries can be bought uncooked from France and baked after the flight for this reason. May be a gimmick but I worked by a place with French owners that did this. The pastries were excellent.

I don't know if that's true. I've had some pretty awesome pastries in French speaking Africa, made by French trained patissiers. Pastries that rivaled ones made in France. And this was in hot and humid climates.

The quality of pastry depends on ingredient quality, preparation, age of dough, and freshness out of the oven. There could be others.

A pastry out of the oven is delicious. Which is why pastry made in house taste better than the hours old stuff you get at chain coffee shops.

The parent specifically mentioned Americans. It's much easier to find the right and good ingredients for a recipe in France than is it in the U.S.

Go to any supermarket in France and buy flour for instance: you'll find type T45, T55, T65, T80, T110, T150 [1]. And professional pastry recipes will tell you exactly what type of flour in what quantities. In the U.S. you will only find "All Purpose flour". I know French pasty chef in the U.S. who struggles to find the right ingredients. Since people care about getting T45 or T65, the producers create them at scale accordingly, and so it's possible to find a specific flour for the same price of "All purpose flour" in the U.S.

[1] http://www.wessexmill.co.uk/acatalog/Flour-Types-T55-T45-Typ...

Supermarkets may only carry two or three types of flour, all purpose, 110, and "pastry flour" and perhaps some whole grain....

But that's not where most bakers get their flour, most will get it from someone who specializes in delivering baking goods who will have a larger selection.

You're right. I was trying to convey the idea that: If it's easier for the consumers, it's also probably even easier for the professionals.

I think those specialized deliverers are more rare in the U.S., and so the baker either has to pay for more expensive raw ingredients, or use lower quality.

This is higly correlated with regulatory laws governing agriculture in US and Europe.

EU has much more strict policies, limits on pesticide use, no GMO rule, plus specific laws to protect traditional (sometimes centuries old) product recipies from being faked by inustrial-scale producers, replacing natural ingredients with chemicals.

That's why food generaly tastes much better in Europe.

> limits on pesticide use, no GMO rule

Neither impact flavor.

> replacing natural ingredients with chemicals

You do realize that "natural ingredients" are chemicals too right? Everything is made up of chemicals.

Your first comment doesn't square with my (limited) experience with bread. Making bread from wholemeal organic flour versus non organic makes a big difference. You can see, smell and taste it, and if you were nearby I'd bake you two loaves and ask you to rate each. However this isn't a true compassion as the manufacturing processes are sure to be different. My theory is that there is less wild yeast in the nonnorganic flour, but the real reason may differ.

> replacing natural ingredients with chemicals.

How is natural vanillin any better than synthetic vanillin? Matter is matter. Organic molecules are identical whether a plant produced them or a chemist.

Not the parent, but that's a good example : I cook with vanilla sticks sometimes, and it's just 100x more flavorful: I can leave the vanilla stick "marinate" overnight in my preparation and the flavor will be much different than pouring vanilla extract (real or synthetic). Synthetic vanilla sticks simply do not exist, and I think the impurities and other things in those vanilla sticks contribute to the taste.

Vanilin itself is a good example of the exact same molecules, but for instance I remember on chemistry class discussing banana flavor extract: it tastes "like banana" but it's not actually the same chemical component. Making a cake with that chemical and labeling it banana bread could be done and probably won't taste the same.

The price comparison is a bit weird there; there are some of the best croissants and baguettes by very small cheap shops in France while you pay a lot more for a nasty piece of 'doughy thing' in Starbucks for something that has the same name. That is incidentally another comparison where this falls flat; when my American friends visit, they insist on Starbucks every day. Not only is the coffee and the food better next door to it, it is far cheaper. Of course that is a matter of taste, but that is not the reason why my friends want to go to Starbucks; they find it familiar. Once I get them to go into a local small family run place, they don't go the rest of the stay to Starbucks however when they come back they seem to have forgotten the small place.

Can't speak for anyone else, but for years now, I tend to seek out more local mom-pop shops over the chains. Don't get me wrong, I eat at the chains too, especially breakfast (more functional meal), and will try to eat more locally at lunch/dinner. I also try to cook at least once a week. The cooking comes in spurts because I live alone.

>> In general, Americans don't value high quality food.

What precisely qualifies food as "high quality", and what meaning does value have if it's allowed to be subjectively redefined by others?

The popularity of Whole Foods in the USA seems to contradict that statement.

Whole Foods is repackaged Costco crap that people pay markup for.

I don't think that's the case. I'd like to see some evidence.

I agree, but I know the reason I won't pay $8 for a croissant. Because my local grocery store does a good one for $2. Hell, I can get 6 decent ones from Wallmart for less than 5 dollars. Food is a volume game. Perhaps with automation we can make workers more efficient and pay them better but for as it stands currently its a relatively low profit enterprise. Plus you work every weekend and holiday.

The problem is that you're probably representing the prototypical American, who wouldn't know good bread or baked good if it hit them.

Customers don't know the difference, so most places are fine with serving frozen cakes from the local wholesaler. So the labor rates is driven by those costs.

Well, the typical American is the one who is being sold the crescent/croissant so I'm not sure the point you're making.

Good croissants are croissants out from the oven. Ingredients and method can influence quality but an expensive baker is not going to make worth more than 2x.

I mean, a $4 croissant can taste twice as good as a $2 croissant, but an $8 croissant is more about prestige. It's not twice as good as the $4 croissant just because you get a certificate of provenance along with the fake story about the family who made the raw ingredients possible.

An $8 croissant would be an indulgence a $2 or $4 is one one can buy every day without thinking about it.

In the early 90s, Starbucks marketing research showed (internally) inverse relationship between latte and Twinkie consumption. Think coastal vs flyover. More a validation than heuristic.

I never thought people would pay for high-end toast, but at least in SF, they are (according to this 10 min video)

Toast: Inside San Francisco's Controversial Bread Obsession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhPrWm-vKSY

This is from over two years ago; are artisanal toast shops still a thing? People in New York are no longer standing in an hour-long line to get a cronut.

While I'm from SF, I haven't lived there in several years. From the video, it seems these are just hip cafes (offering artisanal toast), rather than artisanal toast shops. Will have to wait on a current SFer to chime in here.

No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.

Have you ever worked in a bakery?

Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment.

PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here.

Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.

I assume they fail to grasp their ineptitude. Frequently doing a good job is not enough. In a professional setting failure has real costs and you are directly paid to minimize those failures.

One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that your own lack of ability at a task precludes your ability to judge the difficulty of that task (because you don't know your unknown unknowns.)

This often surfaces in the software world as non-programmer managers asking "how hard could it be?" and assuming software developers are unskilled, interchangeable, replaceable cogs.

I didn't say it wasn't difficult - just that someone could be trained in how to do the tasks in a bakery that someone else has already come up with, in 90 minutes. Imagine someone who has no programming experience (0, in any programming language, does not know what a loop or an if statement is) and that you have 90 minutes to train them to join your development team. Come on.

Maybe if they are doing prep work or washing dishes, that's fine.

If you've never made a loaf of bread and don't know the steps, you aren't training them in 90 minutes. The first loaf likely won't even bake - heck, a lot of baked goods take an hour or two. The dough for croissants takes some hours in itself. You might have 15 different sorts of breads you make (admittedly some will use a master dough). And this is assuming these are pre-tested. You might need to make hundreds.

And make other things as well. Even assuming they are all tested, there are a lot of varied skills there. A lot of them have pastry cream, meringue, and different sorts of custards. All on a time schedule.

I'm not saying one can't train the help with tried and true things, but you are completely underestimating the amount of work and thought that goes into it.

I got a lot of push-back for my comments and Googled, completely neutrally, the exact searches "how long does it take to become a baker" (without quotation marks) and "how long does it take to become a software developer" (since the statement I replied to used 'softwere development.')

The former gave me confidence that I could be hired as a baker apprentice tomorrow and learn on the job over a matter of months. The latter gave me confidence that if you hire the staff of a bakery or coffeeshop and want to get them all started as junior software developers, they won't be productive junior software developers after a day, a week, or a month (unless someone happens to already code as a hobby.) They just can't start making contributions.

It's completely incomparable. Plus, I very specifically talked about joining an existing process of manufacturing to someone else's recipes and designs - not developing new ones.

Junior software developers don't do anything that you can train most servers (waiters/waitresses), dishwashers, bakers, bus drivers, pizza delivery people, to start doing after a few hours or a couple of days of training.

I completely stand by my statement that no, software development doesn't happen the same way. It's just different.

You can get someone in as a software tester basically off the street which is comparable to a jr baker. AKA limited part of the process that makes developers more efficient. We also use collage interns to do some development tasks, which might take 6 months of focused training from scratch so 1-2 years training from tester to Jr dev seems about right.

Thus there is a path for someone to be useful their first week with zero training to gradually become a senior developer in less than 10 years.

PS: Just remembered, my dad actually went from cabinetry to developer and his background was a few years of a philosophy degree. Granted, this was ~40 years ago, but the jump is not as hard as you might think.

I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.

Wasting ingredients even a fairly small percentage of the time get's really expensive. This is one of those cases where a server with 90% up-time is easy, but 99.999% is really really hard.

What I don't think people get is it's no big deal to fail say 15% of the time at home. But, bakery margins are really tight and they can't afford that kind of failure regularly.

I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café.

The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others used a no-name vodka + fruit essence mix.

The quality was miles ahead of anything available from a supermarket or ordinary bakery. I offended my mum by refusing to say her baking was better. (But my parents couldn't have afforded the kinds of places this factory supplied.)

I was surprised by how incapable some of the other low-paid staff were. Simple tasks like "arrange 6 half-strawberries like this in a hexagon on the cake" or "put one dollop of mix into the tray" were regularly messed up.

You get what you pay for. Qualified, hard working people demand a living wage. If you can't pay that you get whatever is left over after every other employer takes his pick.

This is so true. Because labor is not a commodity, some folks forget that the rules of demand and supply work both ways for labor, just as they do for widgets.

Every time I dip my toes in some creative field that others take seriously, I find way more depth than was apparent from the outside.

I have yet to find a hobby worth doing where I don't consistently think, "Wow, I'm so much better at this than I was last year/month/week." And I keep feeling that way no matter how much time I put into it.

Over hundreds of years, thousands of people have dedicated their lives to pastry making. You are positing that after the first day on the job, every one of them had plateaued and the rest of their career was just drudgery and repetition. I find that highly unlikely.

I'm only just getting into baking, but I've been cooking burgers for about a decade. The ones I made this week were better than most of the ones I've ever made. I learned some new stuff (this time that a thicker piece of cheese doesn't overwhelm if it's had a little more time to soften from the heat).

An anecdote against: I've been making beef fried rice for a little over a decade (but probably less than 500 times total). The best I could do in the first year was probably nearly as good as the best I could do five years in, and five years in was easily as good as any I could do now. It's a very simple dish, but then, that's the argument about these pastries as well.

As another anecdote, after I learned how the professional chefs made fried rice, it completely changed how I made it. For example, using cooled down rice, preferably from the night before.

Also, the need for extreme heat can complete change the taste, something that most homes don't have.

So if I want really good fried rice, I have to go out to get it.

>thicker piece of cheese >more time

You are creating recipes. That takes vastly more skill and artistic effort than following an exact recipe.

> Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.

If your job is customizing CRM installations maybe not so much.

arguably that is not 'programming'. What I said probably doesn't apply to every IT field.

Why not, especially when we're lumping together everything from baking cupcakes to preparing a tiered wedding cake?

Because the comment I replied to said:

>The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.

That says "software development" and was the only reason for my comment. There are no "cheaper, okay" non-developers (as in, the 90%+ of the population who does not know how a loop or if statement works in any language) you can train in under a day to do "software development".

It was quite a bit more specific than "IT". There is no recipe or set of steps you can follow (as in, actual steps: 1, 2, 3, 4, and then you... ) to be a "software developer" if you aren't one, and a non-developer can't be hired for any dev role. People (including you) thought my comment was about baking; it's not, it's about software development.

If this isn't clear enough imagine an ad in a general newspaper: "Now hiring junior bakers. We will train you, no baking experience required. $18.50/hour." and imagine another ad "Now hiring junior developers. We will train you, no computer experience required. $18.50/hour."

The average barista in California for Starbucks makes $10/hour and might apply for either job. But the second job ad is ridiculous, it doesn't make any sense at all in a general newspaper and even if it's true, would entail weeks of training at a minimum.

Please try a bit harder to see my point.

> “It depends on the needs of the website,” said Boris Epstein, co-founder of the tech recruiting firm Binc. “Coding academies and boot camps” — short courses lasting a few weeks to several months — “graduate people who are perfectly fine.” As a result, wages for web developers nationally increased only modestly during the same period, though the rate of increase was most likely higher at more tech-heavy companies, which also frequently offer stock options.

> The example of pastry chefs — a field where the artistic and technical requirements may be even more demanding — is no less striking. Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients.

Please try a bit harder to read the article you're commenting on.

you quoted "a few weeks to several months" as a "short" course in web development. how long do you think a "short course" is in baking?

It depends on what you're baking, don't you think? How long do you think it takes to learn to use JS to add an animation to a Web page?

That's a pretty ridiculous statement which pretty much speaks for itself.

Software development is as much robotics as baking. I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

>I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

Not defending this guy, but it's not like we are still making the same product (pastry equivalent) as 1999. We go through the automation and then build on top, right?

I find it hard to believe that pastries and pastry-making haven't evolved with the introduction of better tools, materials, different recipes, etc..

I think everyone completely missed my point. You can hire someone (who has no baking skills) away from starbucks and teach them to follow an exact recipe precisely, in a few hours. You can't hire someone with no programming skills (doesn't know what a loop or if statement is) and train them to join your programming team in a few hours or even a few days. It's just not possible, unless they learn miraculously quickly. I think other respondents might have forgotten what it means not to be able to program at all, or what it means to follow a recipe precisely. You can't compare the two.

And the other 25% isn't.

When you are mass-producing a pastry, the other 25% is still robotic repetition.

>Software development is as much robotics as baking

The next time you see a bus (public transportation) suppose that every person on it were committed to joining your bakery as a junior baker, and one at a time you must teach each of them how to follow one particular recipe exactly. You have two hours with each person. How many of them, if they are motivated and attentive, could you train to be able to follow any recipe?

Now repeat the thought experent, a busful of motivated people. If you have two hours to teach them to be junior software developers, how many will you succeed with?

There are no clear steps any non-dev (who does not know what a loop or if statement is) can follow to start developing. You can't use a non-developer as a junior dev, unless they're an incredibly fast learner and willing to put in incredible amounts of training on their own or on your time.

(I am talking about following other people's recipes exactly, not coming up with new ones.)

The big difference is that a software developer can have an impact on software used by millions (sometimes even billions) of users. So it can be cost-effective to have an expensive software developer.

A pastry chef however can only produce so many pastries every day, so for them to get better pay they need to sell the pastry for more. Is the high-quality high-price pastry market big enough for that?

Many software developers write in-house applications for SMEs. These will be used by sometimes dozens or hundreds of people - not millions or billions.

Companies that write software applications that have millions or billions of users generally hire expensive developers.

Take heart, as the industry matures I'm seeing much more wariness about fresh employees and a refreshing willingness to spend money on talent.

Maybe because they are only in demand at the current price point, but as soon as the price goes up, people switch to 'substitute goods'?

Right. All the employers want a pasty chef that will work for a certain amount, and demand is high at that salary. Above that salary, and demand sharply drops off.

Not only for the labor, but for the product as well.

I know few people that dislike pastries... ok maybe they like some kinds more than others, but still...

But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods. Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

At some point, this too will resolve itself. I think you'll see some mix of price rise and demand reduction in the independent sector (with some labor rate rise, too, but only for the highly skilled) and an increase of demand in the cheap, mass production baked goods area. This will take time to shake out, but it will.

...And I could be wrong in how it will: you cannot plan economies. Not everyone will agree with that, but I have yet to see it happen successfully.

>But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods. Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

Eehhh. I think there's a huge range of quality that's underserved between the fancy cookies, over-sweetened brownies, and pretentious scones at most cafes and the fancy croissants and cakes at "real bakeries". In fact, you can tell there's an underserved market because most of the "high-quality", expensive offerings are actually pretty bad, but dressed-up nicely.

You know what? I think my comments in this thread might be a hint that someday, when the economy grows again for non-tech people, I should go ahead, learn to wake up really fucking early, and try starting a bakery.

Also, maybe we'll have increase for demand for affordable, mass produced, high quality frozen pastries that are easy to finish in the oven.

I wouldn't expect the New York Times to bring solid economic reasoning to bear on its journalism any time soon.

Thanks for doing so here so concisely.

Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff, since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise to your chef, you want to fund it with a price increase, but you can't do that without giving a raise to your waiters.

There is definitely some evidence for this hypothesis. If you read about the restaurant industry you'll see a lot of comments from restauranteurs that seem to indicate that they think the salary ratios between FOH and BOH staff are off.

We've had a couple of restaurants in NYC go tip free, instead building the cost of service into the base cost of menu items. Unfortunately it appears that this can be a challenge because consumers aren't used to the higher cost menu items. Even though a $30 entre with no tip is roughly the same cost as a $25 entre where a tip is expected apparently consumer behavior changed significantly. Quite a few places have abandoned their gratuity free plans after a couple of months of testing.

There might be a bit of a prisoners dilemma problem here. If every restaurant eliminated tipping consumers would soon get used to new prices, but when only a few do they stick out as feeling more expensive (even if they really aren't).

We might currently live in a stable but non-optimal equilibria.

Sounds like something an ordinance could solve.

Indeed. In fact, one of the main reasons that some NYC restaurants have been experimenting with no-tipping policies are due to labor law changes. Not ordinances about tipping specifically but rules around pay and benefits for restaurant industry workers.

Its a federal statute originally designed to prevent kitchen staff from being underplayed.

In the modern high end restaurant its back fired.

Are tips required by law to go to the FOH staff or could a restaurant split the tips between the FOH and BOH staff (assuming the staff agrees to it)?

I believe that in most jurisdictions they are required to go to FOH staff. I am not 100% certain about that though.

Nope. It's called tip out, and in my experience it's been 3-4% of my total sales going to the other staff (sometimes 4% of only the liquor sales to the bar). Othertimes, it has been a percentage of my tips themselves (~30%: 10 bar, 10 runner, 10 bussers, I think.. been years).

All of the tip outs you describe are to FOH staff.

Pretty sure the first gig with the 4% of sales went to the kitchen, but okay.

> Even though a $30 entre with no tip is roughly the same cost as a $25 entre where a tip is expected apparently consumer behavior changed significantly.

I bet this is due to the same effect that leads to .99 pricing. People concentrate the most on the first digit of a dollar amount. So if all your first digits go one number up, the consumer is going to feel the mental pinch and consume less.

One solution would be to restructure no-tip pricing in a way that causes the minimum number of first-digit changes (i.e go ahead and make that $12 entree $17, but make the $25 one only $27).

You can thank "the other NRA" for many of the problems in food wages.

http://rocunited.org/the-other-nra-unmasking-the-agenda-of-t...

They have lobbied hard to keep FOH staff wages down (up to 3x less than ROH) supplemented by tipping.

The driving force for this is that your wage bill is not as strongly correlated with demand - no customers means no tips so your FOH staff pay the price for your poor management.

When I said "they think the salary ratios between FOH and BOH staff are off" I was indicating that they think that FOH is overpaid relative to BOH. That is not inconsistent with lobbying to keep FOH pre-tip wages down.

I don't think this is an industry conspiracy so much as a particularly challenging market. The consumer is a vicious seeker of value. This depresses wages and also makes it so that restaurants aren't particularly profitable enterprises(1).

1. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-thrill-of-los...

In Seattle some higher-end restaurants have done away with tips and added an automatic surcharge of 20%. They're very diligent about making sure customers know this before they order, and they make it clear that the money is split between the front and the back of the house.

I can see how that would work but as a consumer I kind of hate that and look at it as dishonest pricing. Annoying.

The problem here is the Restaurant industry. Overall, its not growing like high tech is growing. While even the article notes:

“Restaurants are being built much faster than I can produce professionals.”

That sounds like it'd be good for "professionals", but when you think about the industry that sounds bad for "restaurants".

That means higher competition between restaurants for the consumer's food dollar. The wages to pay the professionals come from those food dollars.

Without people willing to pay substantially more for food there isn't the cash going into the industry to be able to give raises to the professionals (anyone here willing to shell out $25 every day for the best latte in the world, or will you stick with $4 starbucks or brew your own?).

Good points. On top of that you might also argue that restaurants are very consumption oriented.

Fast food can save you time by letting you focus on other things than cooking. A pastry chef will take more time to make something special. During that time you might be entertaining potential clients or business partners, though on the global scale of restaurants, most people are probably going out to dinner to enjoy dinner.

There is of course nothing inherently bad about this. People like going out to have food, and restaurants oblige them. But they can only really do this when their guests are in their restaurants. They cannot create more value than they do now. All they compete on is status, atmosphere, service, food quality, price. I personally see limited innovation potential here, therefore a somewhat limited market. Therefore, sort of like you said, lots of competition in many aspects besides pastry chefs, all for the limited food dollar.

Now compare that to your average software developer. There is new software I come across on a near daily basis that attempts to improve work flow one way or the other; trying to make me more productive. There is more value in a rather basic tool MS Word alone than there is in lots of dinners. If Excel didn't exist, I'm not sure if I would have the time to go to restaurants.

But software development also differs greatly to restaurants, on the developer's side. They can produce a game once, and people can purchase it and play it without the developers having to directly entertain at most a few number of people.

But what I am most surprised about is that you make it sound as if a daily $4 latte is that normal. It isn't, is it?

(Sorry for the mess, the screen kept scrolling oddly, so I could only see the last few words I typed.)

> you make it sound as if a daily $4 latte is that normal

I buy maybe 2 lattes a day at 3.50 EUR each.

I also spend about 350 EUR a year on coffee beans/grounds and this year 1-2k on coffee machines (a one off admittedly, I expect a yearly average of 200-300 EUR on equipment going forward).

Maybe I'm unusual, but I expect people who buy fewer home materials will drink at cafes more?

> I personally see limited innovation potential here

Yep, there's really no "iPhone" of food coming out anytime soon. Fast food already happened, which was the commoditization of eating out. Starbucks may have been the closest thing to that, but that is a $4 drink, not a $400 phone.

> you make it sound as if a daily $4 latte is that normal. It isn't, is it?

That is about what a double-tall latte costs these days. Usually around US $3.50-3.75, but with tip its $4 or $5 if its your regular place and you find the barista attractive...

And yeah, there's been times when 1 or 2 a day was typical for me (sometimes 3 when work was particularly bad), but I mostly work from home these days, so have a machine.

There are a number of reasons why wages might not rise that have nothing to do with free market supply and demand.

The most obvious is you could control wages by being the owner of inelastic goods your workers require to live, such as housing. I think this is how the feudal system worked originally, workers produced cereals but the Land and the worker's cottages were both owned by the Landlord. If the price of bread decreased the Landlord could simply increase rents. So it was only when the factories came along that most workers managed to have any savings.

Another example is where a worker in debt, and must work at an existing job to pay for the debt. Obviously a worker without debt is a worker than could request a higher pay rate because they are able to be more competitive by obtaining a new employer.

Another example is the existence of non-compete agreements.

It should not surprise us that in London there exists widespread use of non-competes and their workers are typically indebted by student loans or mortgages, that the wages are so low. Look at any London software engineer thread if you'd like to be depressed, 300-400 a day and sometimes much less, for people with 10+ years of experience.

Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing. I further suspect this is a deliberate policy by at least the US and UK governments using a list of occupations they depend on to function. Scientists, engineers, programmers.

This shouldn't come as a surprise because even in Silicon Valley where the wages are the highest in the world for computer programmers, it was found that multiple well known corporations were involved in a wage fixing cartel. That however I suspect is merely amateur hour in comparison to the government and its partners.

...what? If I could upvote the top half and downvote the second I would.

Why do you find the idea of a wage fixing cartel so bizarre? It's a phenomenon as old as labour markets themselves. The employer does not want a market for labour, they want a steady supply of workers for the lowest price. Since there are fewer employers than workers, it is easier to coordinate a plot against them.

Also when the economy becomes more centralized and bigger companies swallow up smaller ones, you should expect more cartels. That is just logical.

I didn't say I had evidence but I know the number of competitors for positions in the UK has been going down, not up. The price for labour however has not shifted.

This is indicative of fixed prices, in this case wages.

Does you think the prices for turnips can be fixed but not that of plumbers? It's all the same thing.

I would have thought that Google and Facebook coming in would cause wages to rise?

Well, perhaps, but at least Google had been taken to court for hiring collusion.

I don't know about Facebook but yes, in Google's case they offer superior wages to their employees.

However that doesn't diminish my original statement because Google is likely to hire the most expensive talent and also their employees in London are paid I think about 30% less than their counterparts in the US. I suspect the American programmers are actually more effective at their jobs for a number of reasons e.g. being at ground zero when new domains open up but there is still likely to be wage gap which I'd explain by the depressed wage market in London. There are many very effective workers who ought to be paid twice or triple what they are currently earning. I know some of the younger programmers in the UK are being paid as little as 12-16k a year.

Think about how people won't buy turnips (or consumer goods in general) if the price is higher than they expect -- even if that's the break-even price. I think something similar's happening with employers: they won't pay more than $80-$100,000 for a programmer, the market-clearing price for programmers is somewhere around $130,000, and thus you get a STEM shortage. And this applies pretty much everywhere; it's astonishing how few employers are willing to admit that they can't fill positions, they aren't offering enough money.

That's what I think as well.

Why are they motivated to do this though CT? I feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle.

Labour costs are tiny fractions of these company's profits, and code stays 'fresh' for decades. You can easily get leaps in productivity that save a huge quantity of money for the company by just thinking a little harder. And it should be the case that smaller teams are better teams.

Why do programmers even make wages similar to the middle class? Their work isn't remotely comparable to lawyers or dentists. Surely million dollar salaries should be the norm. The practice of acquhires suggest a starting salary ought to be around 1.5 million dollars.

Even if it was one tenth of that...

good point. Price stickiness can apply to wages as well - it's often used to explain why it's supposedly difficult to decrease wages to keep positions filled during a recession, but I suspect in the current market the opposite is more often true: companies have a certain price point for labor in mind and are unwilling revise their payscale upward. It's a sinister version of your grandmother complaining about the price of milk, since large companies have a lot of leverage to distort the labor market.

On medieval rents ruling out any savings, you're probably thinking of the rack-renting of the Border clearances in the 1700s. There was room for upward mobility in the Middle Ages; for one example, look up the Paston letters and the biographies of the family, who rose from yeomen to gentry and I think minor nobility. Yeomen were freeholders, approximately, but we have records of serfs rising to yeoman status.

See Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, for a great deal of discussion in passing; or look up A Farewell to Alms, although the situation wasn't as rosy as that book claims.

>Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing.

I've read a couple of anecdotes, though never could find anything concrete: the government was more than happy to offer industry the use of H1B visas for high-tech employees.

That way, wages would be suppressed, and the US military industrial complex would be able to outcompete adversaries as warfare was becoming more and more software based.

It might be interesting to see if companies in and around the DC metro area (where many of the associated MIC contractors do business) have a higher rate of acceptance for their H1B requests.

For example, if random banks and insurance companies in the DC area were able to get 2x - 3x the amount of visa approvals vs similar industries in other metros, this would, over time, push wages down in the area for all programmers. This would save the government billions of dollars per year considering how much the US spends on defense.

> workers are typically indebted by student loans or mortgages, that the wages are so low. Look at any London software engineer thread if you'd like to be depressed, 300-400 a day and sometimes much less, for people with 10+ years of experience.

Student loans are paid back based on salary. 400-300 a day is low for a senior software contractor in London, or even a FTE (hard to judge difference given benefits).

6-8k a month is a good wage on London.

Very simple, the supply of people who want to be pastry chefs is increasing just as fast, thanks to the recent crazes (cup cakes, etc) and the explosion of reality tv cooking shows in the last decade that is making that career option a much more popular choice. I know someone who just quit their high-paying consulting job to fulfill her dream of becoming a pastry chef, and willing to take a considerable pay cut for it.

Chefs and cooks generally don't command high wage because there is plenty of competition, including those who don't cook for living.

There is a limit as to how much people will pay to have other people prepare meals for them. After all, people can cook meals for themselves if all else fails.

There's a cap to how much people will pay for dessert. They will just skip it if it's too expensive. As such restaurants will source cheaper pastries from larger suppliers if they reach this point, rather than employ in house chefs.

Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients.

This is an example of pastry chefs overvaluing their own skills, so not surprising there is labor substitution happening.

"months" sounds reasonable actually. "decades" and I would definitely agree with you.

The problem with this sort of discussion is that everyone thinks they are worth more than the market will pay, and that the market is somehow broken.

Read this article, then spend a few days making ice cream, and you'll have a pretty solid grasp on it. I promise, months is an exaggeration.

http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/08/how-many-eggs-should-i...

that's fascinating, though I'm not into sweet things enough to invest in the required equipment.

I do agree with your overall point that chef's skills probably aren't specialized or difficult enough to command high wages in the long term.

It's one thing to make a pint of icecream at home, at your own pace. It's another to product enough (and not too much) icecream in a restaurant's cuisine.

If the restaurant is high-end, the icecream should have the correct ingredients to pair with the other food.

Pastry making is often compared to an art... but then art doesn't pay much either.

This is hysterically ironic on a forum like hacker news.

The article directly makes the parallel case of programmers and code academies. I'd say the same thing about programmer wages and claims you need a 4 year degree to put up a wordpress blog or whatever you think the programming equivalent of making ice cream is. Bottom line is if your wages are low, then your skills aren't as valuable as you think, whether you are a coder, or creamer.

I think the endgame for programmers is very different to pastry chefs. Yes there are bootcamps, but part of their success is being selective in who they accept. No one has yet shown how to take an average person and get them a well paying programming job. Egalitarian dogma states that programmers don't have special abilities or interests but the market has been very stubborn so far.

Why? Are developers overvaluing their skills?

Why do you consider this an overvaluation? I imagine it takes a lot of practice to reach a high level of cooking. Sure, you can probably make an ice cream decently enough in after a few tries, but I imagine to be a good chef you should know how to make something new taste the way you want on the first try or couple of tries.

Not only that but as a chef you presumably have to make it perfectly every time. I remember reading Jacques Pepin saying how he doesn't get bored of cooking because it's never the same: even if you cook the salmon 50 times, no two pieces of salmon are identical but a good chef should be able to make them all taste very nearly the same.

On the other hand, I imagine that chefs have a much more nuanced palate than the regular person so I wonder at what point are most normal people unable to distinguish the differences.

If you have reached a high level of cooking then I apologize and will admit I'm wrong, but it seems wrong of us, who haven't been through the same process, to say it's easy. I'm sure people who aren't programmers might wonder why software always has bugs and security vulnerabilities and think it shouldn't be too hard to write programs without them.

In these matters it pays to look closely at wants and needs. A lot of restaurants want great pastry chefs but in how many restaurants will an excellent pastry chef really make a difference? The whole experience of a night out depends a lot more on the desert. Sure an excellent desert can make the difference between a good meal and a totally over the top experience worth twice as much. But how many restaurants are on that level? Most suffer from significant weaknesses in the basics. A dollar can be spent only once and spending salary on pastry chef competes with cleaning the bathrooms more often.

The headline when I click the link now reads "Creating a Pastry Chef From Scratch"

This also seems more accurate.

Pastry chefs may be in demand, but it does not appear that experienced and trained pastry chefs are in some high demand. Sounds like humans willing to work as pastry chefs are in demand. Personally I have not noticed a pastry explosion. Couple more cupcake spots maybe.

If humans are easy to find and train to do this "from scratch" while on the job...Supply meets demand here. One reason why wages aren't rising.

> For the profession, the downside is that it can be hard to scratch out a middle-class living.

Middle-class living meaning? If it consists owning a property, then...you might need to adjust your definition of middle-class then.

FYI: In Santa Clara Country there is a related proposal to require large employers to offer full-time employment to existing employees rather than just hiring more part-time employees with no benefits: http://opportunitytowork.org/

Seems like a sector that would be ripe for automation ie grunt work of prepping.

Surprised it hasnt taken off yet but maybe because wages are still reasonable.

Pretty sure that would change instantly if wages started rising.

another way this can happen even if there is demand is collusion. if businesses decide together to pay a certain amount for a certain job, then wages won't rise. if they decide to not pay more than their neighbour, they also won't rise. eg software development here has not seen the big salaries like in the US. Even if demand is very high.

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