The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.
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.
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.
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.
That's a lot of dough!
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?
> "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...
http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/12/...
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.
If my circumstances had been different, that update could have killed me!
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: apparently I was wrong and it was the other way around! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/why-r...
> 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.
Ultimately, the "ignorant fools" responsible for such mishaps are almost always at the management level.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The world is larger and has far more tradition and expertise in food that your local USA neighborhood, "dude".
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.
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'.
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.
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?
And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.
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.
Um, what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastry
I don't see a great controversy brewing here. Pastry. What do you think it means?
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.
lots of value differential between a "coder" and an "engineer".
Yeah, god forbid the actual quality of the pastry comes into play, and that the restaurant/bakery/etc takes pride in its output.
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.
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...
As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers.
[1] negative externalities aside
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?
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.
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.
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.
And some crap, everybody agrees it's crap.
This is not about McDonalds vs Mortons.
It's about the Ford Pintos or Dell Dittys.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Neither impact flavor.
> replacing natural ingredients with chemicals
You do realize that "natural ingredients" are chemicals too right? Everything is made up of 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.
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.
What precisely qualifies food as "high quality", and what meaning does value have if it's allowed to be subjectively redefined by others?
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.
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.
Toast: Inside San Francisco's Controversial Bread Obsession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhPrWm-vKSY
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
I do like yours better, but suspect that'd be less popular stateside
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 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.
I think that's the gist of the issue. 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.
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.
It doesn't matter how skill or how rare the worker is, if you can't sell their work for a higher price.
(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.)
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?
Companies that write software applications that have millions or billions of users generally hire expensive developers.
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
Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
You are creating recipes. That takes vastly more skill and artistic effort than following an exact recipe.
If your job is customizing CRM installations maybe not so much.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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?
When you are mass-producing a pastry, the other 25% is still robotic repetition.
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.)