One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.
You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen).
If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order?
If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space?
If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule?
Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce.
Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this).
There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment.
I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%.
I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
I think it's really easy to look at something from the outside and think "how hard could that really be?" I bet if you asked someone who wasn't in CS how hard an identity management system is, they wouldn't think it is all that hard. Only once you get into the details do the challenges become apparent, and I suspect that's very true for bakeries as well.
Has anybody here claimed the opposite?
Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
[1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
I worked there for almost but not quite two years, and by the end I was managing the bread dough for all the mixes (moving things in and out of the proofer and fridge as necessary to make sure they were ready to bake at the right time), mixing all the specialty breads (multi-grain loaf, rye breads, holiday breads, basically everything but the sandwich bread, french bread, hot dog buns, and pizza dough), handling 95 percent of the actual baking, plus I was the person who kept track of the pastry stock, produced and baked pastries, and did the final prep work (frosting the brownies and cakes, etc).
If you're curious, please don't hesitate to ask me how often things went smoothly.
ps: I am not saying thta being the customer interface is easy. Just not in bakeries and some other kinds. My mother was a post office clerk, it was famous for the angered waiting line venting violently on the powerless employees, sometimes physically. I never had to deal with this in the food serving business.