Comment by toast_coder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast_coder | Hacker News Reader

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Point taken, but....

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.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/

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.

>but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.

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.

I only worked at a satellite bakery[1], not the bread making part, which is not taxing mentally after 20 days. For the rest I honestly cannot speak.

[1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.

Ah, okay. My experience was with an independent bakery doing both retail and commercial production; that is, we would bake mix, proof, and bake bread/pastries in house for direct sale to the public, and additionally provide bread and pastries to local restaurants for resale.

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).

Pardon the slight arrogance, but isn't most of this a technical problem that can either be solved mechanically or you end up knowing by heart after a few months ?

When it all goes smoothly, it's a technical problem that can be solved mechanically or with a schedule that you know by heart after a few months.

If you're curious, please don't hesitate to ask me how often things went smoothly.

Aight, forgive me for asking, I just never encountered this, most of the restaurant I worked at where more industrial than a bakery.

No worries (: It's hard to express how much of the mental stress comes from stuff going wrong. It can be exhausting to have to reassess the plan and come up with a new solution that will still get everything baked in a timely manner while making sure that nothing is over or under proofed, five or six times a day, every day.

I would say that baking the bread is the easy part. Dealing with customers, managing employees, getting to the bakery at 3am EVERY DAY, and dealing with other business bureaucracy is the mentally taxing component.

Each of us have wildly varying experiences it seems. The madness of tech projects made me feel so helplessly alone. Probably because it involves my own brain and soul rather than a production job, where I can just go, do my task brainlessly, clean and leave everything behind to enjoy the my free time. And customers / colleagues interactions felt nowhere near problematic. It wasn't a special crowd either, a blend of rich tourists and lots of working class at rush hours.

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.

I'm sure IBM couldn't set up a single profitable bakery.

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