Restaurant work sucks, it's not tipping's fault. I don't work nearly as hard as a software developer compared to when I was a waiter or cook. Software development is lower stress most of the time too.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from that hard work is as valuable/more valuable than skilled work. But it seems to be a pervasive idea.
The problem is that the turnover rate in restaurants is ALREADY very high. Most employees see it as a “stepping stone” while they get their careers on track.
The industry is terrible. If you didn't work in it, your solutions sound a whole hell of a lot like "bootstraps". I think "there should not be such thing as poverty wages" or "if you can't afford to pay people you can't afford to run your business" are better
> Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return.
> That's because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers.
Knowledge work does look different from physical work, but you can work hard at both; you need to work hard at either to be successful.
As for why hard physical work is so valued - only a century or two past, it was the only practical method to prevent the starvation for yourself and your family. Knowledge work being a viable means of survival (for non-nobles) is pretty new, all things considered.
Even my own parents never really understood how knowledge work could be as valuable as getting out and working with your hands; and they were born in the early/mid 1900's.
I probably should have used the phrase "unskilled work" in my original post, but I was trying to convey the person's frustrations about "hard work." From an outsiders perspective, a skilled knowledge worker doesn't look like they're working very hard, but we know that's not true.
Those people are only serving us the food we need to live.
After a certain point, programming becomes less hard. It becomes a set of very familiar syntax snippets to copy/paste around.
Rushing around a kitchen in the heat, and often toxic, juvenile environment all week never changes… versus programming in your house?
Give me a break. You’re not coming close to putting the same real pressure on your body.
Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.
- 20 years of work
- x years of study
- being born with the right nature/nurture mix for computer work
…to get to this point. That’s a very significant initial hump in difficulty that restaurant work doesn’t have.
I've worked in a factory as a machine operator, and in a company as a programmer, and they're not comparable in either difficulty or compensation.
people with engineering degree struggle to find job as SE.
let alone that you need to put hundreds/thousands of hours into it in your free time
and then still learn a lot as dev in order to move up
i'm not saying that it makes SE harder, just different.
Go work 20 years of Friday and Saturday nights in a popular restaurant. Does not have to be the same one, as the expectation is the same.
The level of effort I need to put into coding dropped off exponentially.
As one ages the level of effort out into restaurant work goes up.
Let’s rely on science and not bias. Programming is still not sweatshop work on the regular. I work 4 solid hours a day.
Why isn’t there a flood of ex-restaurant workers becoming software engineers? Because getting over that hump is really hard, statistically speaking.
Classist wage disparity is a real problem in America today. Often knowledge workers who don't work hard earn more than physical workers who do work hard.
earnings are measured with productivity, and knowledge work has more scaling to their productivity output. You can dig holes really hard, but a hole dug is a hole dug. A line of code written is not just a line of code, as power of compounding output stacks on top of each other.
Historically, the people doing "hard work" were peasants, serfs, and other lower-class people.
The people doing "skilled work" were the educated sons of nobility, and later of wealthy merchants.
An awful lot of the unhealthy and destructive dynamic in our modern work can be traced to feudalism.
Skilled, in late antiquity/mediaval times, meant the engineer doing trebuchet, or building ships, or building high quality steel, etc.. et.c.. it was actually hard work.
None of them were things that the ruling class/aristocracy did. They just paid for it (with the levies/taxes they took from their land).
Eventually another higher skilled level arised, as thinkers/scientists became hired by the court of a monarch, or baron.... and being a patron (paying for someone to do poetry, science, etc) was a sign of status.
The skilled workers have always been the middle class. It took the industrial revolution, where they could become rich themselves, and monarchy started becoming irrelevant.
It really boils down to how much money a business can make from your outputs. A line cook makes the business less money than someone building an AWS service. This is not a law of nature, just the status quo.
Wait until they learn about passive income and proper usage of leverage!
It comes from well-paid workers also liking to pretend that they are hard workers. It's required for the moral superiority.
Because the labor theory of value seems intuitively true,
Unfortunately it does not reflect the reality of how humans exchange labor.
I think it probably depends on which restaurant you work at and on your skill set and ability to thrive in that fast paced environment.
The difference is that software is easier money if you have the knack for that type of work.
But it’s like anything: you have folks who are passionate about cooking but not business savvy. They might be excellent cooks but the potential customers just eat greasy shit and don’t appreciate nuance of vegetables and spices—and so the chefs are at the mercy of substance-less customer demands. How can one be excited about that?
Anyway, I don’t think the folks quitting their jobs fit this category because talented chefs can make a lot more than minimum wage. But it’s still relevant as one must be excited to go to work in the morning.
Equally true of software development, systems/network administration, etc. It can totally suck, or it can be a source of joy, growth, and profit, all depending on where you're workin' and who for. Some of the best jobs I've had in both industries have been almost like "gettin' paid to play" because the whole crew was doin' stuff they already enjoyed doin' and doin' it for a boss that knew how to motivate in positive ways and how to join in and be part of the fun of it all. That plus a paycheck and benefits? Why would anyone ever want to go back to a shit job after knowing good jobs exist out there.
Software development is done from a laptop, in whatever air-conditioned room or office you'd like.
Restaurant work is, by definition, hot, loud, and surrounded by people who treat you like a servant.
You could take two people who have the exact same "knack" for each profession, and one of them would still be much more miserable.
It just sucks more to be in a restaurant than it does to write code. I think that's kind of tough to argue.
I personally haven't worked in a restaurant, but I see how the staff and chefs are always running around, doing 20 things at once. Stimulants use like cocaine and amphetamine is endemic in the industry as well, probably for that reason.
As a restaurant worker, the pay is usually terrible as well. So while some super rich corporation won't lose millions off of your mistakes, you can lose your job and be forced to live off of your inexistent savings. That sounds very stressful to me.
Your assessment for what constitutes stress seems to be, at best, highly subjective.
For me, the cumulative stress of the software industry is a lot higher. I can never quite "turn off" and in the long-run it's a lot harder for me to control my psychological stress, than when I was working in a kitchen.
(And of course these are highly subjective, I'd expect nothing less from a psychological phenomenon. Anecdotes will likely be all over the place.)
For some people, server jobs are a between what they're doing. Especially for artists/filmmakers it's money between the gigs that don't pay. I met tons of people as a barista doing exactly that.
Worked through college, and yes conditions need to be better overall. A concern would be if it's now a FT 40h something or other, it squeezes out people who take 6 months making coffee to get to their next acting gig. Also, barista jobs are a dime a dozen once you make some friends. Very easy to get rehired, people talk.