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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

> You might as well test a French Cuisine Chef on how well his Chinese cooking is.

A way more apt comparison would be evaluating him on his knive sharpening skills.

As someone who has worked in professional kitchens, I can say that any professional chef that isn't comfortable sharpening their own knives isn't there because they love cooking. All of the ones I know take great pride in their knives.

I think a more apt comparison would be to tell a classically trained English speaking chef to write out obscure recipes in French

The HN Law of Analogical Accuracy: for each attempt at an analogy, an attempt at a more accurate yet more abstract analogy exists in a reply.

If it continues long enough, so we eventually reach a point where the original situation is used as the analogy?

Hilarious. "... Okay, but this is more like if instead of on a cruise ship in Borneo, the monkey is a guy at an engineering interview who only has JavaScript on his resume, and the recruiter is making him implement linked lists in C."

It actually happened already, right down below:

> It'd be a bit like 'someone else has set up a software development environment for you, now write some code' I suppose.

It just goes round in circles for eternity; the never-ending search for the Aptest of Comparisons.

Im not a professional cook, but i do cook most all my meals.

I make my own knives.

name checks out.

Not a professional chef but I'm a good cook. I try to bring my own knives when I travel to visit friends just in case someone asks me to cook, because most home kitchens have shit knives that are only good for spreading butter.

This is a dicey proposition when flying: Carry-on is not an option so I have to bring my B-grade knives that I won't miss if the airline loses them.

I got frustrated with terrible knives in a variety of Airbnbs but instead of bringing my own, I bought a portable sharpener. It generally makes even a pretty bad knife into something not so terrible to use for a couple days. And airport security doesn't care, even in carry-on.

Right on! I'm at an extended stay hotel right now for skiing/work, and good knives are one of the things I brought to stock the kitchen.

Growing up, all my family used were small, cheap paring knives. As an adult I treated myself to a high quality set, and I try to keep them in good shape. It's taken a few years to fix my visiting in-laws' bad habits like running them through the dishwasher or cutting stuff on ceramic plates. At first they thought I was odd for calling them out on such things, but they're starting to come around and realize the quality of life improvement of being able to actually slice things. I'll bring my sharpening stone and oil when visiting them, and put an edge back on whatever random kitchen knives they have. I sharpened my sister-in-law's set and she almost chopped her fingers off cutting through a tomato because she was used to putting muscle into it. A month later she bought a whole new set of knives that have sharpeners built into the block. My mother-in-law now even brings her knives when she visits us just so I can sharpen them sooner!

Rando, but question of genuine interest:

What keeps you from having a couple sets of A grade knives? Is it cost, or some other thing?

I'm asking because I have a few tools I LOVE. One is a set of dial calipers and I've had them since the 80's. I can get new ones, and have, but that tool I know well. My measurements are most repetable with it.

I bought my A-grade knives from a knifesmith in Kyoto. They're expensive and very difficult to replace. Nobody gets to touch those except me.

My B-grade knives are Shuns, which are still much better than 90% of the knives in a typical American kitchen but a bit more tolerant of abuse and available everywhere.

Oh, got it. Very special knives!

Thanks, that makes great sense.

A butcher can sharpen knives very well, but that doesn't mean they'll know how to cook. Same goes for a line cook, while a chef knows how to run a kitchen... sorry for being pedantic, but being good at grinding out Leetcode questions doesn't mean you'll be a good programmer. It'll mean you'll be good at answering Leetcode puzzles.

Err, no. Being able to sharpen one’s own knives is a basic skill that every professional chef learns early. Having a sharp knife isn’t an ego-driven showoff move, it’s critically important.

As someone who knows nothing about being a professional chef, it surprises me to discover that a professional chef wouldn't be very comfortable sharpening knives!

I would not trust somebody who calls themselves a professional chef if they couldn't sharpen a knife.

And if they couldn't sharpen a knife? Would you still trust them to cook a 5 course dinner?

Sure. Just like I trust race car drivers to drive even though they don't know how to fix the car. As long as they understand the basics of how the car parts interact, they'll be just fine driving it.

But in practice, a good one probably won't let anyone else sharpen their knives, nevermind be unable to do it.

It'd be a bit like 'someone else has set up a software development environment for you, now write some code' I suppose.

Good race car drivers actually know how car works and I bet can fix many things. Race car drivers take the car to the limit and understanding how car works is competitive advantage - they can help mechanics tune the car, can diagnose problems that show up only at high speed, understand pro/cons of different suspesions and how they work, etc.

On the other hand typical Uber driver does not need to know anything about the car other than what pedals are for and you turn the wheel to steer. If he tries to take the car to the limit, he probably gets 1 star rating from scared passenger. No need to know how car works.

You decide whether Google engineers are more like race car drivers or Uber drivers.

But they probably don't have a MSc like lot of F1 mechanics do.

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