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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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!
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...
Ultimately, the "ignorant fools" responsible for such mishaps are almost always at the management level.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
lots of value differential between a "coder" and an "engineer".
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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?
And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.
Yeah, god forbid the actual quality of the pastry comes into play, and that the restaurant/bakery/etc takes pride in its output.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.