Every time I dip my toes in some creative field that others take seriously, I find way more depth than was apparent from the outside.

I have yet to find a hobby worth doing where I don't consistently think, "Wow, I'm so much better at this than I was last year/month/week." And I keep feeling that way no matter how much time I put into it.

Over hundreds of years, thousands of people have dedicated their lives to pastry making. You are positing that after the first day on the job, every one of them had plateaued and the rest of their career was just drudgery and repetition. I find that highly unlikely.

I'm only just getting into baking, but I've been cooking burgers for about a decade. The ones I made this week were better than most of the ones I've ever made. I learned some new stuff (this time that a thicker piece of cheese doesn't overwhelm if it's had a little more time to soften from the heat).

An anecdote against: I've been making beef fried rice for a little over a decade (but probably less than 500 times total). The best I could do in the first year was probably nearly as good as the best I could do five years in, and five years in was easily as good as any I could do now. It's a very simple dish, but then, that's the argument about these pastries as well.

As another anecdote, after I learned how the professional chefs made fried rice, it completely changed how I made it. For example, using cooled down rice, preferably from the night before.

Also, the need for extreme heat can complete change the taste, something that most homes don't have.

So if I want really good fried rice, I have to go out to get it.

>thicker piece of cheese >more time

You are creating recipes. That takes vastly more skill and artistic effort than following an exact recipe.

Have you ever worked in a bakery?

Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment.

PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.

Wasting ingredients even a fairly small percentage of the time get's really expensive. This is one of those cases where a server with 90% up-time is easy, but 99.999% is really really hard.

What I don't think people get is it's no big deal to fail say 15% of the time at home. But, bakery margins are really tight and they can't afford that kind of failure regularly.

I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café.

The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others used a no-name vodka + fruit essence mix.

The quality was miles ahead of anything available from a supermarket or ordinary bakery. I offended my mum by refusing to say her baking was better. (But my parents couldn't have afforded the kinds of places this factory supplied.)

I was surprised by how incapable some of the other low-paid staff were. Simple tasks like "arrange 6 half-strawberries like this in a hexagon on the cake" or "put one dollop of mix into the tray" were regularly messed up.

You get what you pay for. Qualified, hard working people demand a living wage. If you can't pay that you get whatever is left over after every other employer takes his pick.

This is so true. Because labor is not a commodity, some folks forget that the rules of demand and supply work both ways for labor, just as they do for widgets.

I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here.

Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.

One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that your own lack of ability at a task precludes your ability to judge the difficulty of that task (because you don't know your unknown unknowns.)

This often surfaces in the software world as non-programmer managers asking "how hard could it be?" and assuming software developers are unskilled, interchangeable, replaceable cogs.

I assume they fail to grasp their ineptitude. Frequently doing a good job is not enough. In a professional setting failure has real costs and you are directly paid to minimize those failures.

I didn't say it wasn't difficult - just that someone could be trained in how to do the tasks in a bakery that someone else has already come up with, in 90 minutes. Imagine someone who has no programming experience (0, in any programming language, does not know what a loop or an if statement is) and that you have 90 minutes to train them to join your development team. Come on.

Maybe if they are doing prep work or washing dishes, that's fine.

If you've never made a loaf of bread and don't know the steps, you aren't training them in 90 minutes. The first loaf likely won't even bake - heck, a lot of baked goods take an hour or two. The dough for croissants takes some hours in itself. You might have 15 different sorts of breads you make (admittedly some will use a master dough). And this is assuming these are pre-tested. You might need to make hundreds.

And make other things as well. Even assuming they are all tested, there are a lot of varied skills there. A lot of them have pastry cream, meringue, and different sorts of custards. All on a time schedule.

I'm not saying one can't train the help with tried and true things, but you are completely underestimating the amount of work and thought that goes into it.

I got a lot of push-back for my comments and Googled, completely neutrally, the exact searches "how long does it take to become a baker" (without quotation marks) and "how long does it take to become a software developer" (since the statement I replied to used 'softwere development.')

The former gave me confidence that I could be hired as a baker apprentice tomorrow and learn on the job over a matter of months. The latter gave me confidence that if you hire the staff of a bakery or coffeeshop and want to get them all started as junior software developers, they won't be productive junior software developers after a day, a week, or a month (unless someone happens to already code as a hobby.) They just can't start making contributions.

It's completely incomparable. Plus, I very specifically talked about joining an existing process of manufacturing to someone else's recipes and designs - not developing new ones.

Junior software developers don't do anything that you can train most servers (waiters/waitresses), dishwashers, bakers, bus drivers, pizza delivery people, to start doing after a few hours or a couple of days of training.

I completely stand by my statement that no, software development doesn't happen the same way. It's just different.

You can get someone in as a software tester basically off the street which is comparable to a jr baker. AKA limited part of the process that makes developers more efficient. We also use collage interns to do some development tasks, which might take 6 months of focused training from scratch so 1-2 years training from tester to Jr dev seems about right.

Thus there is a path for someone to be useful their first week with zero training to gradually become a senior developer in less than 10 years.

PS: Just remembered, my dad actually went from cabinetry to developer and his background was a few years of a philosophy degree. Granted, this was ~40 years ago, but the jump is not as hard as you might think.

> Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.

If your job is customizing CRM installations maybe not so much.

arguably that is not 'programming'. What I said probably doesn't apply to every IT field.

Why not, especially when we're lumping together everything from baking cupcakes to preparing a tiered wedding cake?

Because the comment I replied to said:

>The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.

That says "software development" and was the only reason for my comment. There are no "cheaper, okay" non-developers (as in, the 90%+ of the population who does not know how a loop or if statement works in any language) you can train in under a day to do "software development".

It was quite a bit more specific than "IT". There is no recipe or set of steps you can follow (as in, actual steps: 1, 2, 3, 4, and then you... ) to be a "software developer" if you aren't one, and a non-developer can't be hired for any dev role. People (including you) thought my comment was about baking; it's not, it's about software development.

If this isn't clear enough imagine an ad in a general newspaper: "Now hiring junior bakers. We will train you, no baking experience required. $18.50/hour." and imagine another ad "Now hiring junior developers. We will train you, no computer experience required. $18.50/hour."

The average barista in California for Starbucks makes $10/hour and might apply for either job. But the second job ad is ridiculous, it doesn't make any sense at all in a general newspaper and even if it's true, would entail weeks of training at a minimum.

Please try a bit harder to see my point.

> “It depends on the needs of the website,” said Boris Epstein, co-founder of the tech recruiting firm Binc. “Coding academies and boot camps” — short courses lasting a few weeks to several months — “graduate people who are perfectly fine.” As a result, wages for web developers nationally increased only modestly during the same period, though the rate of increase was most likely higher at more tech-heavy companies, which also frequently offer stock options.

> The example of pastry chefs — a field where the artistic and technical requirements may be even more demanding — is no less striking. Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients.

Please try a bit harder to read the article you're commenting on.

you quoted "a few weeks to several months" as a "short" course in web development. how long do you think a "short course" is in baking?

It depends on what you're baking, don't you think? How long do you think it takes to learn to use JS to add an animation to a Web page?

That's a pretty ridiculous statement which pretty much speaks for itself.

Software development is as much robotics as baking. I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

>I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

Not defending this guy, but it's not like we are still making the same product (pastry equivalent) as 1999. We go through the automation and then build on top, right?

I find it hard to believe that pastries and pastry-making haven't evolved with the introduction of better tools, materials, different recipes, etc..

I think everyone completely missed my point. You can hire someone (who has no baking skills) away from starbucks and teach them to follow an exact recipe precisely, in a few hours. You can't hire someone with no programming skills (doesn't know what a loop or if statement is) and train them to join your programming team in a few hours or even a few days. It's just not possible, unless they learn miraculously quickly. I think other respondents might have forgotten what it means not to be able to program at all, or what it means to follow a recipe precisely. You can't compare the two.

>Software development is as much robotics as baking

The next time you see a bus (public transportation) suppose that every person on it were committed to joining your bakery as a junior baker, and one at a time you must teach each of them how to follow one particular recipe exactly. You have two hours with each person. How many of them, if they are motivated and attentive, could you train to be able to follow any recipe?

Now repeat the thought experent, a busful of motivated people. If you have two hours to teach them to be junior software developers, how many will you succeed with?

There are no clear steps any non-dev (who does not know what a loop or if statement is) can follow to start developing. You can't use a non-developer as a junior dev, unless they're an incredibly fast learner and willing to put in incredible amounts of training on their own or on your time.

(I am talking about following other people's recipes exactly, not coming up with new ones.)

And the other 25% isn't.

When you are mass-producing a pastry, the other 25% is still robotic repetition.