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.