The business of pastry sales saturates pretty quickly relative to other products. So "better pastries" can keep on scaling but you can't keep charging more for them. The regional food/dining marketplace can only bear so much, so "better pastries" can't draw from a much larger group of customers.

There's nothing inherent in software that makes it so that can't be the case for software products either. I anticipate the response here is that some products are more complex than others -- true enough, but how many people buy a wedding cake at the grocery store?

My wife and I did in fact buy our wedding cake from the Publix Bakery near the church. We were extremely satisfied with the quality and the much more affordable price. Enough cake for a couple hundred guests for about $400.

To expand my point, we had a really tight wedding budget but still wanted to have friends and family. We had our reception in the Church's Fellowship Hall, not some fancy venue that cost 10x more. My wife and I had to make some hard decisions (harder for her than me, I could have gone much cheaper), but in the end we stuck with the plan. Are more expensive designer cakes worth the money, absolutely! And the pastry chefs who make them are worth their wages. We met with one of the local bakeries that won on Buddy the Cake Boss. But! We didn't have the money. No amount of wishing could make us have the money at the time. We loved our wedding cake from grocery store bakery. It was yummy with good icing and our guests said nice things. Maybe its just because you always say nice things at weddings.

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.

I had a small wedding too. But this isn't typical.

If that were the case here, then surely the demand for pastry chefs would also saturate and there would be no paradox?

I don't find it hard to believe, but if a regular line cook can do the job "good enough", why hire a dedicated pastry chef? If using a bonafide pastry chef makes a real difference, the higher end restaurants will hire them and have a competitive advantage.

I don't know. Perhaps many diners can't tell the difference, or restaurants don't think they can. Perhaps restaurants aren't that interested in desert because it's often a money loser for sit-down restaurants. But you can't tell me no software project has ever operated under similar assumptions (in fact the article says as much, pointing out that there are plenty of places hiring five-figure boot camp grads over more experienced developers).

An experienced worker can work faster at the same level of quality, or at the normal pace or even slower but with a much higher quality, or a combination of these. Not being a domain expert, I can't tell for pastry chefs. (E.g. for sushi chefs, increase of speed seemingly dominates increase of quality, quality as experience grows.)

> Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries?

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.

Presumably less wastage leads to more profit and a growing customer base means higher prices can be charged?

The real value of an experienced chef is in the creation and perfection of a recipe. Once that is achieved, a less experienced chef can churn the pastries out indefinitely - assuming they stick to the recipe.

It's not that easy. Ambient temperatures change, humidity levels, flour retains more moisture. Small changes in these things can make huge differences in the finished goods. A skilled baker will read these factors and adjust.

Reminds one of that Breaking Bad episode...

ditto programming.

lots of value differential between a "coder" and an "engineer".

Let's be honest. Making pastry is not really hard.

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.

I'm sorry, but what you are thinking of is a baker. A simple baker.

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.

I have to disagree with you completely.

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.

Another way to stay below those razor thin profit margins is to hire cheaper chefs. Nobody is denying that better educated chefs make better pastry. But if 'edible' pastry is good enough for your average customer, then it might be a more profitable strategy to cut down on the labor costs.

Dude. You bought, hooker and sink, some bullshit ad from the local 'artisanal bakery'.

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.

It doesn't meet your 10 generation bar (not sure there would be even 4 generations of non Maori baking in New Zealand) but I can name 3 second generation bakeries/kitchens and the staff work very hard and have high standards. The things they make get high prices and they appear to be doing very well. I went to school with 4 of the younger generation and they now mostly run one of the companies.

>Dude. You bought, hooker and sink, some bullshit ad from the local 'artisanal bakery'

The world is larger and has far more tradition and expertise in food that your local USA neighborhood, "dude".

Let's be honest. Writing code is not really hard.

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.

How many companies need "basic code"? Many need much more than that. Your phrasing makes it seem like advancing beyond that point is just as easy, but it's not.

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?

Have you ever looked into how many businesses do nothing but set up WordPress sites for customers with light customization? Quite a lot of companies want such services.

"Writing code is not really hard" isn't the same thing. Maybe you can bang together such a site without really coding, as soon as you do, even simple PHP or HTML it gets harder. I'd also take "writing code" to mean writing code, not just a subsection of particularly easy code - you can't advertise as "software developer" in general if all you can do is wordpress.

You can't advertise as a "pastry chef" if you just know how to bake cupcakes either.

I'm not sure this is relevant to my point that coding isn't easy. I don't know anything about pastry-cheffing.

I think you're missing the point of my post -- I don't think writing code is easy.

I am not saying that pastry chefs and baristas are useless.

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'.

> You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.

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.

I feel like if it were really that easy there wouldn't be any need for the elaborate system of culinary schools and apprenticeships at restaurants that teach high-level versions of these skills.

I just want to say that there is a misconception here. 'Chef' indeed needs to go to school and may take years to earn the title. 'Pastry chef' is not a 'chef'. There is no culinary school involved, or required to be pastry chef.

You keep using this word "pastry". I don't think it means what you think it means.

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.

> You keep using this word "pastry". I don't think it means what you think it means.

Um, what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastry

I don't see a great controversy brewing here. Pastry. What do you think it means?

Like "software engineer", "chef" is a pretty much unregulated title. You can be hired as a "chef" as a fairly low skilled short order cook, or as a highly skilled, highly trained master of fine fusion cuisine.

And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.