Most restaurants fail. It doesn't seem like a way to avoid stress?

You know sometime even a failure in something you like can be healthier and more motivating than safe thing you ended up dreading deeply.

Unless you drain your life savings, end up divorces... etc.

Professional gamblers* have something to teach everyone about managing risk.

In this case, the primacy of establishing a separate fund as your bank roll, and protecting it by not letting too much of it ride on any single bet (no matter how great the bet seems), is very appropriate to self-funding your own businesses. If you lose your bank roll, then you have to stop gambling, which is bad if you are convinced you have an edge.

*I'm not a gambler of any type, unless you count investing 401k/IRA savings in index oriented ETFs and mutual funds gambling (not an unfair position).

You're right, management risk is extremely important for anyone wanting to quit their job.

My advice would be to not even consider it without having enough money to sustain yourself for a minimum of 2 times the period you predict will take you to become profitable in your desired venture.

So if you spend 3000 a month, want to become a freelancer and expect it to take you 6 months until you build up steady business you should have a minimum of 36,000 saved up.

I learned this the hard way, hope someone out there heeds this advice.

You're doing it wrong

i think stress really just depends on the kind of work, and the expectations of your customers.

yes, most restaurants fail, but most businesses fail, because people think of it as some kind of paid vacation rather than an actual job.

getting up at 5am and making croissants is a very different thing than getting up at 5am and dealing with people screaming at you because an api endpoint isn't functioning.

It is very easy to fail as a restaurant because you signed the wrong lease/for the wrong place/at the wrong location/in the wrong neighborhood, or any combination thereof. Everyone I personally know in the food services industry works harder than anyone I know doing computer programming. Every task that happens in back and front of house has a very specific start time and a very specific duration allowance - there is no flexibility and no opportunity for pacing or giving yourself some slack.

The difference is the type of stress, the mental effort, and the expectations.

At the end of a hard day in the kitchen I'm ready to go hang out with friends and enjoy my free time.

At the end of a hard day as a software dev I can hardly string a sentence together and want to go be by myself.

Likewise in the kitchen I didn't get given completely unrealistic timeframes. As long as I focused and worked hard it was all good.

As a software dev I constantly have pressure to perform miracles and hit unrealistic deadlines from all sides. And the pressure is cumulative. If I have a bad day today I'm going to have to work extra hard and under more pressure the rest of the week to catch up.

If the food services industry paid as well as software dev I'd go back in a heartbeat.

That's most of what I tried to express earlier about the difference between dev/eng and "production" work. Being in the blur and under pressure, without moving targets around and under your feets that creeps in your life seems to be prevalent in the former way more than in the later (even though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12987866 tells a different story too).

Seems like you're describing the experience of being a worker? I expect someone starting their own restaurant has a whole new set of worries.

we're talking about workers, not management/ownership. e.g. like at apple, vice president in your title means the excuses stop mattering. it's your job to fix it, or you're fired, end of story.

A piece of fish cooks in 6 minutes regardless whether it's plain or encrusted in black pepper.

> It is very easy to fail as a restaurant because you signed the wrong lease/for the wrong place/at the wrong location/in the wrong neighborhood, or any combination thereof.

this applies to any business.

> Every task that happens in back and front of house has a very specific start time and a very specific duration allowance - there is no flexibility and no opportunity for pacing or giving yourself some slack.

you've clearly never worked in ops or SRE. or working in a mine, on an oil rig, or on an airplane, or a squad car.

not everyone lives the life of a spoiled computer programmer which seems to be your baseline for evaluation.

I don't think you would need to do much due diligence to rise above most restaurateurs.

Many restaurateurs have been running restaurants and cooking professionally for years before they try to open their own. I'm not sure writing software is as helpful experience wise.

You would be surprised. It's an extremely competitive industry, with some very hard-working people. And hard work is no guarantee of success either.

What strikes me as recurring problems from the things that make it on to shows like Kitchen Nightmares are the following.

  * Can't or won't keep the accounting books in order.
  * Micro-management of staff that want to do the job.
  * Under-management of staff that aren't doing the job.
  
  * I /suspect/ not paying the staff enough (in money/respect/etc) to keep good staff and keep the motivated.

Unfortunately the real world is not like Kitchen Nightmares. Often restaurants with good management still fail due to other reasons, the margins in hospo are razor thin, it doesn't take a lot going wrong to go out of business.