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.
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.
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.