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Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases

• riskable 10y ago
  Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand. Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)! Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?! Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.
  • uremog 10y ago
    Bad chefs create negative value just as easily. Wasted ingredients. Bad product that looks ok and leads to unhappy customers. Etc.
    • yomly 10y ago
      Poor hygiene leading to food poisoning too
      • jobu 10y ago
        This comment made me think of Chipotle. I haven't eaten there since all the food poisoning problems. Chipotle is a big chain and got national attention for the poisonings, but in the age of Yelp a few people getting sick can tank a small local business. Better to pay a little more for decent employees that care about their job and also give them benefits so they don't come in sick and spread disease.
        • uremog 10y ago
          Don't you think it's likely to be a supply chain problem in this case though, seeing as multiple locations were affected simultaneously?
  • zanny 10y ago
    Cheap, inexperienced pastry chefs can also ruin a restaurants reputation if they screw up too badly. You get the quality you pay for.
    • riskable 10y ago
      Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions. The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users. That's a lot of dough!
      • jethro_tell 10y ago
        What do you mean? I don't believe there was much indication that that cost yahoo anything at all? The stock didn't respond. I doubt many customers left. The page rank has not changed. And there is no indication from previous large breaches that the customer cares or at least thinks anyone else is doing it better. So what leads you to think that the impact to a business (especially of comparable scale) would cause more financial impact if it was your average dev job vs a chef?
        • shagie 10y ago
          The stock was being held up by Version's offer. They've asked for a discount of 1B, and are considering backing out altogether. The stock will probably respond then. > "We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact they believe it's not," Silliman said. If Verizon concludes the breach had a material impact on Yahoo's business, then a key condition of the deal would not be met, he said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13/verizon-just-raised-a-big-warning-flag-for-yahoo/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13...
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          Yeah, Yahoo was already dying of attrition anyway. I suspect the majority of those accounts were not active.
  • vonmoltke 10y ago
    > Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand. > Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)! Why are you assuming the problems of Yahoo and LinkedIn were caused by cheap, inexperienced developers? From my experience I think the problem was more likely that someone implemented a basic, not-for-production system to scaffold the larger system and was not permitted to change it by management that demanded it be released yesterday.
  • kafkaesq 10y ago
    Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Ultimately, the "ignorant fools" responsible for such mishaps are almost always at the management level.
• simtel20 10y ago
  I'm noticing that you are asking a question, and then ask another question, put forward a straw man, and then say: > With software development it's a little different without having answered any questions with facts nor citing any references or even anecdotes to support the notion that there is a difference in the jobs or the impacts to the businesses in their respective industries.
  • khedoros1 10y ago
    I'm noticing that they effectively used a series of rhetorical questions to try to make a point. The point is that the curve of worker skill to product cost doesn't have to be the same between a pastry chef and a software developer. That concept is more interesting to me than any references would likely be.
    • emodendroket 10y ago
      Without any support there's no way to evaluate it, interesting or not.
      • khedoros1 10y ago
        I don't think that truth evaluation should always be the point (at least not initially). More like...a comparison to push into the list for deferred evaluation, as the discussion evolves later in the thread. If the comment were a stand-alone work, I'd agree, there's no point without framing it as a complete argument with a thesis and supporting statements. However, it's a component of an evolving body of work (the entire comment tree for the story). It can provide an interesting thesis, and it'll either be supported or refuted by other comments.
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          In that case, I don't think the challenge to this argument is any less valuable.
• in_cahoots 10y ago
  I'm not sure that your two scenarios are as different as you suggest. An expensive pastry chef may produce fewer pastries (I don't see why it would be more expensive otherwise if the ingredients are the same), but the higher quality may also yield more sales. I can bake you a muffin, but you definitely wouldn't want to pay for it. For the second scenario, most companies don't need the mythical 10x programmer. The correlation between code quality and profit isn't any clearer to me than the correlation between pastry quality and profit. Most businesses survive on "good enough", and aren't willing to pay a dime more than what's required to meet that threshold.
  • steveax 10y ago
    Also, consistency. Producing high quality baked goods that are consistent is not an easy task. Applies to endeavors like brewing beer too. I think most good artisans are pretty severely undervalued in the US.
  • lostlogin 10y ago
    Surely you see a correlation between pastry quality and profit? I can name a couple of places that I go out my way to visit (and a couple I avoid). Surely most people can? The places I like have queues, sell out of stock and one has opened in a second (more expensive) location. The ones I like charge premium prices.
• dwc 10y ago
  You left out a plausible (and common) option: a more expensive pastry chef can make pastries that sell better. This is what's in play when you see a line out the door at some shop. The prices may not be that much more expensive, but the quality is that much better.
  • dorfsmay 10y ago
    I can imagine an expensive chef to setup processes that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot (eg: different floor that requires a diff cooking, but cheaper labour can't figure it out), also innovation will suffer. I see the exact same thing in dev envs, and even more so in ops/sysadmin. Cheaper unskilled labour going through old fashion processes without questioning and never trying to improve.
    • IronIvan 10y ago
      I was really puzzled for a while, trying to figure out how a different floor could at all effect the cooking (and whether I would want to eat any food from a shop where it does) until I figured out that it was a typo and that it was supposed to spell floUr... :)
    • specialist 10y ago
      "...that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot." I'm not so sure. I think its binary. I think there's always a touch, a qwan, assumed knowledge, skill & craft, or something that's not captured in the SOP. The master baker in the shop next door made the most delicious brioches. Left to start her own catering company. Whereas her trained replacements, using the same recipe, ingredients, and gear, just made adequate dinner rolls. I spent years perfecting my sunday morning pancakes. Big and fluffy. While best ingredients help, there's still a touch to make them just right. I can't even delegate flipping the pancakes to untrained family members. I've seen this with other trades too. You and me, we're too close to our work (tech) to fully understand the value add we bring to our work. But you miss it when it's gone. Maybe this is why the master / apprentice setup seems to work well for knowledge transfer.
• emodendroket 10y ago
  Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.
  • carterehsmith 10y ago
    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.
    • wavefunction 10y ago
      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.
      • carterehsmith 10y ago
        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.
        • lostlogin 10y ago
          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.
• coldtea 10y ago
  >Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs. Yeah, god forbid the actual quality of the pastry comes into play, and that the restaurant/bakery/etc takes pride in its output.
  • kuschku 10y ago
    This is exactly the worst part about the kind of capitalism that’s been popular in recent decades. It’s all about profits now, and pride in quality is gone completely. In the US it’s already in all aspects of life, in Europe it has only caught the large companies yet, but it’s something we’ll have to fight globally.
    • merpnderp 10y ago
      You have to fight people's acceptance of slightly lower quality if it means slightly lower prices? Maybe we can call it the Global War on Mediocrity? Like other global wars, it will result in a massive increase in mediocrity. BTW when has capitalism not been about profits?
      • coldtea 10y ago
        >BTW when has capitalism not been about profits? At the era when industrialists took pride in their creations. E.g. to the point to refuse to put out something that they know is subpar or to sweat the details beyond what the ignorant layman will immediately appreciate -- even if those things means reduced profit margins. Of course that presupposes companies that listen to people and their vision, not shareholders screaming to maximize value. The current attitude that its all about the profits is why we can't have nice things...
    • grinnbearit 10y ago
      Profits come from satisfying people's values [1], if more "higher quality" doesn't lead to more profits, it isn't valued. As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers. [1] negative externalities aside