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Stressed and burned out so he is opening a food business? What?? I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of

by Stauche 10y ago

Stressed and burned out so he is opening a food business? What?? I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of stress and your just as likely, if not more so, to get burned out. Tell your friend to seriously think twice...

agumonkey 10y ago
It's well known that food industry is stressful, but maybe the nature is different. It's more physical and less mental. Also more social (you interact with customers, kids, families, birthday cakes paint a different mindset) One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.
- CocaKoala 10y ago
  There's plenty of mental stress working in a bakery. You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen). If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order? If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space? If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule? Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
  - toast_coder 10y ago
    Point taken, but.... Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce. Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this). There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment. I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%. I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
    - CocaKoala 10y ago
      >but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system. Has anybody here claimed the opposite? Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        I only worked at a satellite bakery[1], not the bread making part, which is not taxing mentally after 20 days. For the rest I honestly cannot speak. [1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
- Stauche 10y ago
  It's physical, it's mental, it'psychologial, it's emotional - it's everything. The social aspect is a double edge sword; dealing with customers, employees, 3rd parties is a bitch sometimes.

by Stauche 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

It's well known that food industry is stressful, but maybe the nature is different. It's more physical and less mental. Also more social (you interact with customers, kids, families, birthday cakes paint a different mindset) One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.

CocaKoala 10y ago
There's plenty of mental stress working in a bakery. You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen). If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order? If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space? If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule? Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
- toast_coder 10y ago
  Point taken, but.... Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce. Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this). There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment. I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%. I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
  - CocaKoala 10y ago
    >but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system. Has anybody here claimed the opposite? Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      I only worked at a satellite bakery[1], not the bread making part, which is not taxing mentally after 20 days. For the rest I honestly cannot speak. [1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
Stauche 10y ago
It's physical, it's mental, it'psychologial, it's emotional - it's everything. The social aspect is a double edge sword; dealing with customers, employees, 3rd parties is a bitch sometimes.