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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 i

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.
    - CocaKoala 10y ago
      Ah, okay. My experience was with an independent bakery doing both retail and commercial production; that is, we would bake mix, proof, and bake bread/pastries in house for direct sale to the public, and additionally provide bread and pastries to local restaurants for resale. I worked there for almost but not quite two years, and by the end I was managing the bread dough for all the mixes (moving things in and out of the proofer and fridge as necessary to make sure they were ready to bake at the right time), mixing all the specialty breads (multi-grain loaf, rye breads, holiday breads, basically everything but the sandwich bread, french bread, hot dog buns, and pizza dough), handling 95 percent of the actual baking, plus I was the person who kept track of the pastry stock, produced and baked pastries, and did the final prep work (frosting the brownies and cakes, etc).
      - agumonkey 10y ago

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.
  - CocaKoala 10y ago
    Ah, okay. My experience was with an independent bakery doing both retail and commercial production; that is, we would bake mix, proof, and bake bread/pastries in house for direct sale to the public, and additionally provide bread and pastries to local restaurants for resale. I worked there for almost but not quite two years, and by the end I was managing the bread dough for all the mixes (moving things in and out of the proofer and fridge as necessary to make sure they were ready to bake at the right time), mixing all the specialty breads (multi-grain loaf, rye breads, holiday breads, basically everything but the sandwich bread, french bread, hot dog buns, and pizza dough), handling 95 percent of the actual baking, plus I was the person who kept track of the pastry stock, produced and baked pastries, and did the final prep work (frosting the brownies and cakes, etc).
    - agumonkey 10y ago