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I was a mixer general grunt at a bagel shop, also worked at a donut shop, but I have a feeling you are looking to jump in a little above that. In general in th

I was a mixer general grunt at a bagel shop, also worked at a donut shop, but I have a feeling you are looking to jump in a little above that. In general in the culinary world, schooling is like 90% a scam. You dont know how many culinary graduates I trained when I was just someone two years into the industry with a philosophy degree. People do get value out of it, and the debt is relatively small compared to regular college, but unless you go to like CIA you are going to be in the same boat as someone just off the street. That said, the job market for pastry/bread is more competitive, they are special jobs in the whole domain. and you will likely have to prove yourself as a general cook before you can get to work with bread. Any bakery is not going to take a chance with someone without experience, so you need to get your experience in a kitchen. Things in food service are not going to be "careers" the way you want them to be. you will not have any benefits, and you will find there is very little room to progress beyond taking the plunge and doing your own venture. in the united States at least, if you work in a kitchen/food service, you are usually in near constant precarity or you are working over 60 hrs a week. there is little reward beyond the camaraderie of your team and the satisfaction of making things on your feet. and the beer at the end of a shift. I had some great times, but if you are presumably doing Dev work so far in your life, get ready for physical/mental/emotional challenges like you have never imagined. Coding is a million times easier than anything I had to do in food service

schwartzworld 5y ago
> the debt is relatively small compared to regular college, Unfortunately the pay is also relatively small when compared with the kind of jobs a college graduate might apply for. It's not bad once you get your own kitchen, but I've known some very skilled cooks who started at $10 an hour at their restaurants. Culinary degree and all
zengargoyle 5y ago
Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody breathing. It's a fun hacker story. I applied and they told me I was overqualified so I played the "starving actor" card. I do computers and stuff but need a blah blah job to pay the rent. Bagels on that mid-industrial scale are more assembly line like engineering. Cut the dough, feed it into the former, put it on a tray, freeze or proof and bake, coat with things if needed, fill boxes... it's more of just a process. A few weeks later the boss comes out for like the third time for a gripe session complaining about all of the wastage happening during the proofing process. Engineer brain piped up and blurted out "your doing it wrong". Gah! do it this way. The boss turns to the floor manager and promptly sends him out shopping for a list of items and the next day my procedure was implemented and all was well. A week later the boss calls me into the office with the owners. They can't do much but slip me a goodly amount of cash under the table. Not to long after I was the mix-master coming in at 3am with the boss to get the work started and prepare the days production run and we'd bash out a significant amount of product in the couple of hours that it took for the rest of the workers to come in for their shifts. Then he'd go to the office and I'd just mix up new batches of dough or go make some boxes. Pretty much walked out every day with enough bagels to fill myself and my housemates. I would agree in the end, that sort of "baker" is pretty much dead end. There aren't really advancement positions much beyond mix-master or floor manager, it's a sparse field. I actually found "baker" trivially easy compared to Dev/CS work. Same with "residential dining" or "warehouse management". If it's large enough it's just another procedure/process problem that you can hack into shape just like programming.
- em-bee 5y ago
  i am curious to know details of what you told them to change. this story shows that it pays to have engineers work on the ground to understand the operations and find ways to improve them, even if it happened by accident here. i occasionally bake at home, and friends tell me they are intimidated by baking, but it's really just applying a recipe. scaling that up is pure engineering.
thorin 5y ago
That sounds most accurate, read Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential for more detail :-)

schwartzworld 5y ago

> the debt is relatively small compared to regular college, Unfortunately the pay is also relatively small when compared with the kind of jobs a college graduate might apply for. It's not bad once you get your own kitchen, but I've known some very skilled cooks who started at $10 an hour at their restaurants. Culinary degree and all

zengargoyle 5y ago

Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody breathing. It's a fun hacker story. I applied and they told me I was overqualified so I played the "starving actor" card. I do computers and stuff but need a blah blah job to pay the rent. Bagels on that mid-industrial scale are more assembly line like engineering. Cut the dough, feed it into the former, put it on a tray, freeze or proof and bake, coat with things if needed, fill boxes... it's more of just a process. A few weeks later the boss comes out for like the third time for a gripe session complaining about all of the wastage happening during the proofing process. Engineer brain piped up and blurted out "your doing it wrong". Gah! do it this way. The boss turns to the floor manager and promptly sends him out shopping for a list of items and the next day my procedure was implemented and all was well. A week later the boss calls me into the office with the owners. They can't do much but slip me a goodly amount of cash under the table. Not to long after I was the mix-master coming in at 3am with the boss to get the work started and prepare the days production run and we'd bash out a significant amount of product in the couple of hours that it took for the rest of the workers to come in for their shifts. Then he'd go to the office and I'd just mix up new batches of dough or go make some boxes. Pretty much walked out every day with enough bagels to fill myself and my housemates. I would agree in the end, that sort of "baker" is pretty much dead end. There aren't really advancement positions much beyond mix-master or floor manager, it's a sparse field. I actually found "baker" trivially easy compared to Dev/CS work. Same with "residential dining" or "warehouse management". If it's large enough it's just another procedure/process problem that you can hack into shape just like programming.

em-bee 5y ago
i am curious to know details of what you told them to change. this story shows that it pays to have engineers work on the ground to understand the operations and find ways to improve them, even if it happened by accident here. i occasionally bake at home, and friends tell me they are intimidated by baking, but it's really just applying a recipe. scaling that up is pure engineering.

thorin 5y ago

That sounds most accurate, read Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential for more detail :-)