From the thread: > Oddly enough the former chefs we work with are kicking butt - sample size is too small but maybe cooking is a great gateway to coding?? I s

From the thread: > Oddly enough the former chefs we work with are kicking butt - sample size is too small but maybe cooking is a great gateway to coding?? I spent about a year doing short order cooking to put myself through uni, nothing fancy, but I might offer some insight here. Cooking in busy service shifts might transfer well to coding because they demand retaining both a complex, large state in your head with minimal prompting, and update that state frequently with complex flows. Keeping hot food hot, cold food cold, hitting the order all at the same time, meeting the wait people at just the right time, for a baseline steady rate of never less than 5 orders deep simultaneously, peaking to 12-15, and handling emergencies on the fly (running out of sauce pans, spilled food, run out of ingredients, etc.), bears some abstract similarities to coding. And they do it in uncomfortable, loud conditions, people shouting all the time, tempers flaring from time to time. 4-8 hours a day, five days a week, with few breaks. Think of it as they keep the equivalent of coders' flow state under what coders consider intolerable conditions. For a tiny fraction of the pay. If you find a chef/cook who can run a crew of 6+ and pull their load as good as or better than any individual member of the crew, then they've got the raw chops to transfer that skill to keep pretty complex representations in their heads. The good ones I've seen intuitively use queuing theory without knowing it. The one caution I'd offer is watch for chronically short attention spans; there is a different kind of grinding in coding especially in debugging that rubs even many in this group the wrong way. Heck, too few coders have mastered that. I'd like to hear others' experience with people or themselves who got into coding from a different field. My personal anecdata off the top of my head is I've seen a preponderance of military intelligence analysts, farmer/ranchers, and philosophers seem to do well coding.