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My sister's a french trained chef and I've been writing software most of my life. She works probably 3X harder than any geek I know including me. It's brutal. S

My sister's a french trained chef and I've been writing software most of my life. She works probably 3X harder than any geek I know including me. It's brutal. She arrives 8am to prep and leaves 11pm after service, 6 days a week when she was working for someone else. 7 now that she's opening her own place. She's on her feet all day. The job is both time critical and requires constant teamwork. If you or anyone else drops the ball the angry customer is right there, including the angry wait staff and angry team mates. It's very high pressure. She's now busy opening her own restaurant and it's a far cry from writing software once and kicking back while each incremental copy sold costs you zero effort or money. Every incremental product a chef sells is hand-made and has to have its raw ingredients bought without any certainty it'll actually get sold. What's worse is many ingredients have a shelf life of mere days. Every product is hand made to a customer's specifications and delivered in real-time with immediate feedback. If a product is rejected, it's expected to be replaced immediately without interrupting the flow of products heading out to new customers. And of course the tools of the trade are not a keyboard, but sharp knives and open flames. So yeah, the "google chef scenario" comment bugged me too.

VBprogrammer 15y ago
What annoyed me is not the suggestion that the chef is in someway less entitled to the money than other employees, or that he didn't work as hard. It is that it is just factually wrong. How many great people joined Google when it was an up and coming start up who loved the emerging culture and the idea of having a great chef.
- sophacles 15y ago
  To expand on your point: I remember that pre-IPO articles about Google always mentioned the great working conditions, including the amazing meals in the cafeteria. Recruitment material from Google touted the chef as a major reason for working there. People talked about Google as the de-facto model for treating your employees well "look they even have a good chef". Given how much that chef played a role in Google's name making, he certainly deserved every penny he made.
- scottschulthess 15y ago
  In general, in startups, aren't people compensated based on the value their skills provide? I'm not taking anything away from chefs, but Google is an engineering, product, and advertising company, so chef isn't a core skillset and should probably be compensated thusly.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    You are making the same mistake as the original Zynga article does, and the one that this article is attempting to correct: You assume that because a person's job is not in the company's "core skillset" that their contribution must inherently be less than that of an employee whose job is in that "core skillset". This is the incorrect perception that the author here is attempting to fix. From the sound of his experience at early day's in Google, your assumption is flat-out wrong.
    - scottschulthess 15y ago
      All I'm saying is that you have to evaluate each employees contributions and a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company, for a variety of reasons, and then should be compensated accordingly.
      - brown9-2 15y ago
        a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company based on what? You are assuming something about an individual's contribution to a group of people based on nothing but the job title. Based on actual evidence from an early Google employee, this guy's contribution was huge. Will all chefs at company's have similarly large contributions? Not likely. But it doesn't change what this guy contributed and to assume something like this seems really unfair and useless.
        scottschulthess 15y ago
        a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company based on what? Why do you think engineers get paid more than secretaries, on average? There's your answer.
- vaksel 15y ago
  yeah...if the chef's contribution was considered to be worth less, then their # of shares was lower to begin with.
bambax 15y ago
"Kitchen Confidential" describes exactly what you're talking about; it's a fantastic book (published in 2000).
- petegrif 15y ago
  +1
- brain5ide 15y ago
  There's a metaphor, I believe by Stallman, about programs being much like recipes that just came back to mind. Probably that's what makes this comparison so vivid.
  - kunalb 15y ago
    I think you're referring to Knuth -- in the introduction to TAOCP he compares the series to a cookbook, comparing recipes and algorithms.
    - reledi 15y ago
      No, he's correct. RMS uses the recipe analogy often, though he uses it as a free software analogy (i.e. cooks have freedom with recipes, recipes are like programs, why can't users have a similar freedom with programs).
      - X-Istence 15y ago
        When I can hand the user source code and they can experiment on their own and they don't come back and blame me the engineer who created it for doing something wrong. There is an inherent disconnect between cooking and programming. In cooking; experimenting and throwing in an extra ingredient or leaving an ingredient out most likely won't cause anything bad to happen to the outcome and it will most likely still be edible. In programming if the end user leaves out a line of code or doesn't have the correct logic the program will most likely do something it wasn't supposed to and could destroy the users files, could cause them to lose countless hours of work. Burnt chicken can be thrown out, and you can try again, if your hard drive has been formatted it is going to take a while to get going again. Also, since when is programming, compiling, linking as easy as following a recipe?
Natsu 15y ago
That reminds me of a local family-run bakery I frequent. They work long days, six days a week as well, and the head pâtissier there has been doing this for practically his entire life. So plenty of chefs are entrepreneurs too. Including Charlie Ayers, who has his own restaurant.
mseebach 15y ago
It's getting off-topic, but being a chef in a restaurant is a different kettle of fish from being a chef in a corporate canteen setting. I used to work in the latter as a temp kitchen-hand, and most of the chefs there specifically quoted sane hours and working environment in general as reasons for preferring that over a restaurant. Buying is is easier as you typically know fairly precisely how many mouths you have to feed. If you do end up with too much of something, then there's a stew on the buffet the next day. Said mouths are also less particular. If you arrive at the end of service and the lasagna is a bit dry, you don't send it back, you eat it anyway or pick something else.
- anjc 15y ago
  I was an apprentice chef, and it is true what you're saying, but it's still hard physical work no matter where you are. Kind of slightly more physical in canteen style settings (or the ones i was in) because you're cooking/carrying far bigger quantities of food, and still have fairly tough time constraints.
jacquesm 15y ago
It's not bad at all for keyboard wielding persons to be reminded every now and then that in 'the real world' people have to work very hard for their money. And that's not just limited to chefs either, try being a car mechanic for a couple of years (your back will be shot), a bricklayer or a person cleaning stuff. We get comparatively large sums of money for relatively easy (in a physical sense) work.
- codyrobbins 15y ago
  It’s good to be reminded of this from a standpoint of empathy, but at the same time I think it’s missing the fact of the matter: we don’t get paid more money because we work harder. That’s just a remnant of the Puritan work ethic. The economic fact is that we get paid more money because there are fewer people available to do what we do. Generally speaking, anyone can be a line cook, a bricklayer, or a janitor. When (more or less) anyone can do a job, it doesn’t pay as well because the available workforce is ample. If a software developer got paid as much money as a line cook, then software developers would be deployed at tasks that don’t warrant their more valuable time given their (relative) scarcity in the workforce. Deploying scarce resources in a suboptimal fashion is bad for everyone in an economic sense. It’s like using copper during the war effort to make brass bathroom fixtures instead of wiring for airplanes—it’s a poor (and potentially disastrous) use of the resource. You can see this at work in NYC right now: the relative ease at acquiring financing means there are a lot of really dumb startups here right now with stupid ideas and no real market that are tying up valuable engineering talent which makes recruiting harder for legitimate startups that are genuinely creating value. Imagine if all the engineers who worked at Google during the early days were instead tied up working for Pets.com and Webvan such that Google was never really able to get off the ground and folded. That would have been bad for everyone, because Google ended up creating a lot of real value and Pets.com did not. This same reasoning, I think, applies to the question of why CEOs get paid such astronomical salaries. The answer is that the kind of people with the skills to run a large company are extremely few and far between. Sure, a lot of them do fail at their jobs despite getting paid so much money; but that's not a reason for a hew and cry about how much they’re paid—it’s (usually) simply a testament to how hard the job actually is to pull of successfully. (Incidentally, it’s a common lament that the people at the top get paid disproportionately more than everyone else. But that’s just because the scale doesn't increase linearly—it grows exponentially. I'm not sure what the outrage against such a fact is—if you’ve taken differential equations you’ll remember that myriad complex mechanical, electronic, chemical, astronomical, biological, economic, etc. systems have nonlinear characteristics.) So the idea is that salaries for scarcer resources are generally higher such that only enterprises creating sufficient value (i.e., profits, or at least a general confidence in future profits) to pay for them are the ones who get them. It’s certainly arguable whether this is what occurs in practice; and—while there are always exceptions, transients, and outliers—I think by and large it’s a good approximation. This is kind of tangential to @jacquesm’s point, I know, because he’s simply pointing out that we should be cognizant that we get paid more for arguably easier work—but all the same I think it’s important to keep in mind that making things more ostensibly ‘fair’ may not always be in everyone’s best interests in a larger sense.
hfthrowaway 15y ago
Great post because sometimes we forget how easy some of our jobs are. One thing that bothered me about the article and your post, however, is the "google chef" comment is bugging you for the wrong reason. You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly, if you believe that merit and contributions as an employee is what justifies the rewards of equity appreciation. That's not how the world works. Warren Buffett did not lift a finger building railroads, soda pop, and newspapers. That's not why he is rich. Pincus wants you to think of this portion of your compensation as an employee, instead of an investor. Charlie made money because he became an investor, not because he was a chef.
- archgoon 15y ago
  > You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly No they aren't. They're arguing independently of that. In fact, the OP explicitly mentions that he's not commenting on that. What the OP was arguing was that _if_ you were to give compensation to people based on their contribution to the company, it would be absolutely absurd, and insulting, to claim that the original Google Chef did not contribute substantially to the company.
  - hfthrowaway 15y ago
    We are using two different interpretations of what they meant by 'contributions to the company'. In terms of well-being and quality of life to the staff, the chef made tremendous contributions, sure. But in economic terms (what I believe Pincus/Zynga meant), no, the chef did not contribute substantially to revenue/profits the way engineers and sales people did. I don't think Pincus is saying chefs are not important in the qualitative sense (that their contributions don't matter as much as engineers) - I believe he's saying they do not contribute enough economic value to generate a 20 million dollar pay day. And he's right - the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much. But he's wrong for lumping economic contributions as an employee (charlie the chef) and asset appreciation (charlie the investor) together.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      > the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much. Well, they did at least once. And how do we know that the Google Chef didn't contribute enough economic value to generate $20 million? You can't say that just because he's one level farther removed from the final product. If he helped enable the company to recruit talent and helped enable that talent to produce then he very easily could have been worth $20 million.

VBprogrammer 15y ago

What annoyed me is not the suggestion that the chef is in someway less entitled to the money than other employees, or that he didn't work as hard. It is that it is just factually wrong. How many great people joined Google when it was an up and coming start up who loved the emerging culture and the idea of having a great chef.

sophacles 15y ago
To expand on your point: I remember that pre-IPO articles about Google always mentioned the great working conditions, including the amazing meals in the cafeteria. Recruitment material from Google touted the chef as a major reason for working there. People talked about Google as the de-facto model for treating your employees well "look they even have a good chef". Given how much that chef played a role in Google's name making, he certainly deserved every penny he made.
scottschulthess 15y ago
In general, in startups, aren't people compensated based on the value their skills provide? I'm not taking anything away from chefs, but Google is an engineering, product, and advertising company, so chef isn't a core skillset and should probably be compensated thusly.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  You are making the same mistake as the original Zynga article does, and the one that this article is attempting to correct: You assume that because a person's job is not in the company's "core skillset" that their contribution must inherently be less than that of an employee whose job is in that "core skillset". This is the incorrect perception that the author here is attempting to fix. From the sound of his experience at early day's in Google, your assumption is flat-out wrong.
  - scottschulthess 15y ago
    All I'm saying is that you have to evaluate each employees contributions and a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company, for a variety of reasons, and then should be compensated accordingly.
    - brown9-2 15y ago
      a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company based on what? You are assuming something about an individual's contribution to a group of people based on nothing but the job title. Based on actual evidence from an early Google employee, this guy's contribution was huge. Will all chefs at company's have similarly large contributions? Not likely. But it doesn't change what this guy contributed and to assume something like this seems really unfair and useless.
      - scottschulthess 15y ago
        a chef is less likely to be as valuable as an engineer in an engineering company based on what? Why do you think engineers get paid more than secretaries, on average? There's your answer.
vaksel 15y ago
yeah...if the chef's contribution was considered to be worth less, then their # of shares was lower to begin with.

bambax 15y ago

"Kitchen Confidential" describes exactly what you're talking about; it's a fantastic book (published in 2000).

petegrif 15y ago
+1
brain5ide 15y ago
There's a metaphor, I believe by Stallman, about programs being much like recipes that just came back to mind. Probably that's what makes this comparison so vivid.
- kunalb 15y ago
  I think you're referring to Knuth -- in the introduction to TAOCP he compares the series to a cookbook, comparing recipes and algorithms.
  - reledi 15y ago
    No, he's correct. RMS uses the recipe analogy often, though he uses it as a free software analogy (i.e. cooks have freedom with recipes, recipes are like programs, why can't users have a similar freedom with programs).
    - X-Istence 15y ago
      When I can hand the user source code and they can experiment on their own and they don't come back and blame me the engineer who created it for doing something wrong. There is an inherent disconnect between cooking and programming. In cooking; experimenting and throwing in an extra ingredient or leaving an ingredient out most likely won't cause anything bad to happen to the outcome and it will most likely still be edible. In programming if the end user leaves out a line of code or doesn't have the correct logic the program will most likely do something it wasn't supposed to and could destroy the users files, could cause them to lose countless hours of work. Burnt chicken can be thrown out, and you can try again, if your hard drive has been formatted it is going to take a while to get going again. Also, since when is programming, compiling, linking as easy as following a recipe?

Natsu 15y ago

That reminds me of a local family-run bakery I frequent. They work long days, six days a week as well, and the head pâtissier there has been doing this for practically his entire life. So plenty of chefs are entrepreneurs too. Including Charlie Ayers, who has his own restaurant.

mseebach 15y ago

It's getting off-topic, but being a chef in a restaurant is a different kettle of fish from being a chef in a corporate canteen setting. I used to work in the latter as a temp kitchen-hand, and most of the chefs there specifically quoted sane hours and working environment in general as reasons for preferring that over a restaurant. Buying is is easier as you typically know fairly precisely how many mouths you have to feed. If you do end up with too much of something, then there's a stew on the buffet the next day. Said mouths are also less particular. If you arrive at the end of service and the lasagna is a bit dry, you don't send it back, you eat it anyway or pick something else.

anjc 15y ago
I was an apprentice chef, and it is true what you're saying, but it's still hard physical work no matter where you are. Kind of slightly more physical in canteen style settings (or the ones i was in) because you're cooking/carrying far bigger quantities of food, and still have fairly tough time constraints.

jacquesm 15y ago

It's not bad at all for keyboard wielding persons to be reminded every now and then that in 'the real world' people have to work very hard for their money. And that's not just limited to chefs either, try being a car mechanic for a couple of years (your back will be shot), a bricklayer or a person cleaning stuff. We get comparatively large sums of money for relatively easy (in a physical sense) work.

codyrobbins 15y ago
It’s good to be reminded of this from a standpoint of empathy, but at the same time I think it’s missing the fact of the matter: we don’t get paid more money because we work harder. That’s just a remnant of the Puritan work ethic. The economic fact is that we get paid more money because there are fewer people available to do what we do. Generally speaking, anyone can be a line cook, a bricklayer, or a janitor. When (more or less) anyone can do a job, it doesn’t pay as well because the available workforce is ample. If a software developer got paid as much money as a line cook, then software developers would be deployed at tasks that don’t warrant their more valuable time given their (relative) scarcity in the workforce. Deploying scarce resources in a suboptimal fashion is bad for everyone in an economic sense. It’s like using copper during the war effort to make brass bathroom fixtures instead of wiring for airplanes—it’s a poor (and potentially disastrous) use of the resource. You can see this at work in NYC right now: the relative ease at acquiring financing means there are a lot of really dumb startups here right now with stupid ideas and no real market that are tying up valuable engineering talent which makes recruiting harder for legitimate startups that are genuinely creating value. Imagine if all the engineers who worked at Google during the early days were instead tied up working for Pets.com and Webvan such that Google was never really able to get off the ground and folded. That would have been bad for everyone, because Google ended up creating a lot of real value and Pets.com did not. This same reasoning, I think, applies to the question of why CEOs get paid such astronomical salaries. The answer is that the kind of people with the skills to run a large company are extremely few and far between. Sure, a lot of them do fail at their jobs despite getting paid so much money; but that's not a reason for a hew and cry about how much they’re paid—it’s (usually) simply a testament to how hard the job actually is to pull of successfully. (Incidentally, it’s a common lament that the people at the top get paid disproportionately more than everyone else. But that’s just because the scale doesn't increase linearly—it grows exponentially. I'm not sure what the outrage against such a fact is—if you’ve taken differential equations you’ll remember that myriad complex mechanical, electronic, chemical, astronomical, biological, economic, etc. systems have nonlinear characteristics.) So the idea is that salaries for scarcer resources are generally higher such that only enterprises creating sufficient value (i.e., profits, or at least a general confidence in future profits) to pay for them are the ones who get them. It’s certainly arguable whether this is what occurs in practice; and—while there are always exceptions, transients, and outliers—I think by and large it’s a good approximation. This is kind of tangential to @jacquesm’s point, I know, because he’s simply pointing out that we should be cognizant that we get paid more for arguably easier work—but all the same I think it’s important to keep in mind that making things more ostensibly ‘fair’ may not always be in everyone’s best interests in a larger sense.

hfthrowaway 15y ago

Great post because sometimes we forget how easy some of our jobs are. One thing that bothered me about the article and your post, however, is the "google chef" comment is bugging you for the wrong reason. You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly, if you believe that merit and contributions as an employee is what justifies the rewards of equity appreciation. That's not how the world works. Warren Buffett did not lift a finger building railroads, soda pop, and newspapers. That's not why he is rich. Pincus wants you to think of this portion of your compensation as an employee, instead of an investor. Charlie made money because he became an investor, not because he was a chef.

archgoon 15y ago
> You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly No they aren't. They're arguing independently of that. In fact, the OP explicitly mentions that he's not commenting on that. What the OP was arguing was that _if_ you were to give compensation to people based on their contribution to the company, it would be absolutely absurd, and insulting, to claim that the original Google Chef did not contribute substantially to the company.
- hfthrowaway 15y ago
  We are using two different interpretations of what they meant by 'contributions to the company'. In terms of well-being and quality of life to the staff, the chef made tremendous contributions, sure. But in economic terms (what I believe Pincus/Zynga meant), no, the chef did not contribute substantially to revenue/profits the way engineers and sales people did. I don't think Pincus is saying chefs are not important in the qualitative sense (that their contributions don't matter as much as engineers) - I believe he's saying they do not contribute enough economic value to generate a 20 million dollar pay day. And he's right - the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much. But he's wrong for lumping economic contributions as an employee (charlie the chef) and asset appreciation (charlie the investor) together.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    > the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much. Well, they did at least once. And how do we know that the Google Chef didn't contribute enough economic value to generate $20 million? You can't say that just because he's one level farther removed from the final product. If he helped enable the company to recruit talent and helped enable that talent to produce then he very easily could have been worth $20 million.