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Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

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Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#111

Post by emodendroket »

carterehsmith wrote: post #105
emodendroket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.

Let's be honest. Making pastry is not really hard. You can spend 30 minutes learning on youtube, and you will be able to make some basic pastry. It will not be glorious but it might be edible. Otherplace in this thread somebody was quoting some pastry chef claiming that "it takes months" to learn to do cupcakes or whatever. That "months" is a definition of low-skill job. Which is why pastry chefs have minimum-wage sa…

I feel like if it were really that easy there wouldn't be any need for the elaborate system of culinary schools and apprenticeships at restaurants that teach high-level versions of these skills.

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#112

Post by emodendroket »

wyldfire wrote: post #76
emodendroket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.

The business of pastry sales saturates pretty quickly relative to other products. So "better pastries" can keep on scaling but you can't keep charging more for them. The regional food/dining marketplace can only bear so much, so "better pastries" can't draw from a much larger group of customers.

There's nothing inherent in software that makes it so that can't be the case for software products either. I anticipate the response here is that some products are more complex than others -- true enough, but how many people buy a wedding cake at the grocery store?

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#113

Post by emodendroket »

jlarocco wrote: post #84
emodendroket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.

I don't find it hard to believe, but if a regular line cook can do the job "good enough", why hire a dedicated pastry chef? If using a bonafide pastry chef makes a real difference, the higher end restaurants will hire them and have a competitive advantage.

I don't know. Perhaps many diners can't tell the difference, or restaurants don't think they can. Perhaps restaurants aren't that interested in desert because it's often a money loser for sit-down restaurants. But you can't tell me no software project has ever operated under similar assumptions (in fact the article says as much, pointing out that there are plenty of places hiring five-figure boot camp grads over more experienced developers).

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#114

Post by patrick8 »

davidw wrote: post #12
wskinner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps Americans are OK with the pastries produced by lower-skilled workers. Maybe they can't taste a difference.

There's definitely something to this: I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot , and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot. In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful. It is changing though: it's…

After hearing about the fraud in Italian olive oil I am skeptical your Eurotrash friends really know where their tomatoes are grown.

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#115

Post by whyenot »

riskable wrote: post #38
zanny wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap, inexperienced pastry chefs can also ruin a restaurants reputation if they screw up too badly. You get the quality you pay for.

Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions . The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users . That's a lot of dough!

Are you familiar with Amy's Baking Company? Sometimes disappointing one customer can have catastrophic consequences.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/12/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy%27s_Baking_Company

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#116

Post by princeb »

sosborn wrote: post #110
emodendroket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in reverse.

The real value of an experienced chef is in the creation and perfection of a recipe. Once that is achieved, a less experienced chef can churn the pastries out indefinitely - assuming they stick to the recipe.

ditto programming.

lots of value differential between a "coder" and an "engineer".

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#117

Post by emodendroket »

khedoros1 wrote: post #82
emodendroket wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without any support there's no way to evaluate it, interesting or not.

I don't think that truth evaluation should always be the point (at least not initially). More like...a comparison to push into the list for deferred evaluation, as the discussion evolves later in the thread. If the comment were a stand-alone work, I'd agree, there's no point without framing it as a complete argument with a thesis and supporting statements. However, it's a component of an evolving body of work (the en…

In that case, I don't think the challenge to this argument is any less valuable.

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#118

Post by ryhamz »

Spooky23 wrote: post #81
logicallee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.

That's a pretty ridiculous statement which pretty much speaks for itself. Software development is as much robotics as baking. I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

>I'd guess that easily 75% of the tasks being performed by programmers in 1999 are fully automated by APIs and frameworks today.

Not defending this guy, but it's not like we are still making the same product (pastry equivalent) as 1999. We go through the automation and then build on top, right?

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#119

Post by rifung »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #37

Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients. This is an example of pastry chefs overvaluing their own skills, so not surprising there is labor substitution happening.

Why do you consider this an overvaluation? I imagine it takes a lot of practice to reach a high level of cooking. Sure, you can probably make an ice cream decently enough in after a few tries, but I imagine to be a good chef you should know how to make something new taste the way you want on the first try or couple of tries.

Not only that but as a chef you presumably have to make it perfectly every time. I remember reading Jacques Pepin saying how he doesn't get bored of cooking because it's never the same: even if you cook the salmon 50 times, no two pieces of salmon are identical but a good chef should be able to make them all taste very nearly the same.

On the other hand, I imagine that chefs have a much more nuanced palate than the regular person so I wonder at what point are most normal people unable to distinguish the differences.

If you have reached a high level of cooking then I apologize and will admit I'm wrong, but it seems wrong of us, who haven't been through the same process, to say it's easy. I'm sure people who aren't programmers might wonder why software always has bugs and security vulnerabilities and think it shouldn't be too hard to write programs without them.

Re: Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

#120

Post by csallen »

dwc wrote: post #41
hughes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs. With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more…

You left out a plausible (and common) option: a more expensive pastry chef can make pastries that sell better. This is what's in play when you see a line out the door at some shop. The prices may not be that much more expensive, but the quality is that much better.

Many other factors help drive demand, e.g. social proof, marketing and branding, newness, location, PR, etc. There are diminishing returns to food quality.
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