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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?

#151

Post by hiram112 »

internaut wrote: post #16

There are a number of reasons why wages might not rise that have nothing to do with free market supply and demand. The most obvious is you could control wages by being the owner of inelastic goods your workers require to live, such as housing. I think this is how the feudal system worked originally, workers produced cereals but the Land and the worker's cottages were both owned by the Landlord. If the price of bread…

>Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing.

I've read a couple of anecdotes, though never could find anything concrete: the government was more than happy to offer industry the use of H1B visas for high-tech employees.

That way, wages would be suppressed, and the US military industrial complex would be able to outcompete adversaries as warfare was becoming more and more software based.

It might be interesting to see if companies in and around the DC metro area (where many of the associated MIC contractors do business) have a higher rate of acceptance for their H1B requests.

For example, if random banks and insurance companies in the DC area were able to get 2x - 3x the amount of visa approvals vs similar industries in other metros, this would, over time, push wages down in the area for all programmers. This would save the government billions of dollars per year considering how much the US spends on defense.

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

#152

Post by IronIvan »

dorfsmay wrote: post #73
dwc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can imagine an expensive chef to setup processes that allows cheaper personnel to keep producing quality party. Slowly that process will suffer from time rot (eg: different floor that requires a diff cooking, but cheaper labour can't figure it out), also innovation will suffer. I see the exact same thing in dev envs, and even more so in ops/sysadmin. Cheaper unskilled labour going through old fashion processes with…

I was really puzzled for a while, trying to figure out how a different floor could at all effect the cooking (and whether I would want to eat any food from a shop where it does) until I figured out that it was a typo and that it was supposed to spell floUr... :)

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

#153

Post by sgift »

lostlogin wrote: post #143
sgift wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

This is true and there are others too. However everyone eats, not everyone gets a zap to the brain. The below link suggests nearly 40 million cases of food poisoning and 3,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Obviously that isn't all from pastry chefs, but it's vastly more than I'd have guessed. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/

Interesting statistic. Let's say the 3000 are certainly due to bad chefs. What would be interesting: How many of the 40 million are due to bad chefs? From my own cooking experience I'd say you cannot always say before if some food is bad, so probably "only" a percentage of that 40 million is due to chefs failure, but which percentage ..

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

#154

Post by timwaagh »

another way this can happen even if there is demand is collusion. if businesses decide together to pay a certain amount for a certain job, then wages won't rise. if they decide to not pay more than their neighbour, they also won't rise. eg software development here has not seen the big salaries like in the US. Even if demand is very high.

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

#155

Post by logicallee »

Alupis wrote: post #56
Retric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked in a bakery? Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment. PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here. Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.

I didn't say it wasn't difficult - just that someone could be trained in how to do the tasks in a bakery that someone else has already come up with, in 90 minutes. Imagine someone who has no programming experience (0, in any programming language, does not know what a loop or an if statement is) and that you have 90 minutes to train them to join your development team. Come on.

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

#156

Post by logicallee »

emodendroket wrote: post #75
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.

> Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps. If your job is customizing CRM installations maybe not so much.

arguably that is not 'programming'. What I said probably doesn't apply to every IT field.

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

#157

Post by Dylan16807 »

munificent wrote: post #57
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.

Every time I dip my toes in some creative field that others take seriously, I find way more depth than was apparent from the outside. I have yet to find a hobby worth doing where I don't consistently think, "Wow, I'm so much better at this than I was last year/month/week." And I keep feeling that way no matter how much time I put into it. Over hundreds of years, thousands of people have dedicated their lives to pastr…

>thicker piece of cheese >more time

You are creating recipes. That takes vastly more skill and artistic effort than following an exact recipe.

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

#158

Post by marchenko »

clock_tower wrote: post #79
internaut wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find the idea of a wage fixing cartel so bizarre? It's a phenomenon as old as labour markets themselves. The employer does not want a market for labour, they want a steady supply of workers for the lowest price. Since there are fewer employers than workers, it is easier to coordinate a plot against them. Also when the economy becomes more centralized and bigger companies swallow up smaller ones, you should…

Think about how people won't buy turnips (or consumer goods in general) if the price is higher than they expect -- even if that's the break-even price. I think something similar's happening with employers: they won't pay more than $80-$100,000 for a programmer, the market-clearing price for programmers is somewhere around $130,000, and thus you get a STEM shortage. And this applies pretty much everywhere; it's astoni…

good point. Price stickiness can apply to wages as well - it's often used to explain why it's supposedly difficult to decrease wages to keep positions filled during a recession, but I suspect in the current market the opposite is more often true: companies have a certain price point for labor in mind and are unwilling revise their payscale upward. It's a sinister version of your grandmother complaining about the price of milk, since large companies have a lot of leverage to distort the labor market.

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

#159

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

And the other 25% isn't.

When you are mass-producing a pastry, the other 25% is still robotic repetition.

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

#160

Post by Symbiote »

cmdrfred wrote: post #62
Retric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked in a bakery? Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment. PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.

I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café.

The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others used a no-name vodka + fruit essence mix.

The quality was miles ahead of anything available from a supermarket or ordinary bakery. I offended my mum by refusing to say her baking was better. (But my parents couldn't have afforded the kinds of places this factory supplied.)

I was surprised by how incapable some of the other low-paid staff were. Simple tasks like "arrange 6 half-strawberries like this in a hexagon on the cake" or "put one dollop of mix into the tray" were regularly messed up.

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