What a great piece. Glad to see it on front page of HN.
I worked for years in retail, in camera shops, and I understand the episodic hilarity and mundane heartbreak of a career in service. But it was washing dishes in a restaurant, my first ever job, that made me aware of the time-pressure intensity of food service, and that it's a lower-risk version of the old space/air travel aphorism: 'Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror'.
You work a whole shift, but only a slim segment of it matters, when work and concentration become hyper-compressed. Dishes break, people break, and there are no breaks - it continues relentlessly like a forced march, without reflection, until the blessed first minutes where you sense that it's beginning to abate.
If you're of a reflective mood, you think to yourself not only that the frantic and merciless nature of the job will never change (even if the restaurant closes, the same experience is happening in an endless continuum all over the city), but that it has probably been like this for as long as there has been civilization - a millennial succession of workers (slaves, the earlier back you go), chopping vegetables and scraping plates (copper plates, if you go back far enough), back to dining establishments and the kitchens of the influential in Roman times, Egyptian times.
It's a strange thing, but participating in these activities that are most visceral and least threatened by automation, they feel like a kind of time travel, or like being in one of the less objectionable circles in hell.
Cost: Wages for food service workers are extremely low. Automation is extremely expensive.
Capability: Industrial machinery struggles to meet many of the requirements of a professional kitchen. Plating alone requires the ability to handle and place aesthetically, both solids of different consistencies and liquids. Avoiding cross-contamination is another concern. Setting aside a set of pans and chopping boards is very different to installing another assembly line.
Flexibility: Typically, automation pays off when you're making lots of the same thing. Most restaurants will change dishes out relatively frequently and don't have anywhere near the volume of an assembly line. Most kitchens will also try to accommodate requests for the modification of dishes and in some cases for things that aren't on the menu at all.
Resiliency: An automated assembly line is much more complicated than an oven or fryer and much more prone to failure. If a frozen burger can jam up the machine you end up paying someone to watch for that happening, plus a much more expensive maintenance worker when you could've just paid the first guy to chuck the burgers on a grill.
Fast food places are likely to get further than most with automation. Although, I'm sceptical of how the economics work out.
Flipping this on it's head: fully automatic coffee machines have existed for decades, as have conveyor belt ovens. Why hasn't Starbucks replaced its cashiers and baristas "easily" in that time?
The answer is likely to be a combination of the financials not making sense, along with a reduction in quality, and the type of service that people go to Starbucks for.
Starbucks workers are human and very rarely are consistent with making drinks/proportions. I would almost consider paying their outrageous $6-$10 per drink prices if I knew there wasn't a 60% chance a new, untrained employee is just "winging it" on making a 3-4 ingredient drink (my girlfriend likes a frozen (blended) frappuccino with caramel drizzle lining the cup, no whipped cream topping, and almond milk)
They get this "wrong" consistency wise/modification wise 70% of the time, multiple stores.
I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me.
Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different, anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer) has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.
> Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter."
Yeah, I don't buy that either.
I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally.
It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my head while my body just robotically did the work.
Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about programming problems.
Brandon Sanderson has a decent quote from Secret Project #1, that makes me think a bit.
> That is one of the great mistakes people make: assuming that someone who does menial work does not like thinking. Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind.
If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.
> Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world.
Really depends on what kind of labor is it, not all of it is equal. I've had a new doors installed in my apartment yesterday, and the amount of troubleshooting and stress that the installers went through is not smaller than what I've faced in my programming job. But, I didn't have to do it while sweating from lifting 100 kg doors onto fourth floor, and later repeatedly trying to wrangle them into place.
Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driving a mower around and around and around — not really intense physical labor, just a rote mechanical job that doesn’t consume much mental capacity.
I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!
I don't buy this either. I spend my 8 hours coding (yes, mostly coding) and still come home and study most nights. I don't feel any difference at night whether I spent the day doing yardwork or coding.
I suspect because you have not done manual labor. When you really get in a routine, it just has this feeling at the end of the day after being outside in the sun or snow. It is nothing like sitting in front of a computer.
I firmly believe that in our dna we were wired to be outside most of the time.
“An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.”
― George S. Patton Jr.
Other developers keep trying to persuade me to use multiple monitors (I have a laptop - I can't be bothered plugging it in every day, and I'm used to switching between windows with the keyboard). I struggle to explain to them that, even if I was less 'efficient', that time I 'lose' is not wasted - It's thinking time.
From my experience, the hardest part of being a waiter was dealing with customers.
I worked hard physically as a dishwasher or warehouse worker, but had little mental stress.
I only lasted a few weeks as a waiter. Despite the much higher tips, dealing with bad customers was so stressful I couldn't handle it and it significantly affected my studying.
Whereas I never felt that tired when doing physical labor.
It depends. Admittedly this was 35 years ago or so, but generally a certain percentage would go towards the bar and other staff, but mostly you would keep your own tips.
It’s probably due to a difference in culture. The US was still very anti-socialism at the time. But the culture was definitely that you should keep the rewards of your own labor.
At smaller restaurants there was never any pooling at all.
> From my experience, the hardest part of being a waiter was dealing with customers.
I was a fine dining server for a couple years while in college before finding my first programming job. It taught me how to deal with pretty much any kind of person.
That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly talked down to me.
I built an app to replace the restaurant computer, occasionally people would ask why I was taking orders on an iPod and when I'd explain, it made things _worse_: there was more than a handful of times they'd argue about rounding and the local tax rate.
I think the author meant its _much_ harder to take the abusive management, extremely physical work, and occassional abusive customer when you think of yourself as an intellectual working a sidejob, as opposed to it being your job where the programming is a side passion.
I'd have said, Neither. Having worked briefly on cleaning crews, I believe that the work comes in larger and more predictable blocks than waiting tables does, and leaves one more time for thinking one's own thoughts.
No, you can't tell about a person's skillset. I teach ESL, and have taught
a. An employee of the the Brazilian national health department now cleaning houses in Montgomery County, Maryland.
b. A Nicaraguan attorney now cleaning rooms for a Washington, DC, hotel.
c. A Salvadoran archivist doing construction work here.
And forty years ago, I caught a cab driven by a man from west Africa with a degree in urban planning, who had found it better for his health to leave his native country, where he was not well regarded by the government.
And there are plenty of native-born Americans who are holding down jobs that are not commensurate with their skills or anyway potentials.
That you think waiting is a job that doesn't require mental presence tells me you have never done it.
Sure, set up and clear down have plenty of routine zone out time - but service is maintaining multiple concurrent to do lists in your head whilst keeping an eye out on the environment for additional tasks.
I was terrible at the job because I have poor short term memory (my lists dropped items all the damned time). But I sure as hell was too busy to contemplate some higher order problem
Weirdly I have personally never considered PhD to be indicator of being particularly smart. Probably above median, but not special. On other hand it sure requires lot of work to be done. Or at least time spend.
That tracks. I’d add that Ph.D. laureates tends to be people who like to pursue knowledge in depth. I think it’s this, combined with the work ethic and discipline, that make them excel in certain fields.
I never seen PhD as a program that is attempting to teach people write. There is absolutely no reason to expect someone with PhD to write better then other people.
If anything, a PhD program teaches you how to write faster while maintaining an acceptable quality: Journal papers, conference presentations, and funding agency reports are all long-form writing projects that come up quite frequently and distract from the research (the fun part). Most of the value from this writing comes from it being accepted; improving quality beyond this level has rapidly diminshing returns.
I'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers. They must write, but they are not really expected to write well. An MFA in creative writing, sure, but that's a different sort.
I think of the modern or contemporary "intellectuals" I have read and many are mediocre writers. For every William James there's a Pearse or a Lewis who is hard to read.
But I think that the author has a different idea in mind, that of the novelist, story writer or journalist. A lack of life experience and appreciation for dialog can lead to poor writing in these domains, and perhaps a waiter would have a leg up.
Not PhD, but the masters program I did (urban planning) had a very strong focus on writing. I’m thankful for that, because it turns out I primarily write and edit all day. And it keeps me in business because I work with engineers and architects whose focus at school was, understandably, not writing, and I prove my worth by editing their work.
Could you be taking the word "writer" to mean something different than the author? In the context of the article what I got from that line was that it would be easier to teach a waiter to be a food critic/journalist than to teach a food critic/journalist to be a waiter, more than it meant "writer" in the broader sense. I sort of agree with that interpretation. I'm not good with names, but the only names that I can tell you off the top of my head when it comes to food "writers" are: Nikolaj Kirk and Anthony Bourdain and they are both chefs.
Everyone learns to write in school. A waiting job most can pick up but not all. I couldn't get past serving training. Carrying four plates and keeping them straight takes without spilling is for others.
Everyone learns to carry plates while growing up. There's a lot more to being a good waiter than just writing down orders and carrying plates. And there's a lot more to being a good writer than just knowing how to write sentences.
I'm essentially a professional writer at this point. Certainly I learned a lot from technical courses in school and working professionally in technical roles but, at this point, a lot was writing for newspapers and other publications.
This is like saying everyone learns math in school. It's technically correct, but only if you ignore the vast difference in skill between the average person and (e.g.) an accomplished novelist.
Lemme modify the writers words for you to more accurately describe the phenomena : “I suspect it’s easier to teach a good waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a good waiter.”
Being excellent at balancing a stressful, fast paced, work environment applies to many jobs. But being excellent at being an “intellectual” whatever the hell that even means (writers? Programmers?), does not really apply to very many jobs.
I imagine that many people have taste that appeals to some people. The problem is that many teachers mark down any taste that doesn't appeal to them, effectively ensuring that writers choose only the blandest safest optiona when writing.
I think we should also ask what sort of writers do schools train PhDs and students to be? The writing for thesis or scientific articles is different from most other writing. Just as is legal writing for example. They really are not there to teach them poetry... Just to efficiently and in way that passes review to communicated inside the community.
Because it prioritizes exercises that are easy for a teacher to mark over exercises that develop real writing skills. Everything is broken down into elementary mechanical tasks and marked with rubrics. Writing is taught as if it were mathematics, that you can just follow a simple algorithm and you are done!
Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.
Following the algorithms for writing makes you neither a bad nor a good writer. If you learn and follow: tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them; you writing will be formulaic and boring, but competent. If you do all the things, you'll be an ok writer.
Boring writing is bad writing. If you can't holder your reader's attention long enough for them to get what you're trying to say then you've failed to communicate. If you follow that formula, not only will your writing be boring but too long as well.
Step one, then, is to have something interesting to say.
Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.
I struggled with a teacher in high school who expected me to write essays with a formula I could never really master, there might have been other things going on but a big one was that I read so much that I had so many examples to work from that her formula didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.
Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both:
1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end).
2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information.
Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.
I took a two-year course, where our homework was primarily focused on developing an essay at the end of each class (about 14 of them all told). All the classes had similar formats and requirements, and so all the essays also had maximum word counts. I really, really appreciated that, because it surely forced me to distill all my thoughts into the most essential passages and cut out the fat.
Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits.
And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.
How nice to read a long-from piece online, simply and clearly formatted, with no adverts, popups, affiliate links, or such nonsense. Just genuine writing.
> The work was the only thing that kept me out of my anxiety.
I know it's a trope for knowledge workers to romanticize physical work, but I find the opposite when programming. The work increases the mental anxiety.
Like in life itself, if you‘re trying to control your programming job too much, you will be just miserable and fuel your anxiety. The complexity and unpredictability of the future can‘t be completely controlled. IMHO the only solution is to believe in yourself, that whatever is thrown at you, you will find a way to cope with it. Otherwise you‘re only worrying the whole time what the future might bring.
Programming is part of my job, but I only have to do it every now and then. However, I'm considering pulling a plug on programming side gigs I do sometimes. It's so intense, the brain feels like it's going to explode+ there's that anxiety and that the whole thing will fail before I can even submit it. I'm not sure the money justifies every time.
It's interesting how different our experiences are. I love programming so much, I'll often forget about food or sleep if I'm building something that really interests me. It's easily the best high I've gotten.
I’m right there with you. I recently quit my job to recover from burnout. I expected that would involve a break from programming. Turns out I’m spending more time programming now than when I was paid for it. I was burned out on the non-programming parts of the job. I’m relieved to know it didn’t break my love of programming.
You can even get burnt out on the programming parts of the job! Having to do a thing you normally like doesn't mean you will still like doing it when it doesn't inspire you.
I worked as a busser and at multiple fast food places before getting a job as a software engineer. I have also been reprimanded for going to urinate at unscheduled times. I don’t think that gatekeeping the experience of being exploited for your labor is useful. Creating divisions between people who are only exploited, vs those who are exploited even more doesn’t help anyone except for those who are exploiting.
This subthread starting off with a claim that high-wage workers were the most exploited. I don’t think there’s a vision of “solidarity” where everyone humors that delusion.
The top comment is this sub thread very clearly included the words “even” to imply that while most would not assume software engineers are not exploited because they’re relatively wealthy, they are still being exploited. This very clearly implies that SEs are less exploited—there was absolutely nothing in the original comment that supports your mischaracterization of their point.
That is, other than the second of its two sentences, which reads “In fact, I think that sometimes, companies consider high pay, a license to humiliate.” What do you suggest that means? It seems to me that if high pay is a “license to humiliate” that means that highly-paid workers are due for extra humiliation.
> What do you suggest that means? It seems to me that if high pay is a “license to humiliate” that means that highly-paid workers are due for extra humiliation.
Approximately everyone is aware that low-paid service and agricultural workers get -figuratively- shit on.
As someone who was not in the industry, I expected workers who were paid $120k, $250k, $500k, and more, per year to be treated as people who are highly knowledgeable in their field - to have their opinions carefully considered, and to be treated with respect. In short, to be treated as the Key Employees that their employment contracts often asserted (and their paychecks certainly suggested) that they are.
I was very surprised (and very disappointed) when I discovered that there are managers and businessmen who have opinions that can be roughly summed up as "I'm paying you a lot of money, so you work on whatever I say, do the work however I say to do it, and you take whatever shit I dish out without complaining. You are -after all- taking a _ton_ of my (or our company's) money, so you have no room to complain."
I completely agree with this, but fundamentally I think that there is more value from identifying with the similarities between workers of all wage range. I was mainly just arguing against the point that the top reply in this sub thread was implying that high wage workers are somehow more exploited.
It's not the work itself that's undignified, it's having to work. The only way to maintain your dignity is to have enough fuck you money to tell anyone who would strip you of it to fuck off.
Hard disagree. Being able to go pee when you need to, or a checker having a stool to sit on instead of standing still on concrete all day, or having a boss that offers an encouraging word after an insane customer yells at you because the computer isn't working instead of also treating you like the source of the problem. Things like these bring dignity, and would enable people to work while still having dignity.
Of course. What can people do about it though? If you don't have enough leverage, you'll have to swallow it when a bunch of managers start shitting on you because you went to the bathroom.
That leverage can come from many sources. Maybe you have enough money that you don't actually need to be there. Maybe you're unionized and if they screw with you the union can screw them back. It doesn't matter what it is, you need some power to be able to get them to treat you with respect. Corporations are constantly trying to minimize our power, we should maximize it at all costs.
Amassing enough money to become financially independent is the only surefire way to obtain that power. Everything else depends on others. Unions are rife with politicking and corruption, for example. They can also be busted down or coopted.
However, since being forced into retirement (a highly undignified and humiliating process), I have found that I never want to go back to that again. I work at my own pace (about triple what I did, when getting paid), and don't take one ounce of crap, from anyone.
When I was a manager, I always strove to treat my team with extreme dignity. My managers were not as willing to do that, for me, however.
I once got a below average performance review paired with an above average raise, to which I told my boss that he could call me ugly if it came with money like that. I will say that it helped a lot that I really liked him and he wasn't all that thrilled with the company review process either and was apologetic about it.
There's no such thing as enough money to me. I'm always one cancer diagnosis away from being destitute. I need millions and millions and millions before I'd be comfortable not prioritizing money. Nothing else matters nearly as much as money. Love? Fuck that. Love doesn't pay bills.
You see, I'm a criminal. I've committed the felony of getting old, so I am not supposed to work in tech, anymore (at least, not as an IC).
I probably could have gotten a job as a manager. I was a very good manager.
But I hated it. I just wanted to be a coder (and architect -I'm pretty good at that, as well).
I wasn't given the opportunity. In fact, it seemed as if some folks used the interview process to scratch itches they had, with their own parents.
After a few of these "interviews," I realized that this industry no longer had any room for me, and came to understand that, although I was not rich, I did have the means to walk away.
I spent my life, living humbly, frugally, and modestly. Many folks on this forum would sneer at me, for living the way that I do (but they can no longer sneer from a position of power). I have to be a caregiver to a couple of family members, and being forced to retire, actually coincided with them needing more care, so it has worked out.
From my understanding (I suspect that not too many of them are on this forum, so you may not get an answer), the service position jobs aren't so low-paying, and many are actually good career positions.
Anecdotally, I have a couple of friends that basically have to be "professional shoppers," once or twice a year. It seems like a dream job, going to Europe, and buying the top-of-the-line clothes, from shops in every country, but it seems to actually be quite difficult for them.
In any case, they have been doing this for decades, and I have been told that they regularly see the same sales associates, cashiers, and managers, at these stores, year after year. They have actually made some long-term friendships, and look forward to meeting these people, who have families, kids in college, etc.
I assume that this means that many folks can actually make lifetime careers from work that, in the US, is often considered "transitional."
As the adage goes, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans".
If there's one thing this piece made me think of, is that you should either be happy doing what you're doing or be on the path to do that.
I have friends in their 40s who have worked in the service industry for decades while planning to do "something else later", and they're not the happiest of my acquaintances.
Everyone I know still in my birth country is working to retire, and, when they retire they will move to a place in the sun. Most who retired died unhappy before doing that because of health reasons because of working. It’s all just sad. Move today and you can retire today. ‘Something else later’ doesn’t work with our lifespan.
I gave up on this article about 1/3 of the way through. I could fill dozens of pages with my aimless years after I quit college, but I wouldn’t think to bore people with it.
I read the whole thing in one sitting. I found it interesting in a slice-of-life way. Basically a journey to maturity and self-discovery.
You might jot down your aimless years after college, for your own future reminiscences if nothing else.
But everyone, I believe, has a story to tell, something of value. We tend not to tell our stories anymore, because we’re too busy and overstimulated and no longer need to fill up the hours around the cooking fire.
I have to disagree. Social media is, essentially, people telling their stories 24/7.
> Basically a journey to maturity and self-discovery.
This is my gripe with this piece. There's no buildup at any point, nothing to keep the reader interested, to make the reader care about this person sharing her memories.
For comparison, I used to date a person who worked as a waitress and she had scores of interesting stories to tell.
Once she showed me her former workplace, which had a lot of souvenirs and odd furniture - this was no accident because the manager(owner?) attributed meaning to every piece, like the kayak hanging from the ceiling represented teamwork, because you can't swim in it alone, and you certainly wouldn' be able to put it up there single-handedly. 20+ pieces in total and everyone from the wait staff was quizzed regularly on them.
Or her first, very much illegal, summer work experience at age 13, where her first task as a waitress was to trim the lawn using pruning shears. She got an allergic reaction to whatever was in that grass and management had to backpedal on this child labour thing really quick.
All the crazy stuff that goes on in such places is only mentioned in passing and I think it doesn't do this line of work justice.
It reminded me a bit of the oral history in Studs Terkel's "Working". The interview with the stewardess (as she called herself) was interesting like this.
I got 10% through. Says more about me, or at least my mood. Clicking a HN link I al not sold on reading so much. But if this article was a book I purchased I would read it over a few days.
The writing is good though at a micro level. I think it needs more structure and hooks. Chapters with interesting titles “The positive consequences of lying in my first interview” for example (I am not a writer so sure HN could do better)
I think it's like a less spicy version of Stephanie Land's article on cleaning houses (led to the excellent Netflix series Maid), which had a lot of tantalizing hooks because of the nature of the work I guess. But overall this trend of written accounts of unprivileged work by increasingly college educated people, is a good one. If it was in n+1 it would have been tied to the rise of unionization, income inequality, probably Tolstoy's concept of working class virtues. But giving more voice to pink collar, blue collar workers is a good thing.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is this article, but about a thousand times more interesting. It's on my list of books I recommend to people about to enter the corporate world, even though it's about the life of a drug addict chef.
It's stuffed with anecdotes explaining how to succeed in an extremely complicated and competitive business. With a very small bit of creativity you can construct clear analogies to white-collar work. Here's an example, in a story about a restauranteur nicknamed "Bigfoot":
> In Bigfootland you showed up for work fifteen minutes before
your shift. Period. Two minutes late? You lose the shift and are sent home. If you're on the train
and it looks like it's running late? You get off the train at the next stop, inform Bigfoot of your
pending lateness, and then get back on the next train. It's okay to call Bigfoot and say, 'Bigfoot, I
was up all night smoking crack, sticking up liquor stores, drinking blood and worshipping Satan... I'm going to be a little late.' That's acceptable-once in a very great while. But after showing up late, try saying (even if true), 'Uh... Bigfoot, I was on the way to work and the President's limo
crashed right next to me... and I had to pull him out of the car, give him mouth-to-mouth... and like I saved the leader of the free world, man!' You, my friend, are fired.
I fondly recall how once, after a long-time waitress arrived back late from vacation, claiming her
flight arrived fifteen minutes after scheduled time, Bigfoot called the airport to check her story and then fired her for lying. Treating Bigfoot like an idiot was always a big mistake. He lived for
that. In the man's three or so decades in the life, he'd seen and heard every scam, every bullshit
story, every trick, deception, ploy and gag that ever existed or that a human mind could
conceive-and was always happy to prove that to anyone foolish enough to try. If Bigfoot asked
you a question, and you didn't know the answer, he always preferred an 'I dunno' to a long-
winded series of qualified statements, speculation and half-truths. You kept Bigfoot informed of
your movements. He would never allow himself to fall victim to 'manager's syndrome'-constantly
watching the clock, wondering if and when his employees were going to show up. Where Bigfoot
ruled, he knew when they were showing up: fifteen minutes before start of shift. That's when.
Bigfoot understood--as I came to understand--that character is far more important than skills or
employment history.
This is of course a very blue way to tell a story, but it also sets a very clear model for what a demanding and competent boss wants out of his competent employees. Anyone in the corporate world who is always 15 minutes early and says "I don't know" instead of BSing is going to be a rare asset to any company, and that's just one dimension of what Anthony Bourdain outlines as a competent chef in his book.
Me too, because I wasn't captured by the story of that young woman, but the writing is so much better than on most of the blog posts that get to the top here every so often.
yeah it's a rambling incoherent piece, i don't know what people are connecting to in this - i admit there are decent ideas scattered all over it but none of them are pursued meaningfully.
My foodservice experience was highly unorthodox as it was always either an underage/under-the-table or supplementary part-time arrangement in one of my family's establishments. The last time I was yelled at for something that wasn't my fault I decided to quit and got a better-paying day job a week later.
On an unrelated note, that final restaurant job was as a bartender at a cocktail bar frequented by white-collar workers. On a slow day I was asked to wait on a table which I'd never done before. They ordered a red Bordeaux blend; I messed up the bottle service by failing to pour a sample to which the eldest gentlemen in the party retorted "Well I hope I like it!" (despite the initial pour being to check for quality, not preference, but I digress). I made it up to him by providing a few minutes of free IT consulting to the chagrin of the rest of the table and ended up with a beefy tip :o). All's well that ends well, I suppose...
This is probably the most surreal article I’ve read on HN, only because I grew up in Mira Mesa and have eaten at that very IHOP, probably even while she was a waitress there. It’s astounding how small the world can seem sometimes.
"I leaned into the idea of serving as an identity. I joined all the Facebook groups, followed #serverlife and server memes on Instagram."
I think this is one of the most toxic things in todays society, work becomes your identity and therefore you relate to it and it becomes you, or you settle to what that identity is. You are also surrounded by people in the same role, and depending on that you change to fit in with your new peers. The social media groups also re-enforce the same idea of that's all that it is.
As the author wrote in the beginning:
" I always said, soon, soon, things like this cannot last forever. I thought I’d get too tired to keep waiting tables, I thought if I waited much longer I’d lose the chance to get a ‘real’ job, in publishing or media or who knows what industry."
Many people don't get "out."
The same can be described of other groups too, can be hobby groups like cars, or other activities and such - we choose to involve ourselves with other people.
Personally, I've known many people at a distance join such groups/roles/jobs/interests and change to something worse/negative and then cut off - because it became their prime identity.
Just an interesting observation, but many times I feel people go with the easiest/path of lease resistance. Change is hard. Persistance is harder.
Tech isn't the only thing I follow, and I have a few other hobbies, but it definitely is a big part of my identity now, to the point that even when I next take a break from working in software I'm still going to be following open source, tinkering with software, and probably still obsessively keeping up with HN
I agree. It's often toxic, but it fills a common need to belong.
The need can be healthy (or at least it is common in healthy people). The satisfaction of it can be toxic, and it takes a strong(?)/determined, or at least self-aware, person to escape the local maxima and reach for something approaching real fulfillment.
But I may be projecting. I would be dissatisfied if I still lived in the town/state/region I grew up in, for example. Some people are perfectly happy there and never even question their (lack of) path. And I'm not talking about people born in destination locations!
I acknowledge my own display of ignorance and privilege in the preceding!
The freedom to consider those kinds of options -- or even the ability to conceive of them -- is absolutely not available equally to all people or at all times.
> For so many years I thought that I was missing an element of secret knowledge about how actual jobs worked, and that therefore I would be stuck forever. But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.
Reading this article made me wonder if I could hack it as a waiter. I’ve never really done any manual labor in my life - just a few part time jobs as a student that made me realize I am bad at it compared to some of my friends for whom it came so naturally. Driving a truck, building things, interacting with customers, etc. Programming, on the other hand, has always just come so naturally to me that it’s hard to imagine myself doing anything else.
I agree with the author that with most careers there is a system, and once you learn the ropes it makes things dramatically easier. And sometimes the only thing holding someone back is that first opportunity to get in the door and start learning the system. I think writers especially must struggle with this as the career path is not as well-defined as other trades.
> Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
But I don’t really agree with this premise that anyone can be a writer. I struggle to write - every paragraph is agonizing for me. I think I could definitely get better with practice, but if it were my career it would fill me with so much anxiety and self doubt that I wouldn’t be able to function. Same as if I were to be a waiter (assuming I didn’t just get fired in my first week).
I think that the author is underestimating the value of her journalism degree, and her natural inclination that made her want to study journalism in the first place, to her eventual success in that career once given an opportunity.
> The job at that bar was the best job I’ve ever had, in concert with the life I’d always wanted—publishing my writing, running a literary magazine, having several close circles of friends, living in the city I’d always dreamed of. I loved my apartment and I had the money to do things like get facials and use ClassPass. I took vacations and went to literary awards or friends’ book launches and plays and fancy dinners, and one night when I was sad I bought a pink suit, and then I felt better. Waiting tables gave me a life I didn’t think I’d be able to attain for myself.
Remember when a job such as being a waiter still meant you could in fact survive and have money left over for the occasional niceties in life like a bit of relaxation, or a frivolous purchase like (gasp) some clothing that isn't needed for a particular purpose?
All gone...because billionaires drowning in yachts, jets, vacation homes, and ultra-luxury, hyper-sports cars...aren't satisfied, and also want tax writeoffs they get because politicians tell us that if they don't give them a tax break, someone else will get the trickle-down economic benefits.
The greed is so extensive, they've gotten the USSC to rule that workers are now liable for damages to their employers, from striking...in what is almost certainly a response to the railroad strikes that scared the shit out of the 0.01%.
> Remember when a job such as being a waiter still meant you could in fact survive and have money left over for the occasional niceties in life like a bit of relaxation, or a frivolous purchase like (gasp) some clothing that isn't needed for a particular purpose?
The author's experience was three years ago. Yes, I think we all remember, no, not that much has changed in three years. Many people still make a comfortable living in a big city waiting on tables; many struggled to make ends meet even way back then.
The next time you eat in a restaurant, and you're feeling snarly cos you had a bad day, and you can't be bothered to be nice to people just doing their jobs, keep this article in mind.
Author refers 3 times to 20-pound plates of potatoes. Is that really a thing? I’ve eaten at thousands of restaurants and don’t recall anything like that but I’m not the most observant person.
> "I do think being a waitress has done one great thing with respect to writing: it has made me understand deeply and fundamentally how many writers are full of shit"
"Useless" is an odd way to describe a memoir, as though it should record someone's thoughts about their life but also teach you how to repair a clogged drain or something.
I worked for years in retail, in camera shops, and I understand the episodic hilarity and mundane heartbreak of a career in service. But it was washing dishes in a restaurant, my first ever job, that made me aware of the time-pressure intensity of food service, and that it's a lower-risk version of the old space/air travel aphorism: 'Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror'.
You work a whole shift, but only a slim segment of it matters, when work and concentration become hyper-compressed. Dishes break, people break, and there are no breaks - it continues relentlessly like a forced march, without reflection, until the blessed first minutes where you sense that it's beginning to abate.
If you're of a reflective mood, you think to yourself not only that the frantic and merciless nature of the job will never change (even if the restaurant closes, the same experience is happening in an endless continuum all over the city), but that it has probably been like this for as long as there has been civilization - a millennial succession of workers (slaves, the earlier back you go), chopping vegetables and scraping plates (copper plates, if you go back far enough), back to dining establishments and the kitchens of the influential in Roman times, Egyptian times.
It's a strange thing, but participating in these activities that are most visceral and least threatened by automation, they feel like a kind of time travel, or like being in one of the less objectionable circles in hell.
We've always been at lunch with Oceania!