As a former dishwasher and line cook at the local steak house when I was growing up, I relate almost exactly what this guy said. I was 15 and sucked at washing dishes. We had this one guy, Snoopy was his nickname. Dude was so fast at washing dishes I wanted to be exactly like him. But it was how he attacked it that stuck with me. Organize what you can, soak the stuff with caked on crap, wash what needs washing first (plates for cooks, silverware and cups for waitresses, biscuit pans, then baking pans), sling plates around like a madman, get soaked to the bone, and never let your feet stop dancing. And exactly like this guy, I too can sort silverware with each hand independently (I have to admit I'm pretty awesome at this). Speed, speed, speed was what Snoopy drove into me. To this day I do the same things as a developer/devops person at work. Organize, prioritize, speed, speed, speed...iterate.
Ya, spent 10 years in the restaurant industry. Started as dishwasher, then busboy, salad cook, etc, then waiter, bartender, doing deliveries, and finally manager. Here's the lessons I took with me to coding:
You can't pass the problem to later. Steak is not cooked right? Wrong salad dressing? Let's have a meeting tomorrow and talk about it. No. Gotta address it RIGHT NOW.
When you get in the weeds, meaning you're overwhelmed, you gotta stop doing what's not 100% required and hustle, hustle, hustle. Don't talk to people, just do your job super fast.
Last rule: you have to be prepared for the day: gotta have the food ready by the time the front door opens. You can't say at 12:03 that there's no iced tea. Everything has to be prepared ahead of time. If you've not prepared everything as well as possible, you're gonna be screwed. Even small things like rolling silverware in napkins will kill you if you have a party of 15 ready to sit down clogging up the front lobby and you can't sit then down because you're out of freaking silverware.
So: prepare well, resolve problems as they arise, and hustle when you're overwhelmed.
Last rule: don't whine. If 19 years old Becky can do it, you can too.
That problem you just heard about? The audience is going to see it too if you don't fix it. Right. Now. And it's not going to get fixed unless you do it yourself or have someone else capable do it - you are in control, and if you don't make something happen, it doesn't happen. And while you're managing crises, you still have to fly the airplane - the performance crashes without your voice guiding it along.
You have to think through plans, make sure they will work and nothing will get in the way, and then execute them quickly and correctly, or you and the people you're responsible for are detracting from the quality of other people's hard work. Sure, you can get it right next time, but this is live. There is no editing. If you screw up, you screw up, everyone knows it, and you've blown the suspension of disbelief. But there isn't time to get flustered or argue over blame, because another cue is rapidly approaching. And sometimes, things that are nobody's fault will arise, and you'll have to work around those too. (Actor injured? Call 911, get them out the rear loading dock, and keep calling the show. Or know when to stop it. Building power outage? Get out there and get control of the audience, get some flashlights, and lead a safe evacuation.)
I don't think there's any exercise in high school with more real-world significance than that.
And the screw-up: calling the wrong backdrop on the wrong scene with an open curtain; realizing it 10 seconds later; calling it back up to drop the right one; thinking "everybody is going to notice that...I look like an idiot."
And then finding out nobody noticed or saw. Taught me an important lesson: The world is much less likely to notice my mistakes than I am, which means I can screw up more without worry as much.
My first job was as a dishwasher too, learned the same things from a dishwasher-turned-cook there. And to work hard. No one else was going to clean those dishes, and they had to be cleaned. Right now.
Restaurant's signature was french onion soup, so we had these little crockware pots coated in melted cheese that Every Single Customer had to order. Ugh. Lots of scrubbing in very hot water.
Dave was the cook's name, he was a drummer in a band in Athens Ga (drove up from Atlanta for every show) at the time when indie bands from there were the thing. He set my musical tastes on a track they never recovered from.
It felt good to start buying records with money from my own job. It really did.
10 years in catering (a pub kitchen and then a steak restaurant chain) starting as a pot washer, then commis chef all the way to grill chef including stints as acting head chef in a couple of other local restaurants in the chain.
Constant hard graft that had 99% of deadlines measured in single digit minutes not months.
It also meant I had no problems getting part time work whilst at University. I could walk straight back in to the job each term/semester, and also continue work back home during the holidays. I left University almost debt free despite getting no grant[1] and no money from parents (they couldn't afford to).
1. The UK system of subsidising University students that was in place in the 90's. This was the days before there were course fees.
Indeed. I felt a bit cheated by the end that the only appearance of this "sex-crazed" side was: "He sexually harassed waitresses using a long pair of tongs to increase his range. After drinks in the parking lot, he drove them around on his Ninja 1000."
Then I thought about it some more and decided to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - he stresses the sex-crazed aspect of the cook to paint a clearer image of the type of person, even though it doesn't really come up in the story. Starting the article with that fact planted in my head even before the first paragraph probably made a big difference to my reading of it.
I thought "sex-crazed" was just assumed when dealing with people who've spent any length of time in the food industry. [1] So when he said "sex-crazed", I expected he was somehow a notable outlier from the norm. But the characterization was on the tame side.
[1] It's hardly unique in that; pretty much any high-stress industry with a young workforce is equally notorious for the same behavior. (entertainment jobs, military jobs, etc.)
You are assuming that "tongs" is not a euphemism for something else. Hell, if you have a dirty enough mind you could substitute "Ninja 1000" for something else also.
If you follow my suggestion, then the cook will seem more than a little sex-crazed.
It's a linkbait title, probably wouldn't have even made the front page without it. You can complain about it, but it's human nature to be attracted to sensationalism and controversy, as tabloid newspapers and reality tv show producers will be happy to tell you.
It's also possibly a not-too-suble nod to the comedy movie "Waiting", which featured a sex-crazed chef.
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
don't think I would've ever read it without the word Sex in the title. Not a lot of headlines here have the word Sex in them. YC needs a sexual revolution.
I liked this story a lot, but I had a slightly different experience. I started washing dishes in a bakery over the summer, at age 12. Somewhere in the summer of my 16th or 17th year, I think the boss finally realized that I was simply better at other things, after years of what must have been charity on his part to keep me on. He could bang out a full sink of dishes in about three minutes. For me it took closer to 30, so while we generally never quite ran out, there was never an opportunity for me to do anything else. I just couldn't leave them dirty, not even a little bit. I found the concept of not doing a 100% job to be repulsive for some reason. I sometimes still do, and it does cause problems when I should have just stopped at 90% (or more like 30% with the dishes) -- perfectionism definitely has some drawbacks.
Hah! That was me at McDonald's. One night everyone else was waiting impatiently in the dining room at 1:00 AM as I was furiously scrubbing pots sparkly clean. The team lead came over, observed my technique for a few minutes, sighed, and said "Most people just knock the worst of it off. We want to go home."
They wouldn't let guys be cashiers, though, so it was making burgers and cleaning pots for a whole summer.
Awesome. Me too! I still remember one day after the breakfast shift, scrubbing the cruft off of some of the fryer baskets. The manager, after watching me quizzically for a while, said, "You don't have to get them that clean." I said, "Well, I'm gonna," and went on scraping.
I've learned to be more tactical about my high standards, but when pressed to cut quality, my default answer is still a polite GFY.
I was the same way and I actually preferred to be on dish, because I could get something done (and at night, I could blast music)! I eventually got pretty fast at it and was appreciated for not doing a crappy job.
The manager probably got a bonus for upsells. High school girls are better at doing that.
I worked at a coffee/bagel place in a mall across from a chain casual restaurant (Think Pizza Uno/Ruby Tuesday). The manager's compensation was based not only on sales/margin, but the average table occupancy. This one guy hit his number by hiring tall girls as hostesses, getting them to dress up (they tended to look like they were heading to a party) and having them stand in the doorway. Basically, they were a fishing net -- it was amazing to watch, we could tell when he was working based on the crowd.
Yeah, I don't think it's corporate policy. I don't think it was corporate policy even decades ago when I worked there. Probably illegal now.
When we complained about it the manager said "If you came here to buy a meal, who would you rather see?" As a teenage boy I couldn't argue with that logic.
Yes, yes, yes. It contains this chunk of text that is perfectly applicable to coding:
If you let your mise-en-place [your working area, your setup] run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs, and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. "You see this?" he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's palm, "That's what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!"
Any time I catch myself trying to rush through some piece of tricky coding, Bourdain's chef steps behind me and says, "Work clean!"
I'll assume your comedy detector is mis-calibrated, I have a hard time thinking someone could post here about the "tiresome whining of their servants" in anything but a joking manner.
I surely hope so. It was such a derivation from the topic at hand (rags to riches vs. complaining servants) that, if it was satire or irony, I don't get what the joke or lesson was supposed to be.
Edit: Perhaps the lesson it that they are tired of reading hard work your way to fortune stories? That does make sense, I was probably wrong in my comment above.
I don't mean to put down any rags to riches people but if we were to believe the often repeated lessons, then we should be shipping ourselves to Africa in order to become the next billionaire.
Not quite. What I got from it was that being in a kitchen is like learning how to learn how to work quickly and efficiently.
I worked through college dishwashing in a kitchen, cleaning hot pans and preparing food for impatient customers. This line immediately resonated with me:
> I still haven’t forgotten what I learned that summer. I learned the best way to sort silverware, dumping it out on the counter with each hand independently grabbing for knives, then forks, then spoons. I learned that I could work my way out of despair.
Based on how you sort silverware, I can tell whether or not you've worked in a kitchen. If you do it the correct way, then I'm also willing to bet you know how to work smart under pressure.
It's the exact opposite - his father was a furniture maker, and made sure to craft the 'hidden' parts of his work just as well as the visible ones, a lesson he carried on to Apple.
He was probably referring to cleaning (scrubbing, rinsing off, etc) the bottom of the plate prior to putting it on a rack that was about to be pushed through the dishwasher. The bottoms would be clean at this point, but it would be wasted time to spend extra seconds clearing visible food from the bottom of a plate.
a wider world where hardly anyone else had ever washed dishes for a living
There's around half a million restaurants in the US, and turnover of kitchen staff is high, so I don't understand how he concludes this. Maybe he's talking about his social circle, but there's no shortage of people out there working hard at shit jobs. I can't say I care for this style of humblebrag.
I have. I call it a shit job because it's very hard for not much pay. It's also repetitive and reactive, so once you've achieved competence, there isn't really anywhere you can go with it; it's up (to a better job in the kitchen) or out. I moved up to cooking, but I don't feel the same nostalgia as this writer for being a dishwasher. Of the various manual labor jobs I've done, I preferred construction work because it provides a sense of progress and offers more opportunities for skills development and variety as well as teamwork. YMMV.
I suspect that the percentage of knowledge workers in Europe & the US/CA who have held menial jobs prior to entering the professional workforce is significantly higher than the percentages in developing countries. I could be way wrong, but it seems there's far less social stigma attached to holding service jobs in countries where everyone knows there are attainable, relatively straightforward to achieve, better options, compared to countries where the middle class is still much smaller and a large percentage of service workers know going in they'll be holding those types of jobs for life.
Yes in Asian cultures there is much more of a stigma with manual labor. It is a huge difference with western countries where work is valued no matter what it is.
Completely - "when all around you are losing theirs"
I always used to say every university student should tend bat or tables for a month - it teaches you more about customer service than a year of once a week customer meetings.
Thanks for this, had a good laugh reading it! Cooking is my other passion right next to programming and I've worked in kitchens quite a bit, an occasional plunger but mostly a chef, on-and-off since I was 14 (don't ask...). Haven't been back to chef-ing in about 5 years, but I miss it quite a lot for various reasons.
It's taught me stuff about handling stress I don't think I could have learnt anywhere else, and making a bad situation fun is definitely a good place to start.
I think the tech world lacks this sort of attitude drastically ; I also notice that a lot of people in our sector simply can't handle stress and high workloads very well. That might be part of the reason I did pretty well when I went back to programming.
The problem with most jobs requiring a higher level of education (very generally speaking) is that they separate the maker of the product (or at least the person who delivers it) from the client. What it means is that there's rarely any direct feedback either way. Because of the shift in knowledge, you could deliver a sh*t product that your client will love, and vice-versa.
In most cases, this wouldn't happen in a kitchen. You most likely wouldn't even be able to get through the first day without communication. Your work would be meaningless without feedback from your clients and your team (good and bad), chances are you wouldn't even have a job any longer.
I'm not saying this doesn't apply to tech jobs, but there seems to be a certain latency in and "transformation" of the feedback that's passed around. It basically misses that social and professional rawness which I often miss :)
I wonder why nobody found a way to completely automate the dish-washing process? Is it really that hard? Couldn't you have dish-type-customized trays and a "monster machine" you could load them into and get them out clean and dried? (This is one of the jobs I've really like to be made to disappear, viscerally, no matter how many people depend on this type of job. I've worked as a dishwasher myself but even as a young boy I realized I'm not gonna stand doing it, so I used all my cunning and reality-distorting abilities to get out of it to a better position in less than 3 days).
That kind of equipment is expensive. Dishwashers, not so much. Many times, dishwashers are under the table workers anyway.
In high school I was paid $10/hour in the 90's to unload wagons full of hay and stack them in a barn.
There are machines that will bale, load, and stack hay. But they cost like $80k and require a modern tractor that costs $150k new. The farmers I worked for used a tractor from the mid-1950's, and didn't have enough land to generate the cash flow necessary to pay for the equipment.
So they paid about $10-12k/summer for people to do the work manually.
Fun story, but I'm gonna guess that the things he thought he learned on that job, he already had inside him. It was the first time he got to really apply his natural drive.
When I was a teenager I worked in a kitchen. A few times. Worst. Thing. Ever. 20 hour day, 4 hours of sleep, then a day off (regular work). Then another shift, sometimes. Back breaking. Absolutely worst. Still wonder how people do that. Shudder. Had recurring nightmares for the next 20 years about being drafted again.
I worked in restaurants as a high-school student 40 years ago, and at that time the dishwashers (human) put the plates into racks and shoved them into dishwashers (appliances). Manual intervention for tableware was limited to transfer to the racks at one end of the appliance, and from that the other.
I quit my first job out of college and did a few months of part time restaurant work as I figured out what exactly I wanted to do with myself professionally. We actually scrubbed dishes and that was 2010. We had a sanitizer that heated dishes to kills germs but it didn't clean them. This was in Brooklyn and a pretty common setup.
We sprayed the worst of the gunk off with a pressure nozzle after the plates (or whatever) was in the rack. Problem dishes (that we noticed came out of the dishwasher dirty) were set aside.
Not to be (too) dismissive, but anyone can work a crap job for a summer in college. Have a shit full time job after college (hypothetically: file clerk at a nursing agency in in emeryville) -- that teaches you a different level of life lessons & desperation.
The thing about this entry, though, is that it tells you how he had to change in order to succeed at that job. Which is a job, by the way, that I failed at, for exactly the reason he was failing. I just didn't have the mentorship he did. Or maybe I did, but I didn't listen. I don't know, it's been a long time.
Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful.
Isaac Newton is evidence that you're mistaken. If young person with talent and ambition were to mistakenly believe you, the most common outcome is that they'd become shadows of their former potential a few years later.
Is Newton evidence of that? If I recall rightly, he had a pretty hard life as a kid.
Learning how to work hard and get things done is definitely an experience every young person needs, and a high-school summer washing dishes will hurt nobody.
I've seen plenty of people with talent and ambition but lacking the requisite execution skills. And I've seen people with much less talent make great progress because of their hard work.
This resonates particularly well with me. I've worked at 3 places in my life. The first was a summer camp, where I was often a dish washer.
Being exposed to the skills of maintaining precision, order, and process under extreme stress is a massively valuable skill that you can cary through life. I'm just glad I learned it when the highest stakes were the lunch backup delaying dinner from being cooked - and not managing millions of dollars of investor's money.
(Ironically my only place of employment between my company and that summer camp was at Microsoft, about 5 minutes away from the Red Robin mentioned in the post)
Hmm, I am not sure his points really apply to programs given that it would be trivial to program if we knew exactly what the problem we were trying to solve was.
Hard to prioritize when we don't know what is more important (relatively to the amount of time it takes), easy to prioritize when you have 10 different kinds of things to wash.
And yes, I would fail as a dishwasher. That is why I am a programmer.
Reminds me of Thomas Keller's famous clock in the kitchen, with the words "Sense of Urgency" printed below. It hangs in the kitchens of all his restaurants.
I try to remember it when I start to lose that sense of urgency, and it works well.
Really? I'm back and forth on this, and the unlocking usually comes after periods of urgency even if I've moved on to something else. But "urgency" definitely is different than "panic" or "frantic".
I had a few high school dishwashing gigs myself. The rib house was the most memorable. Cleaning up BBQ sucked. I learned I never wanted to do that again.
most people are missing the point, it's not the dish washing or the food industry, it's these lessons learned:
1. create some type of order (clean env) in the chaos
2. coach
3. trust those that you hire old saying in chinese, leverage those you trust, dont leverage those you dont trust)
3. motivate/reward/acknowledge
Bullshit -- plenty of people, especially technical folks or individuals working in IT more generally -- still haven't learned the lessons of hard work and problem solving + prioritization of tasks under pressure. Even if it's treacly, it's still worth hearing the same thing for the millionth time. I can tell you, for one, that I'll reshare this link in a place where my team might see it (especially for the benefit of the remote teams in Mexico, Brazil, and India, where programmers tend to come from upper-middle/upper class families anyway and may never have held a manual labor position in their lives).
