[zappo2938]

After a career of being a chef with employees, I decided to return to school to learn how to write. There is one thing that struck me with the professors in college. While in the kitchen, if a cook made a mistake, the failure and responsibility fell on me whether I was a sous-chef or executive chef.

Earlier in my career I was a chef de partie in a two Michelin star restaurant with a team of 4 cooks under me. If a cook made a mistake, the chef didn't talk to him, the chef would literally scream at me. I asked one of the cooks who worked with the chef for many years why the chef was yelling at me instead of the cook and he said that I was responsible for everything that happens on my station.

Here is the striking contrast between learning in the real world and learning in a school. In the real world, the teacher is responsible for the failure of the person learning, while in the school the student is responsible of the failure to learn.

As a chef, I can break people's spirits day and night, I have a mouth like chef Ramsey and scars on my chin where I've been punched hard, but that doesn't serve me any purpose. People breaking emotionally happens a lot especially in kitchens. There is a reason there is a lot of drug use and alcohol abuse in restaurants.

If I opened a restaurant in the town I'm in now I would never find decent cooks. I would have to train them. Unlike a college professor I wouldn't succeed by giving out F's and pushing people to drop out. I'd have to know on a case by case basis how far I can push a person to learn; to know when to give a cook a hug and to know when to scream, "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

Some people hear things like that and they change a behavior to end a chef being annoying while others see it as a threat to their employment. The same feedback is different with people. The ability to hire or fire someone gives an employer an enormous amount of power over that person.

Absolutely, adaptive learning must address the emotional state of the student. Not only does every student have a different rate of learning and different types of intelligence, for example, some people are much better with kinesthetic reasoning while other verbal reasoning, everybody has a different stress threshold before they break emotionally or give up.

[yermierc]

This message really resonated with me. Thank you very much for sharing. One thing that we've really thought about is how to learn in the real world for subjects outside of school. I know this is a silly example, but check out this set: http://www.memorangapp.com/flashcards/20746/How+to+cook+the+...

We're working on a version of our platform where you could define need-to-know facts for your employees and then give them an engaging, adaptive way to learn. These data would be fed back to you and you could determine how to help your employees, or who is falling behind. Maybe even aspects of your "curriculum" for employee training that are insufficient.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

[zappo2938]

I'm going to approach this from a professional chef point of view. For the home cook there isn't much you can do. The way to get good at it is following Dave Grohl's advice to get good at playing the guitar or drums, suck at it for a long time.

After a while I forget what the exact temperatures are but I have them written down on an index card in my recipes folder.

In the restaurant, there are some things that need to be memorized. First and foremost is the menu, every new employee needs to memorize it and it is hard to do. I worked 3.5 years in a restaurant that changed the menu every Thursday night. Nobody had a clue what was going on until Wednesday the next week. The second thing is the wine list and which dishes go with each wine. For the bartenders, they need to memorize 100s of different drinks. Both the cooks and the wait staff need to memorize the ingredients as many customers are allergic to nuts, dairy, and shell fish. Who doesn't know that there is lobster in the paella?

A restaurant will have 30 - 40 recipes and memorizing them greatly increases the speed of the cooks, a lot. However, many restaurants consider these trade secrets and like the fashion industry a recipe can't be copyrighted. The restaurants I worked in never really kept the recipes a secret because few people had the skill to implement them correctly. That paella recipe isn't a big deal going back to what I said earlier that the most important thing was sucking at making it for a long time.

[steve19]

There is nothing clever or special about how you or other chefs treat and abuse your employees.

You seem to have successfully, in your mind, justified verbal abuse ("it's OK if they can handle it and I gave them a hug last week").... let's call that "enlightened bullying" verses straight up bullying.

The ability to put up with bullies in the workplace do not make a better chef (I would prefer to see a study if you disagree, not just hear about engrained culture). It selects for psychopaths, not good cooks. It's not the military, it's a kitchen.

I train people everyday. Failure for them to learn is my failure. But I never insult or belittle them in private or public. That achieves nothing.

[zappo2938]

Fair enough. You are correct. But, your comment is attacking me! Ah, that is the secret. I'm writing code now instead of cooking. Within the new group I have entered, Hacker News, there is level of propriety that I must conform to or my behavior will be corrected by the group. For example, in the old group, aggression was a necessity of survival. Now that my behavior is falling outside of appropriate, you are reprimanding me. We are completely anonymous but your word choice still makes me feel threatened. You are challenging me. If you challenge me further I might take a moment to find a psychology study which supports what I'm saying right now, there are a few. Which means if I want to continue to be in the in group, I will be required to adopt to a certain culture and cultural norms.

Nonetheless, are you training people who have graduated college? Because there is a very big difference between training someone with enough self disciple to get through college and training someone being paid $10 an hour who was just released from jail or partied with cocaine and escorts the night before. I never used drugs which made me an outsider in the restaurant industry. I strongly believe that a lot of the people I worked with sometimes needed a hug and sometimes needed someone to yell at them. And, definitely they needed someone who knew the difference.

I also strongly believe the reason they ended up with me screaming at them was a total failure of the educational system in the United States. You train people everyday. Unlike a college professor you also have financial incentive to be effective at it. They do not.

The point I was making is that learning including memorization and behavior correction which is a type of learning is more than just linear memorization and punctuated adaptive learning, that learning must include emotional and stress assessment and consideration of the power relationship between a teacher and student which isn't inherently bad.

You do understand that your comment is aggressive and you are correct which gives you the right to be aggressive? However, you would never outright challenge your boss like that. Aggression is appropriate in certain circumstances. There is something very powerful about the pigs in Angry Birds taunting the player when the player fails and when the birds cheer. The pigs taunting is very motivating pushing people to learn the spacial reasoning to get better at the game. Can you imagine how angry people would be if the Khan Academy used subtle taunts to motive kids like Angry Birds does? Critics will say we don't know if that motivates kids or not. I say let's do A/B testing. We will know in a week and I wouldn't be surprised if taunts from the pigs and, on the other side, to keep the emotions equal, supporting cheers from the birds strongly motivates children to learn. That is on topic. What is the psychology of motivation?

[ectoplasm]

I think screaming at people and all sorts of other stuff (16-hour days?) is just an unfortunate reality of the restaurant business. It's not like your experience is unique. I feel like most of the problems could be resolved with more money - because the real problem is that every day there's some unpredictable crisis and you have to pull the resources to deal with it out of your ass. Service jobs are so hard because clients want cheap, high quality, fast service are there is tons of competition.

[paganel]

> "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

I'm stating the obvious here, but verbal abuse is not ok in a professional setting, never ever. There's nothing to justify it, not even "success" (a better cooked meal, more revenues coming in for the company etc).

[xiaoma]

>There's nothing to justify it, not even "success" (a better cooked meal, more revenues coming in for the company etc).

Not even winning a war, saving a child from a burning building or eliminating behavior that kills surgery patients? Is nothing as important as a bruised ego?

[such_a_casual]

How do you define verbal abuse? We all have different codes of morality. Is manipulating your employees verbal abuse to you? Is lying or placating things verbal abuse to you? What about going behind your back and telling another employee to talk to you instead of telling you face to face? Is that verbal abuse? Well it is to me. Whereas, I could care less if someone said "Where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?" I am extremely offended by the other examples. I think they are never ok in a professional setting, "never ever". Not even justified by success, revenue, or majority vote. Please realize that your morale code is not the only morale code, that your way of communicating, is not everyone's way of communicating. Trying to say that your rules, that your methods, are the ones that everyone needs to follow is childish.

[jonahx]

I get where you're coming from, but am torn about agreeing. The problem is that your argument can be used, exactly as you made it, to defend physical abuse too -- or anything at all. Either you don't believe in any universal human rights (in which case your argument is perfectly consistent) or you do believe in some, and then your disagreement with the OP is just about where to draw the line (in which case accusing him of childishness for wanting to enforce rules of behavior seems hypocritical, since you do that too, just in different circumstances).

[such_a_casual]

The argument I am supporting is that different things work for different people. So yes this applies to all human "rights". That said, if a population, say the state of Texas agrees that physical abuse in the workplace is wrong, then I think that it's perfectly reasonable for a rule to exist for that particular population.

The case that OP is making is that X is the only acceptable way to talk to people in the work place.

When it comes to violence, enough of us agree within our "populations" so to speak. When it comes to how people should communicate with their words, there is enough diversity to warrant freedom of choice. I think that it's important that OP be able to choose to not work in a place where their competency is questioned without regard to their feelings. However, it's completely unreasonable to tell everyone how their businesses should be ran, or how their bosses should talk to them. Not all of us enjoy being patronized, or are ok with being dishonest about how we really feel. Enough of us disagree on the best way to communicate in the workplace that there shouldn't be one right answer. OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption that what works for one person works for everyone.

[jonahx]

> OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption that what works for one person works for everyone. reply

Fair enough, some people like a culture with directness, swearing, etc. Fwiw, though, you come across as equally sensitive and marshmallow-like as the OP, it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back, while for example I accept (and expect) that as the natural behavior of nearly all humans. If you're cool applying your logic to that, too, and just choose to opt out of being around people who aren't direct, then that's fair.

[such_a_casual]

> it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back

Exactly, everyone has their own values. I value honesty. OP values dishonesty.

[hueving]

The other things you described do not fit the definition of verbal abuse. Verbal abuse is negative statements directly to a person.

Your post is defending verbal abuse, which might be a legitimate argument you could make. However, don't pretend what you do to people is not verbal abuse with some mental gymnastics to convince yourself that someone talking to HR behind your back about a problem is what real verbal abuse is.

[such_a_casual]

Since when does verbal abuse need to be made directly at a person? And don't make assumptions like "someone" talking to "HR". I'm specifically referring to situations where my boss talked shit to other employees who held the same position as myself. Negative statements? What is negative to you? Because I don't feel disrespected by some curse words or jokes. I feel disrespected when people are dishonest with me. Or when they talk shit behind my back.

[stdbrouw]

I think I'd prefer it over office politics, though: it doesn't happen behind your back. (Not that that's a choice anyone has to make.)

[emj]

They are not exclusive, you get both verbally abused and office politics. Being open is not the same thing as being abusive.

[davydka]

I agree with this, but in some professions this is a very established way of doing things with a long history that's been passed down from mentor to students for a long time. If you refuse to work in these types of situations then you had better not try to still work in that profession.

[panglott]

The "real world" requires "learning" to be so intense and abusive that it routinely pushes people to mental health crises, drug abuse, and violence?

If a professor abused his students in this way, they would rightly be fired.