[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.