| Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody breathing. It's a fun hacker story. I applied and they told me I was overqualified so I played the "starving actor" card. I do computers and stuff but need a blah blah job to pay the rent. Bagels on that mid-industrial scale are more assembly line like engineering. Cut the dough, feed it into the former, put it on a tray, freeze or proof and bake, coat with things if needed, fill boxes... it's more of just a process. A few weeks later the boss comes out for like the third time for a gripe session complaining about all of the wastage happening during the proofing process. Engineer brain piped up and blurted out "your doing it wrong". Gah! do it this way. The boss turns to the floor manager and promptly sends him out shopping for a list of items and the next day my procedure was implemented and all was well. A week later the boss calls me into the office with the owners. They can't do much but slip me a goodly amount of cash under the table. Not to long after I was the mix-master coming in at 3am with the boss to get the work started and prepare the days production run and we'd bash out a significant amount of product in the couple of hours that it took for the rest of the workers to come in for their shifts. Then he'd go to the office and I'd just mix up new batches of dough or go make some boxes. Pretty much walked out every day with enough bagels to fill myself and my housemates. I would agree in the end, that sort of "baker" is pretty much dead end. There aren't really advancement positions much beyond mix-master or floor manager, it's a sparse field. I actually found "baker" trivially easy compared to Dev/CS work. Same with "residential dining" or "warehouse management". If it's large enough it's just another procedure/process problem that you can hack into shape just like programming. |
this story shows that it pays to have engineers work on the ground to understand the operations and find ways to improve them, even if it happened by accident here.
i occasionally bake at home, and friends tell me they are intimidated by baking, but it's really just applying a recipe. scaling that up is pure engineering.