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Programmers are also Cooks?

Posted Wednesday, April 23, 9:44PM

Apparently Ryan isn't the only one seeing correlations between the digital world and cooking. Here's a short post comparing software developers to line cooks.

http://www.deadprogrammer.com/developer-life-yo

"Restaurants are a lot like developer shops. You have your front of the house: waiters (sales people), hosts and managers, food runners (analysts). And then you have your back of the house: chefs (architects and lead developers), line cooks (developers) and prep cooks (producers). There's no good equivalent for dishwashers in a typical developer shop.

People often assume that a chef primarily cooks and a lead developer primarily codes. Do you know the title of Julia Child's awesome show? Well, she was neither French nor a chef. Chefs do surprisingly little cooking, they are more like conductors in orchestras. They create menus, divvy up the tasks, check quality, train and supervise cooks. Best chefs, just like the best lead developers do find time to cook, but still spend more time organizing, tasting and researching."