My first job was washing dishes in a pub (with a rather good restaurant attached). Later I progressed to cooking a bit too, and finally I was asked to put on a shirt and tie and serve front of house. It was hardly the career I had in mind, but I did learn a hell of a lot there.
Cooks for example (who often can snotty when you don’t called them “Chef” but seem to like to think of themselves as cooks not chefs) are master craftsman, carefully reducing thing to exactly the right consistency, searing slabs of meat for a length of time you can only measure with an atomic clock stolen from the Olympics and whisking sprinkles of salt into vast pans of soup where such a small quantity is surely lost.
They pontificate over cuts of meat, loose their rag when the wrong sort of pepper corns are used and I once saw a head chef hit a lad round the head (with a hot frying pan) for not trimming leeks correctly. They’re prickly, secretive, grumpy bastards. Oh, and they generally hate waiting staff. There’s a joke about the difference between a waiter and a bucket of poo, but that’s for another day.
Waiters on the other hand seem to glide about on wheels, remembering people’s names and orders (and what they ordered last week, and who their wife is and that she is not the person with them at the moment), ferrying food form kitchen to table and back again, all with a slightly aloof air (but a friendly smile).
As the swing door between the roaring burners slides closed they sweep their hair back behind their ears and go back to making sure that table 14 has got their wine, table 21 aren’t finished their starters because Mr Table 21 is still telling a story and that Table 9 are being served even though their waiter is hungover and wobbily. It’s the 12 seconds before that door closed however that were most interesting, when the vinegar of the kitchen met the oil of front of house, and the two had to mix.
Waiting staff also tend to hate kitchen staff, but they do it more quietly.
Why am I banging on about the food trade and not the web development crowd? Because it’s just the same in our world too. Designers do their thing, and developers do their thing, and where the two meet there is friction, even if we pretend that there is not.
Where the food world is best however is where the two sides of the kitchen door understand and respect one another. There are no doubt waiters who had cook, and chefs who can wait on, but they are few and far between, and very very rarely do they actually do both jobs at the same time. Why – because they are very different skill sets, and both very demanding.
A great head chef however understands that people will eat more slowly than desired, that one mans well done is another’s rare, that some (idiots) like tartar sauce with pasta dishes and that the waiters are not completely air-headed automatons.
Equally a good front of house man knows that you can’t replace cream with yoghurt a crème brule, or that a piece of fish will only be good for 2 minutes after it comes out from a grill, that chicken carpaccio is a dreadful idea (even if you saw it on telly last night) and that chefs create recipes for a reason.
It’s this loose understanding (grey knowledge) of each others areas that makes them great at their jobs, and it’s in this spirit that a two-track designs and developers conference is needed, a little knowledge can help you dodgy some very very hairy bullets.
Nobody designing a user interface should have to understand why sessions are a pain in the arse, but they should understand that splitting their forms over 14 pages is not quite as simple as it looks.
No Oracle DBA should ever have an understanding of colour palettes on their job description, but they should have grokked that putting all 127 form fields into one long list is dreadful (and their MVC model should let them correct it easily enough).
Plus, so far as I can tell, both designers and developers like drinking
beer, and that’s never a bad thing.
Tags: development
