Food for thought

Posted July 28th, 2009

I've learned a lot about the working world by watching television and it's not all pretty. Now I know that reality shows aren't really "reality" and I don't tend to watch them — unless they are cooking reality shows. It started with "Iron Chef" and then "Kitchen Nightmares" (the original British version). Now it's spread to "Top Chef" (original and Masters), "Hell's Kitchen", and "The Next Food Network Star".

I'll let Andy tell you everything you need to know about how to get hired and I'll let Chad tell you everything you need to know about becoming excellent but these last two shows give you an interesting look inside the process.

Gordan Ramsey is the star of "Hell's Kitchen". The contestants are split into a red team and a blue team and each week someone gets sent home. At the end of the competition the two remaining compete to become an executive chef at one of Ramsay's restaurants. Each episode begins with a competition between the two teams doing something fairly focused like cleaning shrimp or portioning fish. Ramsay acknowledges good work but what makes the viewers tune in each week are his rants when someone does inferior work or dares to talk back to him.

I spend much of my time working with people who write software for a living. I've wondered how this show would translate to our world. I picture Steve Jobs asking contestants on two teams to create a cool User Interface for a new tablet and then shouting at them that they're useless. 

The second half of each episode of "Hell's Kitchen" features the two teams working on either side of a large kitchen competing to get food to their half of the dining room fastest while still being of high enough quality to get past Ramsay. Ramsay receives the orders from the wait staff and calls them to the appropriate kitchen and then he supervises the dishes as they go back out to the diners. 

No matter how long the diners have been waiting for an order, Ramsay will look at their food before they get it and often send it back to be cooked from scratch. He's always right to object that the food is overdone, underdone, improperly garnished or otherwise "not good enough."

Again, I imagine this would be Jobs' role as he interprets what it is the customers want and sends design after design back to the teams until they can pass his muster. He stands in the window unconcerned that his competitors have been shipping netbooks for months. So far what his teams have sent up to him is "not good enough."

"The Next Food Network Star" has a whole different vibe. Each week the contestants meet challenges for three hosts and a guest host. Instead of working on teams, the contestants compete individually. The winner gets their own show on the Food network. 

It feels more Open Source-like. Hard decisions will be made but we'll make them as a group and we'll try to be transparent in the process. The evaluation seems to be more constructive and you get the feeling that once it got down to the final four or five that any of these folks might end up on camera for the network at some point. But it feels like there's a big difference between the way the contestants in these two shows are evaluated. It's almost a Scrum-like pigs and chicken difference.

On "Hell's Kitchen" each week a team must put up the names of a couple of people who they think should go home. Ramsey gets to decide who the person is who goes home. Usually he picks from the two nominated. Some weeks he chooses someone completely different and some weeks he lets everyone stay. It's one man's decision. 

On the Food network competition, as far as we can tell, the decision is a consensus of the three main judges. They are evaluating how the contestant cooks, relates to the camera, is likable. There are lots of factors that seem to go into their decision. Two weeks ago they had a woman stand before them who had misrepresented herself three weeks in a row. 

You could probably go further and say that she lied. One week she didn't include a cooking ingredient that was required of her and initially lied and said that she had. Another week she lied and claimed to have helped everyone get their food out to the customers when she was actually only working on her own dish while everyone else struggled.

Knowing all that, the judges kept her and let another woman go. The other woman wasn't as good on camera. Her food didn't pop as much. I would think that you could teach someone those skills whereas you can't teach someone integrity. In the end, perhaps the judges felt that way too as they let the first woman go this week. I know, I know, it's a show it's not real.

I don't think it just comes down to decisions by committee. It's also how you look at the final product. Gordon Ramsey knows that no matter who is the executive chef at his restaurant, people will view it as a Gordon Ramsey restaurant and may not even remember the name of the executive chef. The Food network star is different. He or she will have a show on the network but people will remember it as their show. I watch Mario Batali when he's on the Food network and when he's on public television.

I don't know how you know as a potential employee how to figure out how your potential bosses think about the position they are hiring for. I'm not sure it changes how you approach the position. Andy comes out clearly in favor of being very honest with yourself and your potential bosses on what your experience and preferences are. You don't just want to win the chance to film a pilot episode–you want to get picked up by the network and run for many seasons. 

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.