What if you flipped the scenario and you heard of Americans living in India and locals claimed they have seen them killing and eating local cows? Would that just be incredibly unbelievable to you? Its just absurd to suggest that it just absolutely, 100% never happened, and everybody who has anecdotal evidence is just some racist idiot making stuff up.

And I know you won't believe me, but I actually live adjacent to one of the towns that received a large influx of Haitian migrants. Not Springfield, but a city that was also regularly mentioned on the news, and I saw evidence of the claims that were being spoken at those town halls myself. Our town literally had to put out city notices to ask people to refrain from shooting blow darts into the geese down at our local park, a place where the Haitians were known to loiter all day long for months on end, since they had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go. All of this shit was not just made up, I guarantee it. These were not all model citizens.

Now I am sure this is the part where you call me, a mixed race person who has a child with a minority mother, a racist.

The reason was: (1) it wasn't new, wide access to it was new and (2) there was clear value to it that could be explained to others and used immediately

Neither of those are true for LLMs. It just has a lot of weird hype men who get huffy and DARVO if you say what you honestly think lol

From the moment you walk in the door for your shift, you are already hours behind. You will be given a couple of hours to prep an insane amount of food from scratch, often bouncing between 5-10 stations at a time to make it happen. I worked at a place that I was expected at all times to have food cooking on a giant flat top, charbroil grill, multiple ovens, 6 burner sauté range, deep fryers, steamers. While all this is cooking you also need to be doing the cold prep of cutting, measuring, weighing and portioning all of this prep work.

After you finish this, you will have a little bit of time to start a mad rush to set up your actual station for the service. I worked at a place once where this was a two hour ordeal to set everything up while basically working at a slight jog the entire time. And all of this can be really heavy when it comes to moving around large buckets and containers of ice, for example.

Finally, once service starts on a busy weekend for example, you are now looking at a 4-5 hour rush with a minimum ambient temperature of 95 degrees, where you will be absolutely slammed with multiple orders all coming in steadily, requiring a tremendous amount of skill to balance the timing of all this. Think about how hard it can be just to time a main protein with a couple of side dishes when you are just cooking at home for the family, and now imagine having to cook that same amount of food 300 times within a few hours. There will be no break during any of this either, standing and running around the entire time.

Once the service rush is finally over, you might think that your day is winding down, but think again. You now get to start the multi hour process of breaking down and cleaning every single thing you dirtied over the course of the night. This will also be a somewhat fast paced time of the night as labor costs are always a concern in the restaurant industry, so there is no time to slack here either.

Finally the shift is done and you can go home after 10-12 hours, stuff your face with a peanut butter and jelly, and do it all again tomorrow, since you work 6 days a week, every holiday, every weekend.

I am a software engineer now and I can confidently say that I have never had a day in this profession even remotely close to as stressful as just a regular Tuesday could be in the restaurant industry.

That is, you are correct that it is higher stress than a healthy software job. It doesn't take a lot of searching to see that "grind" for game devs is absurd, though. And I'm sure you can find stories of toxic teams in any big company.

That is all to say, a ton of that pressure being "high stress" is specifically from people buckling under the pressure. I think it is fair to say that working an active event at the likes of Amazon can be as pressured as any food service work. Doesn't mean it has to be high stress.

I didn't even include the stressors involved in wondering if your pay was even going to cover your bills for the month, or stressing if the restaurant was just going to close its doors on you overnight. Never heard of a tech or construction company doing that, it happens all the time in restaurants. And I was specifically talking about my time in actual restaurants, not fast food chains or fast casual. I can't speak to them. I am talking white chef coat, table cloth with reservations type of restaurants.

I'm not arguing that tech work can't be stressful or hard (or any other job), from a skill level the tech work is much more difficult. But you asked if a the high stress stereotypes are true, and as someone that has worked in around dozen different industries over the years, restaurant work is far and away the most stressful of the bunch, it's not even remotely close. Not arguing that it should be that way, but it certainly is.

Similarly, worrying if your pay will cover bills is not at all unique to the industry. Having lived on bounced checks for a time, I agree that sucks. I've also known friends who had their paycheck bounce. An absurd amount of stress that makes zero sense.

So, my pushback here isn't that I think you are wrong. My pushback is I see no reason it has to be true. Basically, your last point. There is nothing intrinsic here that dictates this is a high stress job. Certainly the stakes are lower than something like an ER. The folks I've known that work ER complain less about the stress of their job than folks I have known that did food service, though; and that just doesn't make sense.