CHICAGO — When it comes to hot jobs in today’s economy, software app developer is almost certainly near the top of the list. Robotics and automotive engineers, too. But pastry chef?

In recent years, as fine food has evolved from highbrow preoccupation to a form of mass entertainment, demand for people skilled in the delicate art of dessert-making has soared.

“Many students are getting hired before they even graduate,” said Jacquy Pfeiffer, dean of the French Pastry School here in Chicago, which graduates about 160 full-time students each year. “Restaurants are being built much faster than I can produce professionals.”

It’s not just restaurants that are hiring, but a profusion of pie shops, cupcakeries and cronut-mongers as well. Even grocery stores are snatching up bona fide pastry chefs.

Yet, according to Pfeiffer and 10 other chefs and restaurateurs, the salaries of pastry-makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the U.S. economy isn’t necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally assumed.

Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets. In effect, they are creating their own pastry chefs like so many tart shells rather than paying a premium to hire them fully formed.

The strategy isn’t unique to the culinary world. In many booming sectors, employers have an underappreciated capacity to slow the upward march of wages by hiring less credentialed candidates.

A company looking for a web developer — an occupation whose numbers have increased by about one-quarter during the three most recent years for which there are government data — could pay well into the six figures for top talent, or it could pay in the mid-five figures.

“It depends on the needs of the website,” said Boris Epstein, co-founder of the tech recruiting firm Binc. “Coding academies and boot camps” — short courses lasting a few weeks to several months — “graduate people who are perfectly fine.” As a result, wages for web developers nationally increased only modestly during the same period, though the rate of increase was likely higher at more tech-heavy companies, which also frequently offer stock options.

The example of pastry chefs — a field where the artistic and technical requirements may be even more demanding — is no less striking. Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are thrown off by the use of different ingredients.

“You’re binding proteins to fat molecules in milk and cream,” said Galzin, who is preparing to open a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, called Nicky’s Coal Fired. “It’s science. You can’t make it work if it doesn’t bind.”

And ice cream is just one staple of the veteran pastry chef’s repertoire. Dana Cree, now the executive pastry chef at the Publican family of restaurants in Chicago, spent eight years mastering a full complement of desserts before she first oversaw a full-blown pastry department with a sous chef and two cooks.

“I worked for a European wedding cake-maker,” she said, “who was adamant that you didn’t deserve to think of yourself as a pastry chef until you put in 10 years as an apprentice.”

If there were any place where the combination of skill requirements and rising demand should drive up salaries for pastry chefs, it would almost certainly be Chicago. Rahm Emanuel made culinary tourism a major priority after he became mayor in 2011, and the number of visitors to the city spiked to 52 million in 2015 from 39 million the year before he took office.