“What’s A Job That’s Romanticized But In Reality Sucks?” (30 Answers)

Veterinary medicine.

Fantasy: I get to work with puppies and kittens.

Reality: a 3 month old kitten passed away in my care, I've seen so much gore and blood and neglect, I've sent animals home with invasive cancers because family can't afford treatment, I've been the only comfort shelter animals knew before they left this world. It is a specific and exhausting kind of pain and it isn't really talked about enough.

People who say they couldn't do it because of the euthanasia have no idea.

Have a good night everyone and be kind to all living things.

Teacher.

Fantasy: ima change the world one student at a time.

Reality: poor paying zoo.

ObGyn sonographer.

“You get to scan little unborn babies all day!”

Then you have an excited parent eagerly watching my face and looking at the screen asking all sorts of cute questions while I calmly tell them I can’t relay any results to them as I stoically measure a fatal abnormality, or record a motionless heart, etc.

Things they don’t teach you in ultrasound school: keep a pleasant expression that does not reveal anything negative about the exam but that also does not create a false sense of positivity. And do not, by any means, cry.

Lawyer.

Number of historic, life-changing, precedent-setting cases participated in: 0

Number of angry, self entitled, abusive clients wanting to screw each other over: 842

Number of pages of paperwork that’s sucked up free time and social life: 84,836.

Journalist.

Expectation: I’m gonna be the next Hunter S Thompson and write compelling feature pieces with a unique voice and get paid to travel the world!

Reality: Talking to my editor about how my contact from the cat fashion show won’t call me back or do an interview unless we pay them $80 or adopt two cats.

Working on a film.

If you're crew, it sucks. Long long hours for what seem like very very slow progress on the picture, lots of standing around waiting, etc. You arrive well before everyone else and leave after everyone else. If this is an indie production you also may have to beg/chase down for your pay at the end of each week. Oh and when the film wraps, you're now unemployed.

purpleowlie said:
Ballerina.

Judas_Feast replied:
Fortunately you won't be doing it for very long.

EclecticDreck replied:
In order to have a shot at dancing ballet professionally, you have to train your entire life. Once you make it, you'll be paid so little that you'll share lodging with a half dozen other dancers since you make less than a server at a casual dining restaurant. And even then the odds of still being a professional dancer after 30 are almost nil. If you want to stay in the field, you basically have to move into teaching which tends to pay so poorly that you'll need to find a second job.

Source: Married a former professional ballerina.

Chef/Cook - S**t pay. Toxic work environment. S**tty hot working conditions. Megalomaniac/incompetent management and owners. Long s**tty hours. Working every weekend and every holiday. The only people you will see regularly are your coworkers. And most people decend into alcoholism or drug abuse to cope. Most people get into it because they're passionate about it, and most bosses will take advantage of this.

I spent 10 years in this field. I walked away with nothing other than the knowledge I gained, then had to reenter to work force at the bottom at the age of 30. Been out 5 years now, and started making more money and working less hours within a year. I wish I'd left sooner.

Game tester.

I worked as a game tester for EA for almost 3 years. Here's what it's like.

Imagine a game type you don't like. Maybe soccer games. Maybe an RTS. Whatever.

You now play that game, 8 hours a day.

But you don't play it. You test it. So let's imagine an RTS. You are told to test the resource acquisition systems. All you do is click around and make sure your guys can mine gold and harvest lumber. You click around the map and mine and forest. There is no combat, they've turned that off for your testing. There is no story, because you just flick from level to level to test the resource system.

You test using one guy. You testing using 100 guys. You make sure no other units can gather resources. You try blocking your own guys. You try killing your own guys.

8 hours a day. Every day. For weeks.

You enter dozens of bugs.

They put out a patch that fixes the bugs.

You have to retest every level and every bug to make sure they're all fixed.

That's game testing.

Jesus917 said:
Flight attendant.

Ok_Boot5426 replied:
What sucks about a flight attendant? (genuinely curious).

Jesus917 replied:
Oh so many things... flight attendants don't have much time to spend with family, is kind of a lonely lifestyle, they sleep in a different hotel room every night away from family and friends. And the job itself... well you're locked inside the airplane for hours and hours with dozens of angry, tired, frustrated people dealing with their anger and their personalities getting treated like [crap]... oh and they don't get to breathe clean fresh air they spend all day in that stuffy plane smelling everyone's farts... that job is glamorized in the movies but in reality is far from glamorous.

Doctor.

Fantasy: *"I make lots of money, everyone respects me."*

Reality: *"I watch people pass every day, work exhausting 12 hour shifts, have crippling depression and multiple addictions."*

I've spent 9 seasons working in Antarctica both as a graduate student and now full time academic/researcher. Everyone I tell this to immediately gets excited...and says something like, "that must be SOOOO awesome! I would LOVE to do that!". Now...first year geoscience grad students always get incredibly excited about the possibility of doing field work like this...and to be fair, most of them understand what comes with this, and still want to do it. Heck, that's where I was 15 years ago. BUT...and here's the but, for this kind of work, the novelty and romantic "cool" factor wear off after a couple of days, and the remaining 2-3 months of the work is absolutely brutal. You are constantly cold, hungry, dirty...and exhausted. Small cuts and abrasions don't heal properly, your fingers crack and bleed daily, you are constantly getting frost nip, and no matter how many socks and feet warmers you wear, you toes never get warm. It's organized misery in service of Science.

Now if you're like me and are 100% invested in the science (for me it is ice core paleoclimatology), then it's all worth it. BUT, if you are a 21-year old college student that just dreams of "exploring the great unknown"...it can come as an enormous reality check once on continent. I've seen soooo many young kids quit everything for the "one chance at experiencing the raw awesomeness of Antarctica", only to realize that they effectively signed up for 3-6 months of a lonely and difficult stint of incredibly mind-numbing work. So many of the young workers, especially in McMurdo, will sign up to do "anything", just for the chance to get to Antarctica. They come to discover after a few days that they are now stuck on continent, cleaning dorm rooms as janitors or general assistants (aka laborers/handymen), only moving from one dirty building to another in McMurdo for 12+ hours shifts. What's worse, is they watch all the scientists coming through, gearing up for ridiculous deep-field deployments, while they are stuck in the stinky, diesel town of McMurdo. It can make them incredibly jaded and jealous. Sure, the view across the McMurdo Sound to the Royal Society Range and Mt. Discovery are beautiful, but my point is again that the novelty wears off quickly. I was stuck once in McMurdo for 18 days waiting to deploy, and I nearly went crazy. There's only so many times you can run the 5k loop around Discovery Point before it gets old. There's a reason why there are not one, but two bars in McMurdo...and why every bathroom has bins full of condoms. People get lonely and depressed there.

So, all this is to say, I definitely love what I do, and love remote field work and the science that comes with it. But living out of a literal tent atop the Antarctic Ice sheet for up to six months, not getting showers, always covered in a film of sticky sunblock, and always being cold and exhausted, is REALLY REALLY hard and not at all glamorous or romantic. I'm certainly a sentimental guy, and have taken thousands of amazing landscape and scenic photos from my deployments, but I never over-romanticize the work when talking to people (especially prospective grad students).

Musician.

Show up at Club at 5pm, (or earlier) unload, setup, mic check, wait hours for show to start, get [bad] bar food or local fast food, play to half empty room, tear down, load into vehicles, hopefully get paid enough to cover expenses, leave club 2-3am, covered in sweat and physically exhausted, either drive to another location or [bad] hotel.

Lather, rinse and repeat... it's a grind for 99% of the musicians out there... my god I miss it tho.

Archaeologist, specifically field archaeology.

99% of the time you find absolutely nothing, it's often physically demanding (sometimes grueling), the pay is s**t, there are no benefits, you have to constantly travel, there's very little stability, I could go on.

Source: have worked in CRM (Cultural Resource Management) archaeology for several years now.

Scrappy_Larue said:
Apparently lifeguard, because nobody can find them anymore.

SuchLovelyLilacs replied:
I did lifeguarding for a while when I was a teen (this is now 30+ years ago). It's a tough job. It seems "glamorous" - you get paid to tan all day long. Couldn't be further from the truth! It requires training (I needed my lifeguarding certification as well as my first aid and CPR certifications). It is mentally taxing - you need to be "on" whenever you're guarding. Drowning is often silent (unlike what you see on TV) and you really need to be observant. There are also a lot of parents who can't or won't watch their own children which is frustrating, to say the least. Too many parents FAR underestimate how dangerous water can be.

It was great for the couple of years I did it - good pay, flexibility, fresh air when I worked outside -- but it definitely is not something I wanted to do in the long term.

Scientist.

The dream is you come in every day searching for truth and answers to life and the universe's fundamental problems.

The truth is you are stuck in a no-win situation of having to publish like crazy, write grants that are expected to support your work and the whole university, while also handling a teaching load, fending off toxic colleagues, doing "service, and getting a destructive administration off your back.

Everywhere you turn is criticism and blockages. Your papers and grants are rejected, your students s**t on you in your teaching evaluations, you go into every faculty meeting already gritting your teeth because your colleagues on the other side of whatever faction are going to try to shut you down about everything.

You can always go into industry and make quite a chunk of change, but people give up a lot of creative aspects of their work. There is nothing wrong with science being another job where you are part of the larger mission of your company (including making a profit), it's just not what people think being a "scientist" is like.

Rrraou said:
I strongly suspect being a spy doesn't involve half as many high tech gadgets and spontaneous sexual intercourse as I've been lead to believe.

goblingoodies replied:
One former member of the CIA said the most unbelievable thing about James Bond was that he never had to file an expense report.

Barney_Haters replied:
Super boring and lonely. Keep your head down with your local, usually shi**y, job you're placed in and write reports at night. For years. Typically never leads to anything.

macaronsforeveryone said:
Actor/Actress. Most don’t make it big and many have very short career spans, then fade into obscurity.

DancinginAshes replied:
My cousin has been in that industry 20 years now, and he's considered successful because he's a few months ahead on rent at his apartment in NYC. No retirement savings, naturally, and he turns 45 this year.

Being a therapist.

Too many people I've met get into the field thinking it's how they saw it on TV: affluent white collar, own office, warm slow pace environment, where you get to sit on a nice comfy couch and be like "let's talk about your *feelings*"

That's only if you get to private practice, which they don't tell you is also like running your own small business, which good luck is you have no business acumen.

The reality is you get out if grad school, get your first job working at a Community Mental Health facility because they are the only ones who will hire you with a limited license and no experience, getting paid less than $40k/yr if you're lucky, and then get put in a walk in closet of an office, where they dump 100 client case load on you the first day, followed by your first client who has 5 different diagnoses and is on 12 different psych meds who says to you "f**k you, you're my 7th different person I've had here, nobody cares about me".

Yeah people go into $100k of debt for that...

I'm a therapist myself, I love what I do, but it takes years to get past all the [bad] parts of the field to find your place in the field. Needless to say, too many don't survive the baptism by fire I mentioned above and either become burnt out, jaded, or leave the field altogether.

Architect. You think you’ll be designing big fancy iconic buildings. Warehouses, Walmarts, strip malls, and s**t box apartments all need architects and that’s probably what you’ll end up doing