30 Careers That Seem Great But Are Actually Horrible And Careers That Are Often Overlooked, As Shared In This Online Thread

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Perhaps you idolized doctors or veterinarians, and you swore some form of the medical field was in your future. Maybe you always wanted to be a photographer or visual artist? Or you decided to become a pilot after your first experience flying in an airplane? We all grow up with dreams for our futures, but once the time comes to choose a career path, there are a lot more factors to consider than what looks or sounds the most exciting.

One Reddit user sparked an interesting conversation by asking for examples of careers that “seem promising but are actually traps that people consistently waste their education opportunities on” and others that are “often overlooked but unexpectedly lucrative”. The post received thousands of replies featuring anything from jobs that require years of education for very little pay to underrated professions that provide surprisingly great benefits and wages. We’ve gathered a list of some of the most helpful responses, so you can have a better idea of what positions to avoid or search for if you’re on the job hunt. Let us know in the comments if you have experience in any of these professions, and then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda piece featuring glamorized careers that turned into nightmares, check out this list next.

#1

Trap: Teacher.

Yeah it’s nice to have summers off but working 7am-7pm everyday plus a few hours on the weekends just to make 50k a year. Not to mention dealing with a bunch of whiny parents that don’t give a c**p about their child’s education.

Source: teacher

Image source: inNoutCross, Kenny Eliason

#2

Teaching in university/college. You have to do a PhD minimum, and consistently churn out new research materials. You’d have invested over a decade getting all the degrees but jobs are scarce so you end up being a temporary faculty for a few more years, doing the same or more amount of work for a fraction of the pay. At least, this is how it is in my country.

Image source: Disastrous_Process82, Tra Nguyen

#3

Funeral business is where it’s at..
Very lucrative and your customers don’t complain. Or slap you!!!

Image source: anon, Scary Side of Earth

#4

Probably about any kind of artist, but in particular 3D (CG) artist. Tons of art schools popped up selling degrees to be a video game artist or a chance to be an animator at Disney or something. Ended up oversaturating the market with low quality portfolios that had no chance of ever getting into a major studio.

Image source: DotheTroll, Windows

#5

Trap: veterinarian, debt of MD but fraction of the salary. Works if you don’t have to pay for college and vet school, but not really logical if you do.

Image source: cloud_watcher, Army Medicine

#6

Janitors make more money than you might think.

Image source: drygnfyre, Gil Ribeiro

#7

A lot of non-profits rely on your desire to do meaningful work to get away with some pretty exploitative labor practices. I’m sure it depends though because that’s a really broad category.

Image source: harveylem, non-profit

#8

Nursing school has to literally lie to students about what being in the floor in a hospital is like so that they don’t run away.

Image source: kenjimasuda, Vladimir Fedotov

#9

Journalist. I started bartending in college to pay for the degree. Got it. I’m still a bartender. You don’t make money writing until you die. Or unless you f**k your boss. I had no interest in television news so that was out. Plus, I live in DC. I got tired of the grind real quick.

Image source: IreallEwannasay, Thom Milkovic

#10

The biggest scam is being a qualified librarian. For terrible pay, organizations want you to have a flipping Master’s in Library Science. If the jobs paid more, it would make sense but it’s absolutely ridiculous. Even worse because you can sneak your way into being a librarian other ways and still be paid what qualified people are paid (there are always exceptions).

Image source: iamsheena, Taylor Wright

#11

Psychology- I have six years of school and I’ll need more to get to my end goal

Image source: sophsophsoap, Alex Green

#12

Any video game career. I wouldn’t say any specialized degree is a waste, but it’s completely unnecessary. Jobs are super competitive so breaking in w/out experience is hard, and there’s more and more candidates every year. One company I worked for said they rejected five thousand resumes for a position they posted. If you are talented to get a job you’re talented enough to make 2x more outside gaming. Stress, burnout, and divorce are super common.

Image source: jrhawk42, Sean Do

#13

According to what I’ve seen with a woman I dated, Architecture. Lots of hungry, driven kids coming out of architecture school ready to make their mark on the world. Reality is that Architects make little money while being pinched between developers, customers, and consultants. Everyone other than them makes the money, and they’re expected to work crazy hours.

Sounds pretty shitty.

Image source: MuNansen, Karolina Grabowska

#14

Working as an EMT or Paramedic. The work is rewarding but most companies are private and pay dog s**t most of your money will be made on Overtime which is mostly forced due to understaffing. I did it for 6 years and completely burned out due to being overworked. Now getting picked up by and FD or a state/city run EMS program is different and better in my opinion but most people get stuck at a private company for too long

Image source: Long_Ass_Username, Mat Napo

#15

I do beekeeping and while i find it very rewarding it seems like a growing trend of a trap. There have been a ton of people who “want to get into it”. Probably spend like $400 on equipment/bees and are done with it after 2 years. You could buy a ton of honey for that. Plus hobby beekeepers are worrisome because if they don’t treat their bees properly they can be a vector for disease.

Image source: Reddit91210, Pass the Honey

#16

Trap: stripper
Overlooked: strip club staff

I know you don’t need a degree, but if I had a dollar for every girl that thought stripping was it… Wait, I do have a dollar for every girl. Cause I stayed on the staff side. You have more responsibility than dancing, but if you get some management or accounting or business training, you can move right up to mgmt quickly. Most people running a club do not have a formal education. They’re just doing what seems best, which can turn into who knows what. If you are professional, sober, not trying to sleep with the girls, and competent in the actual work, you’re a unicorn. The hours are crazy and people are crazy, but the money is great. And I feel like it’s so much more honest than a lot of corporate b.s. I sat through in vanilla jobs. A really well run club is a beautiful thing.

Also the trades, and other service work like hairdressers and house cleaners. You can make right under six figures if you work for yourself and can handle people well. These are both hard on the lungs though over time if you don’t mask and ventilate well when working with chemicals.

Image source: anon, Eric Nopanen

#17

Yoga teacher. I am still doing my yoga teacher training, but it is basically an MLM.

Image source: MoonLover10792, Kaylee Garrett

#18

Carpentry seems to be good. I know two families where the dad is a carpenter. One is specialised in doing structural work like wooden beams for house roofs and so on, the other combined it with a love for art history and went into the restauration of antique furniture.

Both are their own boss, both are financially stable, own their own houses, provide their families, etc. When you have enough money saved up, you can also very effectively flip houses, because you can do so much of the work on your own.

Image source: Fessir, Austin Ramsey

#19

Theater. Unless you are already wealthy and know people in a big city that can get you a position in a company. Everyone wants in, much competition, low pay. Bad hours. Lots of travel and basically begging for work. I could say more about the things that have disappointed me. There has been some fun moment’s and good people but I wish I would have gotten a degree in something useful. Putting Theatre design/production major on a application has never helped me.

Image source: rholygreens, Erik Mclean

#20

TRAP: Nursing

I was used, abused, overworked, and under paid. Everyone ends up burning out quickly, and the working environment becomes hostle. I almost never got a chance to take a lunch, and was consistently asked to stay overtime to cover for a total of 16 hours. My husband had to come pick me up several times, because I was in not shape to drive home after covering. Having to cover someone was a daily chore, because the nurses I worked with decided to come in to work from a day to day basis.

Image source: Humorilove, Hush Naidoo Jade Photography

#21

Any city,state,county,federal job that is union. Get on the gravy train young and when the opportunity arises and it will, take the new job advancement. The pay rate usually has generous raises and good benefit plans. You can enjoy a good life while you’re working and A great retirement.

Image source: kcaio, Manny Becerra

#22

Being a chef. A lot of people spend a small fortune going to culinary school in order to work in a hot, stressful kitchen 70 hours a week, making a s***y salary that usually ends up being about the same rate (or less) that the burnout line cooks and dishwashers make per hour. Long days, endless deadlines, back pain from being hunched over prepping stuff all day, cuts and burns all over your body… not worth it, in my opinion.

Image source: Vale_Tenebris, Pylyp Sukhenko

#23

Surprisingly lucrative: Travel Agent/Rewarding

So the internet has essentially allowed everyone and their mother to make up their own holiday. What the internet doesn’t tell you is that the average person spends 3 WORKING DAYS planning/booking their holiday.

Rich folk don’t want to waste their time on that. Smarter upper middle class families also realise the time saving.

So now I work from home putting together fancy holidays for people who have reached a stage in their life where their free time is much more important to them.

Bonus: Free or heavily discounted holidays.

Image source: Minidooper, oxana v

#24

Painting houses honestly. The market is constantly saturated with cheap workers so if you can get a reputation for quality work you can make a pretty penny.

Image source: doktarlooney, Cal David

#25

Information Technology:

Its less that you can’t find work, but you never find work at your level, and everywhere I’ve ever worked (outside of the military wherein I got experience doing incredibly high level engineering work) has people who only half a*s know what they are doing. We are talking mistakes that someone on the lower levels of IT should be making.

The jobs you then wind up getting will have bosses getting angry at you over things you couldn’t possibly know: Like how the network is structured, while at the same time refusing to give you network maps.

Image source: Technical-Cut-2421, ThisisEngineering RAEng

#26

Trap: biotech and biotechnology. Long hours, low pay, most of the work is extremely dull and monotonous relative to what I thought “science” was, not much in the way of transferable skills.

Image source: TissueReligion, National Cancer Institute

#27

Trap: Physical Therapy.

In the US it’s a doctorate program, so on top of requiring a 4-year undergrad degree you need to complete 3 more years of graduate education. High tuition, low salary for a doctorate, and most of the fillable positions are what we call patient mills. Essentially companies want to see as much patients as possible reducing 1-on-1 time and reducing quality of care.

Image source: TheAppleJacks, Kampus Production

#28

Trap: Pilot.

You have to take on $150k debt to train, there’s oversupply of pilots in the West (and that was pre-covid) so you generally end up at a crappy low-cost carrier earning surprisingly little and paying back that debt.

You start off with little control over your hours and holidays. You compete with other pilots for the most attractive bases.

Contracts are very one-sided and redundancies are fairly common.

It was a pretty sweet career for a while, and senior pilots still enjoy a lot of benefits.
But to me, it just looked like a multi-decade grind of shift work and poor pay in some c**p corner of the continent.