As you enter the workforce, it becomes pretty clear that most jobs actually involve a lot of busy work that might not be visible to the naked eye. A chef might spend all day prepping ingredients without “cooking” a single dish, while a teacher may spend more time grading papers than standing in front of a classroom.
Nevertheless, between mass media and just plain ol’ stereotypes, there are all sorts of misconceptions many of us believe about different careers. So what better way to educate yourself than through the magic of the internet?
A curious Reddit user asked “What’s a myth about your profession that you want to debunk?” and professionals from across the internet gave their best examples. So get comfortable as you scroll through, and be sure to upvote the replies that taught you something new!
#1
Nurse: oftentimes we can’t control death, only how we greet it, so for the love of God, do not refuse the comfort medication for your loved one. It’s not going to [end] them, their disease is!! The comfort medication just help to ensure they have no pain or anxiety when they die. Let us help them so they don’t die crying or trashing in bed, confused and scared out of their minds.
The hospice nurses loaded my dad the f**k up when he was dying and I’ll forever be grateful for that.
Image credits: LadyVaresa
#2
Former dog walker. Cesar Milán is full of s**t. Dominance training does NOT work for most dogs. It creates more aggression and fear. Positive reinforcement with gentle corrections is *so much better*.
Those alpha wolf studies? Total BS as well. Most wolf packs are family units. Your derp wolf/dog needs a dad, not an alpha douche.
Image credits: UnihornWhale
#3
IT. Rebooting is NOT a waste of time and solves a remarkable number of problems.
Image credits: gfhggdsgsg
#4
School Custodian here and we are NOT overpaid cleaners. What would you pay someone that can paint, Sheetrock, tape/mud, patch concrete/asphalt, operate/repair commercial landscaping/snow removal equipment, operate/repair commercial custodial equipment, restore various types of floors including vct/hardwood/carpet/tile, replace toilets/faucets, air filters, belts, trim/fell trees, shovel roofs, etc? Not all of us are cleaners/janitors, which are vital and underpaid as well. Some of us are Jack/Jill of all trades and you want to pay us peanuts? All employees of a school are important and administrators shouldn’t try to balance their budgets on the backs of workers when I’ve seen an exponential amount of administrative salary and stupid purchasing decisions, not to mention unfunded mandates from the state.
Image credits: Nutella_Zamboni
#5
People in minimum wage retail and restaurant jobs are not all high school dropouts or losers who wish they had gotten better educations.
Image credits: foxylady315
#6
Veterinary medicine is not a happy-go-lucky career choice where you get to deal with cute animals rather than people. Most of your patients are sick and/or scared, and every case involves a fraught negotiation with their stressed-out human.
Image credits: Drabby
#7
Ambulance Drivers, no such a thing.
There’s highly trained Paramedics that just happen to also drive ambulances. As well as dispense over 47 medications, IVs, cardioversion, defibrillation, cardiac pacing, 12-lead EKG monitoring, advanced airways, are able to perform dozens of medical procedures, etc.
Image credits: GFSoylentgreen
#8
Anesthesiologist: you’re not asleep you are anesthetized. When you’re asleep and someone stabs you, you wake up.
Image credits: DrSuprane
#9
Teachers have very little say in anything. We advocate the best we can but most of the time it’s out of our hands including holding children back who desperately need help.
Image credits: chasindreams22
#10
Nursing is a profession, not a devotion, calling, whatever other b******t they tell you.
Yes, it’s an honor to care for people at their most vulnerable, but stop telling people they’ll be a terrible nurse if they say they became a nurse because of the job security or semi-decent wage.
Image credits: MoreConsideration432
#11
Teachers are NOT indoctrinating your children to be gay.
Image credits: Maniacboy888
#12
Bartender here. No I am not hitting on you, I just want a good tip and maybe a nice review with my name so boss knows I’m working hard
Image credits: TheWhitestBuffalo
#13
Politics here. Presidents do NOT control the economy!!!
They might be able to have some minor influence, but you are NOT experiencing inflation, a recession, or an economic boom because of a president.
Congress has more influence, but honestly economies are just complicated.
Image credits: Organic-Roof-8311
#14
There is sooooo much more to the speech-language pathologist scope of practice than working with kids who stutter or can’t say their “r”s. An entire half of the field is in the adult medical setting working with people who have dementia, swallowing disorders, oral cancer, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, and voice disorders, plus some other niche areas like transgender voice or accent modification. The pediatric half of the field also works with AAC devices, social skills, literacy development, syntax, executive functioning, writing, feeding, and more.
Image credits: bibliophile222
#15
If you go to the ER via ambulance, it does NOT mean you will be seen quicker.
ERs take the sickest people first, definitely not the ones who come in by ambulance first.
Image credits: DoIHaveDementia
#16
I’m an accountant. Whenever people jokingly talk about the good looking people in the office, it’s always “Lisa from accounts”.
As an accountant, I wish to point out that most of us look like a bulldog chewing a wasp.
Image credits: 8Ace8Ace
#17
I am a public librarian. While curating books is still a portion of the job, much of it these days is taken up by database assistance and training, program development and teaching, and public education. It’s much closer to school teaching, but for adults and without grading homework, than it was in the past.
Image credits: SmallDarkCloud
#18
I am a stay at home dad and former NICU nurse.
No, I do not sleep all day as a stay at home dad. No, I did not get to play with cute babies all day as a NICU nurse.
Image credits: anon
#19
Maintenance is worth doing and definitely worth paying for.
“I don’t know why we pay those maintenance guys, nothing ever breaks around here.”!!
The reason Germany and Japan (and South Korea) became and remain such manufacturing powerhouses is because they know the value of maintenence. If you keep everything in clean good working order, you end up with minimum down time. Working maintenance into manufacturing schedules keeps output level, because you have no unexpected downtime.
It’s the same for your car or your home. Setting aside time and resources for maintenance means you won’t lose unexpected time and resources when things break. Good maintenance will spot things before they break and switch them out. That’s worth paying for.
Image credits: TrivialBanal
#20
Forester.
I am not the one who actually cuts and hauls the trees, that’s a LOGGER. If you have a problem tree you need removed from your yard or trimmed, you need an ARBORIST.
My job is to create and implement management plans, cruise timber for volume and defect, and mark trees for the logger, among other preparatory and managerial tasks.
Furthermore, my presence does not mean that a forest is being clear-cut (hardly ever). “Clear-cut” does not necessarily mean the complete removal of every tree in an area. Most importantly, the cutting and removal of trees is not automatically a bad thing; more often than not a forested area needs to be thinned to encourage growth/production, increase carbon sequestration efficiency, and reduce fire risk.
Image credits: anon
#21
Speaking as an unemployed disabled, most of us *want* to work, but society won’t give us a chance.
Image credits: daird1
#22
That all lawyers make absurd amounts of money. The ones that won’t sell their entire life for big bucks tend to make pretty average money.
Image credits: dudeblackhawk
#23
Commercial aircraft are built almost entirely by hand. Like 96%. There’s very little automation in the process.
Image credits: Kalepsis
#24
Therapist here- specifically couples therapist
Therapy is not just about venting or having someone agree with you all the time to make you feel better. Yes we validate and listen and venting happens at times. But we also challenge you, encourage you to set goals and make change, and sometimes give “homework.” Therapy is an active process and if you want to see change you have to be willing to make change. I think media has really warped peoples ideas and they expect miracles to happen by showing up without any effort. I wish I could do that for you! But I need you to partner with me to make things happen.
Also- very few therapists actually have you lay on a couch
Image credits: Dependent-Citron4400
#25
Ejection seat mechanic. Goose would not have died in Top Gun. The canopy explosives can malfunction but moving at the speed that a Tomcat moves at would’ve ripped that canopy off and Goose would’ve escaped without perishing. Obviously done for dramatic effect.
Image credits: Bulldogs3144
#26
Logistics is a vital component of our society.
Everything we touch, everything from the doorknob of your home to the oil in your car to the coffee shop to your desk to your commute to your bed has employed around 10 people.
More if it’s food related.
Logistics wins wars and ends them.
Take a banana –
From the planting, fertilizer, cultivation and harvesting involves about 8 different types of transportation, warehousing, storage, distribution and delivery.
On average 17 people will physically touch a banana before it’s eaten (and very few people wash the outside of a banana)
I’ve been in logistics for years, previously a break bulk specialist with my area of expertise being Russia.
It’s a very interesting career
Image credits: NormalFox6023
#27
Nail tech here. We are not uneducated or lacking intelligence. In order to do the job safely, we need a deep understanding of product chemistry, anatomy, and must able to recognize a ton of diseases and disorders that impact the hands and feet. In the US, we are also required to have continued education on these topics.
We also aren’t being greedy by charging higher prices. We not only have to purchase way more products for our services than other professions in the industry, but we also have some of the highest product costs. So no, we can’t afford to provide a LUXURY service with quality products, keep up with our educational requirements and also charge $20 for a full set or a pedicure. If you find a salon charging that low, run. They are absolutely cutting corners somewhere, and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether that cut comes from low quality products, safety, sanitation and disinfection, or labor law violations. For transparency sake, I am on the low end of pricing in my area and a full set starts at $60 and a pedicure starts at $45. At those prices, I’m barely making more than minimum wage after overhead.
Image credits: burritosarebetter
#28
OBGYN.
Childbirth *absolutely* can and does changes the caliber of the vagina. The entire field of urogynecology wouldn’t exist if that weren’t the case.
TwoXChromosomes and other women’s empowerment places on the Internet love to say everything goes back to normal after delivery. It’s not true and it doesn’t make you an anti-feminist to acknowledge the realities of pushing a 10cm diameter, 9lb sack of potatoes out of the pelvis.
This messaging detrimental and causes patients with incontinence and prolapse not to seek help.
This is NOT to say that the “husband stitch” is a good thing…or even that it exists. I’ve literally never heard of it being performed outside of the Internet, and a partner has only asked me about it once in my entire career. (my response was: “Do you need it?”)
Image credits: 70125
#29
I can write code. I cannot debug most of your windows problems without googling them.
Image credits: Resies
#30
Archaeologist. The myth that most of the stuff we find is financially valuable. I’ve had literally hundreds of people ask me to look at the tiny stone tool fragment or the s****y piece of pottery they found because they think they’re gonna pay off their mortgage. Buddy I have bags of 100,000 of those things sitting in the lab.
Image credits: elchinguito
#31
Massage is not sexy, professionally. If you want a sexy massage…idk, do it with a partner or a sex worker, not your physio.
#32
Performing in a touring band is hard a*s work and a myriad of things can lead to depression and burnout. Also, crew on tour (sound engineers/TM’s/merch people) are what keep your favorite musicians from imploding and having fights on stage. If you see one at a show, thank them too.
Image credits: Mastertone
#33
Hospital lab workers DO exist! No really! The lab isn’t just a black hole where tubes go in and results come out, but there’s people inside making that happen!
Image credits: ouchimus
#34
I doubt this will be popular, but here goes… Not my profession anymore, but I sold diamonds (for engagement rings primarily) for a number of years, and have three separate certifications of expertise.
TLDR: diamond rarity is a more complex topic than people realize, and they are incredibly expensive to produce. Diamond companies have done s****y things in the past no doubt, but the stone itself gets a bad rap for no reason. Besides a sapphire or a ruby, if you put anything else in an engagement ring it will inevitably break regardless of how “pretty” you think it is.
The idea that diamonds are worthless, or should be much cheaper than they are, is incredibly misinformed. People talk about them being “common.” As in, there’s a lot of them mined out of the ground. That is true in a technical sense, but reflects a lack of understanding. 90% of diamonds that are mined are industrial grade and not suitable for jewelry. Of the remaining 10%, about 2/3 to 3/4 are of such low quality that you won’t ever see them being sold (color grade below K-M, clarity below I1). For people who don’t know what those grades mean, color has to do with the presence of nitrogen in the carbon chains that makes it look yellow and clarity is about imperfections in the crystal formation. The price of poor color and clarity jewelry quality stones will be accounted for later in this comment. Of the remainder, they get much rarer as they approach being “perfect” (D colorless, FL flawless color/clarity respectively). Size itself plays a huge factor, because while it’s true that numerically a lot of diamonds are mined, only about 1% are a carat or above in weight. I did the math on this once, and a flawless, colorless, 1 carat Diamond is a 1 in 10 billion stone. Really changes the understanding of what makes a diamond “rare.” Most diamonds also have some degree of fluorescence, which is as undesirable trait, so add in no fluorescence and it gets closer to 1 in a trillion.
However, all that aside, there’s elements of pricing strictly related to diamonds as a commodity. The cut quality of a diamond is absolutely crucial to how it looks and how it sparkles (no one wants a dull diamond). Cut quality is graded to microscopic specificity when it comes to angles and proportions (literally hundredths of a millimeter can effect the symmetry grading). As you probably already know if you read this far, diamonds are also the hardest substance on earth. Long story short, it takes an extremely skilled individual with extremely specific and expensive equipment to cut and polish a diamond and there are not that many of these people left, either. As you can imagine, they are paid very well, and that cost is incorporated into the stones.
There’s also the matter of sourcing the stones (before I get anything about bLoOd dIaMoNdS do some research, it’s not the 90s anymore. If you wanna talk about child labor in Africa, you better never consume chocolate, African coffee, or basically anything made over there at all). Anyway, back to the sourcing. Diamonds are mined out of kimberlite shafts, which go deep underground in the sides of volcanoes. They take about 10 years and a billion dollars to build. So there’s that. 90% of the stones mined are sold for industrial use in bulk for not a lot of money, so for it to even be economically sustainable, the money needs to come from somewhere just to cover costs of mining. Then cutting, not to mention the cost of transportation around the world in armored shipments.
#35
I was a Domino’s manager for most of a decade. Nobody seems to know that we actually stretch and top the pizzas by hand. I used to make hundreds of pizzas a day, every day, just to have people think we reheat frozen pizzas. On top of that, we were required to be able to make a large pepperoni (from stretching the dough to sliding it into the oven) in under a minute. I was making pizzas at breakneck speed for people who thought I did nothing all day but reheat frozen food.
The bread sticks, cheesy bread, etc. were also made by hand. The pan pizzas were made by hand. Anyone who came in to the store could have watched me make their food and known how much work I actually put into it, but most people ordered for delivery or stepped outside after they ordered or just didn’t pay attention.
Image credits: Bethymania
#36
Marine biologists do NOT get to play in the ocean for 90 percent of their careers. Tons and tons of desk work, data analysis, report writing, etc.
#37
Professors sit in cushy chairs all day thinking important thoughts, publishing stuff nobody will read, spending zero effort on teaching, and lighting cigars with wads of grant money.
The reality is we’re all frantically trying to keep dozens of plates spinning at once, desperately begging for the money needed to pay for basic supplies from granting agencies with a
Image credits: GeriatricHydralisk
#38
I was a tandem skydiving instructor for a bunch of years. For some reason, people thought that I was an adrenaline junky and risk-taking, pass-on-a-blind-curve guy.
I just worked my way up to a pretty easy job that became mundane and boring 99% of the time. The only time it was adrenaline inducing was when something went wrong. It’s not the type of adrenaline high anyone would seek out.
Image credits: wzl46
#39
Daylight savings time isn’t for the farmers, please quit blaming us.
#40
Biomedical/bioinorganic chemist: no, there’s not harmful levels of metals in your vaccine. HOWEVER, you absolutely should get your drinking water tested for lead, arsenic, mercury, and all the other nasty metals. Harmful levels of lead, for example, are common in cities and with well water…
#41
Fashion design is not glamorous. It has glamorous moments, but is mostly a catty corporate mindf**k and the 2nd biggest industrial polluter, I think. you might have a nice colleague here and there but in general people and management tend to be f*****g AWFUL. 4/10 stars, do not recommend.
Image credits: meaninglessoracular
#42
Scientist (more specifically, molecular biologist in biotech).
I am not hiding the cure for cancer, and idk s**t about actual medicine.
#43
The infrastructure, services, applications, and database platforms of even the largest global companies are all held together by hopes and dreams.
Image credits: k_marts
#44
Bartender.
We’re not short pouring you. The glasses are different sizes.
Light ice = more mixer, not more alcohol.
No, I’m not giving you anything for free. If you were someone I liked enough to do that, you wouldn’t have to ask. Also, if I do indeed give you something for free, it’s not free, it’s just gonna be me paying for it.
No, I can’t take a picture of your ID. I need to see and touch the ID. Would you try this at the DMV? No.
#45
Teacher here..Specifically Preschool/toddler..I DO NOT PLAY ALL DAY!!! I am engaging children, making moment by moment decisions and keeping children safe.
#46
Social worker here. We do FAR more than just take kids away from their parents. Child protective services social workers make up such a small percentage of us social workers. We work in so many different fields. (i.e. geriatrics, medical/ hospitals, criminal justice, government, foster care, domestic violence, schools, hospice, prisons, the list goes on!)
Image credits: -ramenluvr-
#47
Print industry – your paper isn’t as recycled as you think it is.
Image credits: mullett
#48
I’m a security guard. The myth that we don’t actually have any power is false. We have the power to call the real police if there’s real trouble. ?
#49
Engineer here. We can’t fix everything. I’m mechanical, I know enough to stay away from electricity, not enough to fix most electrical problems.
Image credits: Richard-Turd
#50
Board game inventors aren’t usually multi-millionaires, nor are they all broke with a dream. Many of us just make some extra yearly cash that helps with the daily expenses.
Image credits: captainvancouver