Did you ever land what you thought was your dream job, only to realize it was not at all what you hoped for? You’re definitely not alone. I found a Reddit thread where people shared their biggest career path letdowns. Here are a few that stood out:
1.
“Vet tech… When I was in training they ended up making me help with all the euthanasia cases. At least a couple a day. I started crying all the time and getting completely wasted every night. Had to quit after a few months.”
2.
“It turns out, I don’t like working on celebrities. They’re kind of annoying clients. It’s not fun and glamorous. It’s unnecessarily stressful. I still enjoy doing hair and I still like people, for the most part. I am now on a more low-key path. Sometimes on the way to your dream job, you have to make adjustments.”
3.
“Never really enjoyed driving but always wanted to learn to fly. Dropped $10,000 on a pilots license and found out flying was just driving with up and down added. Weird was how quickly a childhood dream turned to meh.”
4.
“Teaching. I thought it would be nice, but I was dreadful at managing behavior and just couldn’t plan lessons well. It amazes me how much teaching is promoted as an ‘anybody can do it job.’ It certainly isn’t, and I met some unhappy colleagues who hated it, too, or that weren’t suited to do it either. Also if you can’t control your class, don’t expect management to understand. Parental complaints look bad on you, so don’t expect management to side with you or have empathy. Just being able to manage kids alone isn’t enough, it’s so much more — it requires a massive array of skills and talent. You either have the knack or you don’t.”
5.
“I worked a lot of physical, demanding jobs during my 20s and had these recurring fantasies about working in a store, sitting all day waiting for people to buy something, and have all that free time. Well a couple months ago, I found that job. Great pay, some benefits, great bosses, but every day it’s slower than the last, and weirdly enough, I come back home tired from doing almost nothing all day long. WTF is up with that? Now, sometimes I fantasize about going back to my old job, where I would end up covered in sweat and dirt, but at least there was a feeling of accomplishment.”
6.
“Doctor. Currently working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week for months at a time. Four weeks of vacation a year. I am getting paid about $12 per hour when you do the math out. That is residency. I wanted to help people but this field takes advantage of that and the hospital CEOs and decreasing insurance reimbursement takes advantage of that. I pivoted to do diagnostic radiology because this internal medicine lifestyle and workload is just ridiculous.”
7.
“Working as a chemist in an academic research lab. Academia is full of narcissistic nutjobs who pretend like their research is the holy grail of their field when it’s actually practically inconsequential. The stakes are so low that the results don’t matter and everyone is just scavenging for what little funding they can pull together for something nobody really wants or needs. The amount of pettiness, sabotage, and fraud is rather pathetic. But they face little to no repercussions because, again, nobody cares. Which is why I now do research in a corporate lab.”
8.
“I thought I wanted to be a manager, but I ended having to deal with my employees’ personal lives and feelings. It clearly wasn’t my thing.”
9.
“My dream job for a long time was being a paid writer and/or screenwriter. I’ve more or less reached that point where I’m making a living writing, but boy is it different than what I expected. I could be cut/let go at any time. Years on a temp contract with no benefits. I get the weirdest notes on scripts by someone who has no idea what storytelling is. It’s a lot of keeping your head down, producing content, and hoping it doesn’t get noted to the point you have to restart…”
10.
“QA tester for a video game company. I love games and gaming. Legitimately, I played video games 8–12 hours straight with only breaks for the bathroom. However, once it became a job for me I absolutely hated it. There is no freedom. You can’t talk about what you are working on with your gaming friends and buddies either since you have strict NDAs for titles. You also have weird quotas for finding bugs in the game. It’s so odd that quantity ends up becoming more of a priority than quality. Especially if you are assigned something you actually care about. Don’t even get me started on crunch times and how swaths of people get laid off so easily even when they do great work.”
11.
“I got my dream job working for the DA’s office. Upon getting interviewed, I let them know I had vacation planned for 10 days the next month. They said no problem. One of my ‘big’ jobs was to print and highlight overnight arrests so the prosecutors had a list of cases. Every morning they’d go to the computer and hit print, and this gigantic stack of every inmate would print. Then you’d go through and highlight the new arrests. On day two, I pointed out that you could ask the computer specifically for date ranges, thus only printing the names we needed. My boss flipped and didn’t trust it. We still had to print them all. There were similar instances of technology available in the office not being utilized efficiently. When I returned from vacation, I worked three hours of OT getting things filed. The next day, I worked through lunch, then was fired on the spot for being on unauthorized leave for 10 days and had already been replaced…”
12.
“I went to culinary school, worked my way up in restaurants (as a woman) washing dishes, being the fry cook, closing two stations without a change of pay at a couple places, and finally made it to an upscale restaurant where the owners had, and STILL have, a great reputation in the industry. We were nominated for two Michelin stars while I was working for them. I finally had a job I worked so hard for, but I was extremely unhappy, unfulfilled, and burnt out. I came to realize that it was always going to be ‘go go go’ and I was never fully going to be able to rest and spend time with family. I knew it was a laborious job going in, and I was ready. What I did not expect was that I was never going to be properly compensated. Cooks are extremely underpaid, overworked, and undervalued. It was a huge disappointment finding out that I would never make enough to live on my own, and start my own business which was my end goal.”
13.
“Realtor. I thought I would be helping people find their dream houses while also understanding the housing industry. Instead, it’s a bunch of scheming and flat-out lying to people. My boss told me, ‘If A wants to sell the house for 300k and B wants to buy the house for 300k, that means we make $0. So, your job is to make A sell for 250k, and B buy for 350k so we make 100k. Don’t trust what every realtor tells you. I got out in less than a year.”
14.
“I got to work on 3D models in a large game studio. Turns out, I hate working in an office setting, I can’t stand office culture, and they don’t pay living wages for new employees. Now I get to help sick and injured people while living in a small mountain town, making enough money to buy a house and travel when I want.”
15.
“All through college, I wanted to be a software engineer. I got the job and hated everything. The work was tedious, the impact I was making was minuscule, and my team was constantly shit on and under-appreciated. I also realized I could definitely do more than code for the rest of my life.”
16.
“I always wanted to be a flight attendant. Then I actually was one. No thanks. Never again. For a few years it was fun, then it just became a series of indistinguishable hotel rooms and it wasn’t worth putting up with the passengers anymore. 🤷🏻♀️”
17.
“I played trumpet professionally for about 10 years. I was good enough that it was all I had to do to make a living. But the performances never brought me the satisfaction or fulfillment that I was looking for. I had to play most nights and weekends, and the pressure of maintaining skills to survive in a grinding competitive environment made me miserable. I miss being around the people, but I don’t miss the constant stress and doubt.”
18.
“Healthcare. It’s one of the most soul-crushing jobs out there. You see things like kids in the pediatric intensive care unit with severe injuries where parents tell conflicting stories on how they got injured or children getting declared brain dead and then you have to tell the parents, it’s awful.”
19.
“I worked for a small nonprofit doing work that I was super passionate about. I thought it was going to be a dream job. In reality, I was super overworked and underpaid. And being such a small organization, there were lots of interpersonal dramas that I was just not into. I now work a more ‘corporate’ job, and it’s still work I’m passionate about and makes a difference. I’m getting paid over double than what I made previously, my workload is manageable, and I am way less stressed. I also really like my coworkers and boss AND I work from home full time. The job I was unsure about wound up being the dream job.”
Did this happen to you? Share how your dream job became a nightmare via the anonymous comments form below, and you could be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed post!
Related
Discover more from InstiWitty Media Studios
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
