Maybe, provided that knowing the difference between “their” and “they’re” isn’t one of the job requirements.
Probably all of them:
Lawyer - As my consulting clients are all law firms, I get to see first hand what they do. Most of it is NOT making grandiose Perry Mason speeches and berating witnesses on the stand A Few Good Men style. It’s reviewing thousands of corporate documents and reading boring legal memos. Or you work for the DAs office plea-bargaining crackheads and jerks who stole a TV set or something.
Management Consultant - At my old firm, there was a saying in one of the orientiation books - “You’ve just finished your MBA, moved to a great appartment in the city and spend every week traveling to the smallest towns in the country…now you are a consultant”.
Investment Banker - Sure the money is awesome, however you also work 100 hours a week and don’t get any days off. What’s the point of owning a Hamptons house if you have to work on putting your deal book together every weekend?
Stockbroker - As someone pointed out, often confused with an i-banker or trader. More often than not, brokers are just some loundmouth meathead who they sit in front of a phone for 12 hours a day cold-calling clients. At the end of the year (or sooner) they get rid of whoever doesn’t meet their numbers or pass their Series 7.
Dentist - just…ewww
Real Estate Sales - I can get a monkey in a dress to show around an appartment. They either like the place or they don’t. How much “selling” does a real estate rep have to do?
Talent Agent - If Ari Gold from Entourage is any indication, spending my day being screamed at by my boss while catering to psychotic jerkoffs doesn’t sound like much fun.
Trader - Highly stressful job where everyone is trying to screw you. And you have to be on your game the entire day as long as the market is open.
I guess ulimately, they aren’t going to pay you a ton of money to NOT deal with a bunch of bullshit.
I have this ongoing discussion with the guys at work that most professional golfers don’t have the sweet gig that is imagined.
Most guys are fighting for their tour card. They are driving from tournament to tournament. They don’t have sweet deals with Nike and Accenture. They need to play golf pretty much seven days a week for long days under very stressful circumstances. (The do seem to have uniformly beautiful wives). They have a long season - and it often involves weather that I wouldn’t choose to play golf in. Unless you make it at the level that gets you a tour card guarenteed for several years (like winning a major) even making it doesn’t mean you won’t grind.
Now, I’m sure being Tiger Woods IS a sweet deal.
Agreed. I know a couple of professional golfers, and it’s not nearly as much fun as it looks like.
And add another vote for “lawyer”. Approximately 50% of the people I know who have law degrees are currently making their living NOT practicing law. They did the math, and decided that “wasting” a degree was better than wasting their lives.
Thanks to CSI and related shows there’s been an upsurgence in student interest in careers in a forensics lab.
What Horatio Cane doesn’t tell you is that labs are not pretty places full of pretty people where one investigator gets to crack the case single handed and nail the perp.
From talking to people in our county’s crime lab, it’s a lot of dull, repetative work done for very little money. They’re chronically backed up and underfunded. Not at all glamorous.
You have to show several properties (sometimes many) before the person choses one. You have to be available on nights and weekends when 9-to- people can look at houses.You have to negotiate the deal, put the person together with an attorney and a mortgage rep. You have to handle every aspect of the deal from showing the house until the closing, including inspections, appraisals, and all the mortgage processes. You have to hold the buyer’s hand.
If you listed the property, you have to come up with comps, list it for a fair but not too low a price (not easy, particularly in today’s market), send fliers, give Open Houses, get a contract, negotiate the best deal, and keep on the other side and the attorneys until the closing. If anything goes wrong with the deal, everyone is looking at you and you have to start all over again.
You have to stay on top of the rules & regs and laws of the commission and the state lawmakers. You have to know the housing people in your local government and get their approval for the final sale.
Real estate is a lot more than showing houses. It is very hard work.
For a funny but true look at the world of the golf pro, read Dan Jenkins’ **The Money-Whipped, Steer-Job, Three-Jack Give-Up Artist. **
I’m a lawyer too, at a big Toronto firm. Like everyone else, I bitch and moan about the stress and long hours, and even think on occasion about going in-house. The fact remains that the money is very, very addictive.
I’ve done other sorts of jobs in the past - in fact, when I was first out of university (BA in Anthropology, of all things useful!) I worked as a sculptor in the family business started by my mom.
Wanna know about overrated? Being an artist. Judging by their place in the modern conciousness, you would think artists are all wonderful, creative free spirits. Reality is that, unless someone with a salary supports you or you are really, really talented and/or lucky, you tend to earn a pittance when measured in per hour terms, when all the costs (materials, studio space, etc.) are deducted - very few of even the best artists I knew, people with real talent, could earn anything approaching a living by actually making art - many taught instead.
On top of that, there is working with toxic materials and in cramped conditions.
But the killer, for those who have no other source of income, is the pressure to produce stuff you know will sell better. That’s what got to me, once I started hankering to leave the family studio and start out on my own. It was the “heck, look at all these bills I gotta pay … maybe I should do stuff that will sell better, actually get solvent for once”.
Thing is, I got to thinking - why would I want to slave away for the equivalent of the salary I could get flipping burgers, and not even do stuff I want to do in the bargain? I never cared all that much for the alleged “bohemian lifestyle” of the artist - it was the creative act I loved. But I could never make it pay, probably because my stuff was way too labour-intensive - people liked it but simply would not pay for it (often enough).
So I thought, if I’m gonna be forced to do stuff I don’t really want to do, I’d rather do something that payed real money. So I went on to law school.
Now I do a mixed bag of stuff - a lot of privacy compliance, other regulatory work, some litigation. It can be stressful and the hours are long, but the pay is very, very good, I’d say.
Every job is hard work. That’s why they call it “work”. 
I think the point was that most of the glamorous ‘status’ jobs are actually long hours, tedious, and require dealing with a lot of jerks.
Hah! I was going to say the same thing, but you described it so much better than I could have.
I was so shocked to learn that to a gallery, an artist is simply a supplier, same as any other vendor selling their wares in any other storefront. Except the gallery owners know how to market it - one of them instructed his artist: “Don’t shave for a couple of days, dress in black and find a red cape to wear”.
The mystique is such a put-on; most artists are just ordinary folks paying their mortgages, hoping that the weather holds out at the art fair so they can at least cover their booth fee (anywhere from $25-$400).
The true eccentrics, free spirits and flakes have a rough time, same as they would in any other field.
About 5% of people who earn their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree are making art 10 years later.
Even better (at being worse) is restaurant owner.
So many people have the dream of feeding people delicious food and having crowds standing line out the door and down the block, and how wonderful it’ll be, but the cruel reality is 50-60% of all new restaurants will be out of business within three years.
Knowing how to cook does not equal knowing how to run a business.
Ad exec. My sister makes a ton of money (and she loves what she does), but she cannot call her life her own. She flies continually. She babysits difficult clients and has to do the whole dinner/entertainment thing that sucks the enjoyment out of actually going out to dinner/entertainment etc. She constantly has to watch her back for the backstabbing young 'uns who want her job–she has said more than once that she is getting too old to do this job (she is not yet 50). I wouldn’t switch with her for all her $.
Realtors also need to make quick evaluations of a house-hunter’s skin color, religion and ethnicity and then come up with a believable excuse as to why that property they want to see suddenly isn’t available any more. Think that’s easy?
Which is auditioning. I’ll agree with this. When my daughter was acting she was featured, and got a dressing room and the good food. It was still boring as hell, and her manager said she was doing great at 1 job per 20 auditions. Still, the money was good for a 12 year old.
Pretty much none of the kids she acted with wanted to do it when they got older, unless they had already hit it big.
Astronaut. By far, the most glamoured out career option that provides nearly nothing in reward. You spend thousands of hours training for the possibility that you just might, maybe, go to space (not the moon!) for a week. For the rest of your twenty years minus one week career, you’re going around giving speeches to elementary schools and training and training and training and training. And many astronauts don’t even go to space.
Flight attendents. It used to be thought of as a glamor job, and still is in Japan, but basically it’s working as a server to a bunch of crabby customers.
I have a very un-glamour job which is a) much more complicated and b) more interesting and fun than you might think.
People think of translation as a completely (sometimes literally) mechanical job, rather like being a player piano, or a trivially simple skill automatically acquired with any degree of fluency in the two languages (“Julie, type this in English, would you?”)
While it has its tedious sides, it can actually be quite challenging. One thing that people never seem to connect with is the fact that you have to be a very good writer in the target language. Add to that the terminological research you have to do (it can take hours or days of research to get a single crucial term), the subjects you need to understand (a lot of professional translators are very specialized, especially in law, and many even have second degrees in the field they work in), the tight deadlines, and the rather good pay, and you have a profession that in another universe might be a glamour profession, but isn’t.
It has its share of mindless busywork, but the thrill of the mot juste goes a good way to compensating for that. It needn’t even be some lofty work of literature; turning out a good press release or gov doc has a satisfaction to it.
Yeah, but chicks love astronauts. I read an interview with one where he said he gets all the tang he wants!
[sub]ok, ok, it’s a 70’s Show joke. Sue me.[/sub]
Professional Gambler
Be it a poker pro or card counter, both involve the same idea. Sitting on your ass for hours and hours every single day, maintaining complete mental focus while doing menial calculations, grinding a very small advantage…to make a couple bucks an hour.
Stanford Wong actually wrote up a Job Description
Sounds like fun. :rolleyes:
I never tried to go pro in poker, but I played 30-40 hours a week (online) once while I was unemployed. I probably made about $3 an hour over the course of 6 months or so.
There is no “joy” in winning that makes up for going to bed after an 8 hour session down money, and pissed off.