When we hear about other people's jobs, we've surely all done that thing where we make assumptions about the work they do and maybe even judge them for having such an easy or unimportant job.
But some jobs are much harder than they look.
Redditor CeleryLover4U asked:
"What's a job or profession that seems easy but is incredibly challenging?"
Customer Service
"Anything customer-facing. The public is dumb and horrendous."
- gwarrior5
"My go-to explanation is, 'Anyone can do it, but few can do it for long.'"
- Conscious_Camel4830
"The further I get in my corporate career, the less I believe I will ever again be capable of working a public-facing job. I don’t know how I did it in the past. I couldn’t handle it in the present."
"I know people are only getting worse about how they treat workers. It is disturbing, embarrassing, and draining for everyone."
- First-Combination-12
High Stakes
"A pharmacist."
"You face the public. Your mistake can literally kill someone."
- VaeSapiens
"Yes, Pharmacist. So many people think their job is essentially the same as any other kind of retail worker and they just prepare prescriptions written by a doctor without having to know anything about them."
"They are very highly trained in, well, pharmacology; and it's not uncommon for a pharmacist to notice things like potentially dangerous drug interactions that the doctor hadn't."
- Worth_University_884
Teaching Woes
"Two nuggets of wisdom from my mentor teacher when I was younger:"
"'Teaching is the easiest job to do poorly and the hardest job to do well,' and 'You get to choose two of the following three: Friends, family, or being a good teacher. You don't have enough time to do all three.'"
"We all know colleagues or remember teachers who were lazy and chose the easy route, but any teacher who is trying to be a good teacher has probably sacrificed their friends and their sleep for little pay and a stressful work environment. There's a reason something like half quit the profession within the first five years."
- bq87
Creativity Is "Easy"
"Some creative professions, such as designers, are often perceived as 'easy' due to their creative nature. However, they may face the constant need to find inspiration, deal with criticism, and meet deadlines."
- rubberduckyis
"EVERYBODY thinks they are a designer, up until the point of having to do the work. But come critique time, mysteriously, EVERYBODY IS A F**KING DESIGNER AGAIN."
"The most important skill to have as a designer is THICK SKIN."
- whitepepper
Care Fatigue Is Real
"Care work."
"I wish it could be taken for granted that no one thinks it's easy. But unfortunately, many people still see it as an unskilled job and have no idea of the many emotional complexities, or of how much empathy, all the time, is needed to form the sorts of relationships with service users that they really need."
- MangoMatiLemonMelon
Physical Labor Generally Wins
"I’m going to say most types of unskilled labor and that’s because there’s such little (visible) reward and such a huge amount of bulls**t. I’ve done customer service, barista, sales, serving, etc; and it was all much harder than my cushy desk job that actually can be considered life or death."
- anachronistika
Their Memory Banks Must Be Wild
"I don't know if I'd call it incredibly challenging, but being one of those old school taxi drivers who know the city like the back of his hand and can literally just drive wherever being told nothing but an address is pretty impressively skilled."
"Not sure if it's still like this, but British cabbies used to be legendary for this. I'm 40 and I don't think most young people appreciate how much the quality of cab service has gone down since the advent of things like Uber."
"Nowadays it's just kind of expected that a rideshare/cab driver doesn't know exactly where you're trying to get and has to rely on GPS directions that they often f up. Back when I was in college, cabbies were complete experts on their city."
"More even than knowing how to get somewhere, they could also give you advice. You could just generally describe a type of bar/club/business you're looking for, and they'll take you right to one that was spot on. Especially in really big cities like NYC."
- Yak-Mak-5000
Professional Cooking
"Being a chef."
- Canadian_bro7
"I would love to meet the person who thinks being a chef is easy! I cook my own food and it’s not only OK to eat but I make a batch of it so I have some for later. So, to make food that is above good and portion it correctly many times a day and do it consistently with minimal wastage (so they make a profit), strikes me as extremely difficult."
- ChuckDeBongo
Team Leading, Oof
"Anything that involves a lot of people skills and socializing. I thought these positions were just the bulls**t of sitting in meetings all day and not a lot of work happening but having to be the one leading those meetings and doing public speaking is taxing in a way I didn’t realize."
- Counterboudd
Not a Pet Sitter At All
"Veterinary Technician."
"Do the job of an RN, anesthesiology tech, dental hygienist, radiology tech, phlebotomist, lab tech, and CNA, but probably don’t make a living wage and have people undervalue your career because you 'play with puppies and kittens all day.'"
- forthegoddessathena
Harder Than It Looks!
"Sometimes, when my brain is fried from thinking and my ego is shot from not fixing the problem, I want to be a garbage man... not a ton of thinking, just put the trash in the truck, and a lot of them have trucks that do it for you!"
"But if the robot either doesn't work or you don't have one on your truck, it smells really bad, the pay isn't what it used to be, you might find a dead body and certainly find dead animal carcasses... and people are id**ts, overfilling their bags, just to have them fall apart before you get to the truck, not putting their trash out and then blaming you, making you come back out."
"Your body probably is sore every day, and you have to take two baths before you can kiss your wife..."
"Ehh, maybe things are not so bad where I am."
- Joebroni1414
Twiddling Thumbs and Listening
" Therapist here. I’ve always said that it’s pretty easy to be an okay therapist—as in, it’s not that hard to listen to people’s problems and say, 'Oh wow, that’s so hard, poor you.'"
"But to be a good therapist? To know when your client is getting stuck in the same patterns, or to notice what your client isn’t saying? To realize that they’re only ever saying how amazing their spouse is, and to think, 'Hmm, nobody’s marriage is perfect, something’s going on there'?"
"To be able to ask questions like, 'Hey, we’ve been talking a lot about your job, but what’s going on with your family?' And then to be able to call them on their s**t, but with kindness and empathy? Balancing that s**t is hard."
"Anybody can have empathy, but knowing when to use empathy and when and how to challenge someone is so much harder. And that’s only one dimension of what makes being a therapist challenging."
- mylovelanguageiswine
Constant Updates
"For the most part, my job is really easy (marketing tech). But having to constantly stay on top of new platforms, new tech, updates, etc etc is exhausting and overwhelming and I really hate it."
"Also, the constant responsibility to locate and execute opportunities to optimize things and increase value for higher-ups. Nobody in corporate roles can ever just reach a point of being 'good enough.' More and better is always required."
"Just some of the big reasons I’m considering a career change."
- GlizzyMcGuire_
Performing Is Not Easy
"Performing arts and other types of art. People think it’s a cakewalk or 'not a real job,' not realizing the literal lifetime of training, rejection, and perseverance that it takes to reach a professional level and how insanely competitive those spaces are."
- ThrowRA1r3a5
All About Perception
"I suspect everything fits this. Consider that someone whose job is stacking boxes in a warehouse has to know how to lift boxes, how many can be stacked, know if certain ones must be easily accessible, know how to use any equipment that is used to move boxes around."
"Not to mention if some have hazardous or fragile materials inside, if some HAVE to be stacked on the bottom, if a mistake is made and all the boxes have to be restacked, etc."
"But everyone else is like, 'They're just stacking boxes.'"
- DrHugh
It's easy to make assumptions about someone else's work and responsibilities when we haven't lived with performing those tasks ourselves.
This gave us some things to think about, and it certainly reminded us that nothing good comes of making assumptions, especially when it minimizes someone else's experiences.
