This goes the other way to an extent: my friends in academia have their own misconceptions about engineering and we can talk past each other. This is true of every profession. But the absurdity of academic life really does get laid bare once you describe it to others.

It’s more like the rest of capitalism than many in academia want to see, but it’s also unusual in that more experience/training can make you less hirable, plus the pay is generally much lower than for other careers requiring (less time intensive) postgrad degrees.

This. In general, people just overestimate how lucrative writing is; one of my coworkers found something I wrote and was gushing about it, but was mouth agape when she learned how little I got paid for it. But it’s more pronounced with academia because of the sheer amount of schooling.

That, and decades of media showing how professors live cushy lives.

I get asked in every job interview why I left software engineering for academia and why I came back, and it's impossible for them to understand that a career as a professor is not attainable or anything like they have seen on TV or remember from college.

It seems entirely implausible that I have better odds of becoming the CEO of Netflix than I do of getting a job teaching Latin as a tenured professor at any university anywhere with a PhD from Ohio State.

I feel like I could have said I was going to make a living as an oil painter and it wouldn’t be as far fetched as trying to become a historian

If I pretend that my life goal was to become a sort of humanities ronin, I kind of succeeded? But what nobody tells you is that you spend a lot of time just wandering around hoping something finds you. (I’m actually very privileged; I have a good job so my chief enemy is boredom).