An aspirational job is a recipe for supply problems. Whether it's fighter piloting, game development, teaching, acting, athletics, or music, you'll find people

An aspirational job is a recipe for supply problems. Whether it's fighter piloting, game development, teaching, acting, athletics, or music, you'll find people who love the idea of the work and are willing (for a time) to be exploited and mistreated for the "opportunity". Employment, at its most basic level, is a business transaction: Employees sell their time and skills, employers offer financial compensation in exchange. This exchange is complicated by expectations of status, morality, patriotism, fulfillment, health care, education, high risk/reward opportunities, societal obligations, and so on into the sales pitch. It's also complicated when the actual job involves fewer fun flight hours and more paper-pushing, distant deployments, bureaucracy, and boot-licking (all revealed only after time in the job). problems are going to arise. Specifically, financial compensation can be reduced, working conditions made worse, and responsibilities increased, without immediate feedback from the starry-eyed recruits. But eventually, someone taking a critical look at their employment will say "This isn't as glamorous as I expected. It actually kind of sucks." A while later, starry-eyed recruits will hear about that and stop thinking that the job is Top Gun and think it's more like Office Space. And someday, way down the road, management will wonder why there's a shortage of people willing to work in the conditions they created for the pay they're offering.