system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
Volunteer fire departments are also struggling big time sadly
gpt
Depends on your county or state. 

I know back home in CA, it’s the inverse. Volunteer departments are staffed by semi-retired EMS or other first responders. You CANNOT get hired on without decades of experience or really great networking. 

On the paid side, a nightmare to get hired onto a engine. I have buddies with combat experience, former corpsmen, 1000+ hours of private EMS experience, etc, all of them with BS degrees and fire science degrees and it still took them years to get to chiefs’ interviews. 

Even my former bosses’ husband, who was a retired AF PJ, had San Diego fire tell him to kick rocks unless he did a few years on CalFire lol. Even then he couldn’t lateral to an engineer’s role unless he went through the usual grunt work including not being allowed to watch TV or cook for the company. Homie was mid-30s being treated like garbage “because fire tradition.”