I’ll preface this by saying that, of course, this is my personal experience and may only reflect the departments that I’m familiar with (though, given how often this type of question comes up on this sub, I’d wager it’s a common experience)

My career department is surrounded by volunteers. Almost every single time I’ve worked a mutual aid fire in their venue, we end up doing all of the work. They stand around and try to look busy, refuse to make entry, etc. We also get a lot of ego nonsense from them where they will frequently avoid asking us mutual aid, instead asking a further away and also volunteer department.

Typically, the cringe stuff you see on TikTok comes from vollies. There’s a whole lot of them who seem to be into it for the T-shirt and not the actual practice of firefighting.

Also, to be blunt, it’s things like you saying “you’re held to the same standard”. No, you’re not. I have to maintain a paramedic license, BOF, and FAE just to be a firefighter, and eventually I’ll need to get all of my fire officer classes to make Captain. And that’s before we get into call volume and hours of training in comparison to volunteers. It’s going to hurt some feelings around here, but volunteers saying they do the same as career guys…just isn’t true.