The Reality Gap
This site holds both halves of a question almost nobody holds together: what a representative survey of a profession reports, and what people in it say publicly and unprompted. The Reality Gap is the distance between those two.
Public first-person accounts of nursing run 9.6 points more negative than the federal survey of nurses implies.
The formula, and when this number would mislead you
Reality Gap = (negative share of applicable screened accounts) - (dissatisfied share of a representative survey)
163 / 552 = 29.5% negative, minus 19.9% dissatisfied = +9.6 percentage points
What it is not. Not a quality score and not a ranking. It describes a divergence between two accounts of the same job, not whether the job is good.
- Read as a rating. A bigger gap does not mean a worse career.
- Read as like-for-like. The survey measures how satisfied a PERSON is; the corpus measures how negative a PIECE OF WRITING is.
- Read without the components. A moving gap can mean either side moved.
- Read as prevalence. The corpus is self-selected and always will be.
What it measures
The share of screened first-person accounts our audit scores as negative, minus the share of a representative survey who report being dissatisfied. Currently 29.5% minus 19.9%, giving +9.6 percentage points — public accounts of nursing run more negative than the federal survey of nurses implies.
What it is not
It is not a rating, a ranking, or a score. There is deliberately no “Nursing: 78/100” anywhere on this site. A composite quality score invites the obvious question of who decided what “good” means, and there is no honest answer to that. A large Reality Gap does not mean a career is bad — it means the public record of it is more negative than the representative measurement, which is a fact about the record rather than about the work.
When this number would mislead you
- Read as a rating. A bigger gap does not mean a worse career.
- Read as like-for-like. The survey measures how satisfied a PERSON is; the corpus measures how negative a PIECE OF WRITING is.
- Read without the components. A moving gap can mean either side moved.
- Read as prevalence. The corpus is self-selected and always will be.
Versioning, and citing it
Every computed value carries a formula version — currently
rg-v1. If the arithmetic ever changes, the identifier
changes with it, so a figure quoted today stays reproducible afterwards. The
formula behind a number people have cited is never silently altered.
The live figure moves with the daily rebuild. A dated snapshot does not: /data/snapshots/reality-gap-2026-08-18-rg-v1.json holds the value computed on August 18, 2026 and will not change. Cite the snapshot; link the live page if you want readers to see the current number.
Cite this
Career Field Notes, “Reality Gap: Registered Nurse” (rg-v1), computed August 18, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/reality-gap/
Why it works for any career
It needs only two inputs: a representative dissatisfaction figure, and an audited negativity figure from screened accounts. Both are things this project produces for every career it covers, so the same label means the same thing across all of them rather than being a one-off for nursing.