system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
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.”
gpt
Yeah it's definitely not that way in my state. Even the career FDs can't keep people hired on from what I'm told by buddies in the career side. Not that I'm surprised, they don't get paid well enough. Then with us volly departments, you'll get two or three people "join" every year, but never do any required training and either disappear on their own or get forced out. That second one being very rare, most vanish.