merry night wanderer

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Just a heads up that I adjusted Oregon's package with more information, especially since there was some confusion about it earlier in the year. It's definitely tight, but I think there was some confusion surrounding the way they've worded things, and the situation is better than people have assumed. 

Hey folks -- Old Bill here, reporting in for the first time in several years. Now that I've finished my Ph.D., I figured I would weigh in on a few things I learned throughout the process in the hopes that it will help your decision about applying to graduate programs, or what to do if you actually get accepted to one.

First, a brief update on my experience. In a nutshell, I very much enjoyed the process of obtaining the Ph.D. I managed to do it in five years, though fair warning: I'm one of only two people in my cohort (which had around a dozen Ph.D. admits and several M.A. / Ph.D.'s) who got through it in that time. I think it's starting to become more common to take as much time as you have funding for, though my own personal circumstances (including a touch of "vaulting ambition," as Macbeth would say) caused me to want to finish in five years, no matter what. As of right now, I'm still not entirely sure what the next academic year holds, though I have secured adjuncting locally, which I'm fine with. I've had several interviews over the past six weeks, and that's apparently unusual -- it's more typical to not receive interviews until you actually have the degree in hand. But I think that may have more to do with a shift in employment expectations than anything unique about me personally.

Anyhow, thinking about the job market is something comfortably down the road for many of you, though I'm guessing you've already had a great many people tell you about how awful the academic job market is. They're all correct, of course. If you have a fairly limited idea of what kind of institution you want to work at (i.e. an R1 institution, a SLAC etc.), and are adamant you need to teach your special subfield (i.e. 18th century, literature and medicine etc.), you're likely going to face a lot of disappointment. I applied quite broadly -- to generalist positions at institutions of all kinds, ranging from R1s and R2s to community colleges to SLACs to HBCUs and others. Most of those were tenure track jobs, but some one-year positions and a few seemingly permanent full-time gigs were sprinkled in there too. To be clear, I was never indiscriminate about where I applied, but was instead open to a lot of options and adapting as needed. Out of forty-four applications, I've had four interviews (thus far), which has a yield of one interview out of eleven applications. And that's considered good! I say all this relatively personal stuff simply to highlight that you ought to be aware of what the situation is like before you even decide to draft those Ph.D. program application materials (assuming an academic job is your initial hope, that is). As for myself, I was quite aware of the state of the market when I started down this path, and nothing I've experienced has surprised me too much. Many of the folks I know who have burned out, disappeared, or otherwise turned against the very idea of an academic career have done so out of disillusionment -- not having a realistic sense of how the hard work of a Ph.D. (and it's very, very hard at times) doesn't pave a clear road to the seemingly glorious tenure-track position. So don't be deluded. You can spend five, six, seven years of doing this and be faced with poverty and no secure job prospects. That's simply true. The question is whether or not you are mentally prepared to do that, and whether the payoff is worth it (to you personally) in the long run. It certainly was for me, but in this I do have to admit I'm something of an exception.

Assuming you still want to go down this path ("no power in the 'verse can stop me," I hear you cry...), I just have a few tips that I didn't quite glean from GradCafe's heyday. First, program fit is important, but advisor fit is equally so, if not more. If you're in the enviable position of having multiple offers once your applications are out there, make a point of talking to as many of your potential advisors as possible. And here's a very, very, very important point: don't default to the person with the best publication record or reputation. That only matters in some rare circumstances. It is far more important to find an advisor who you vibe with -- someone who has the same kind of working style as you, or has the kinds of expectations of you that you want. And here's another related very, very, very important point. Hell, I'll even put it in all caps: YOU CAN ALWAYS CHANGE YOUR ADVISOR. This process inevitably feels terrifying when you're early in the program, but there are almost never any hard feelings on the part of the advisor, and it's exceedingly rare for them to be at all vindictive. I changed my advisor after my comprehensive exams -- part of it was due to fit over field (I'm a poetry person, my first advisor was not), but the other part of it was working style. My first advisor was a very top-down taskmaster sort, which worked great for a lot of his other students. But I realized that that style doesn't work well for me. I like more of a hands-off approach, and to feel that I can work on my own for a month or two with self-imposed deadlines rather than advisor-imposed ones. I switched to an advisor that was more this way, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed the dissertation process as a result. I did my own thing, reached out as needed, received a boatload of constructive criticism when I was ready for it, and never felt pressured or coerced. The moral of the story here is that your choice of advisor may be the single most important choice you make in a Ph.D. program. I put that in bold, because it's something I really never expected once admitted.

One other tip is something that I'd heard, but never really internalized: think about publication options early and often in your graduate career. You're going to start out green, of course...but literally everyone does. Once you've made it through a year of the program, you'll likely have a good sense of A.) whether you want to keep doing it, and B.) what, specifically, you want to focus on. Yes, I know that you'll enter the program thinking you already know your focus, but more often than not students switch it up. And that's to be expected. But publications are a key metric on the job market for most positions. I did manage to get a nice publication during the writing of my dissertation, but I do wish that I had been thinking more seriously about it beforehand. The jury's out on whether having a single academic publication will hurt me on the market, but whether it does or not, the simple truth is that more can only be helpful (and ignore people who tell you it's too early -- editors and reviewers will screen out substandard work; let them be the ones to do it).

This post is getting long, so I'll just end with this little suggestion that I'm sure is going to sound impossibly twee: approach the academic path (from applying to Ph.D. programs to your scholarship in one and beyond) from a standpoint of joy. I'm not trying to Marie Kondo you here, or spout toxic positivity, but my observation is that a large portion of success and well-being in academia is attitudinal. There are many bitter academics out there who don't seem to love what they do. Resist that. It doesn't have to be the norm. Moreover, most of the academics I have gravitated toward do love their work and their students. Approaching this from a standpoint of joy simply seems to work far better than from a standpoint of "struggling through" or "grinding away." Find what you love about the process, and embrace it.

Hopefully this is helpful to some of you! I know GradCafe isn't as populous as it used to be, but I'm guessing there are still enough lurkers to make a post like this worthwhile. Be well, folks, and good luck in your academic journeys!

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

I benefited a lot from reading the statements of people on the forum willing to send theirs to me, so I'm happy to pay it forward and send mine to anyone here - just send along a DM. Good luck everyone!

I benefited a lot from reading the statements of people on the forum willing to send theirs to me, so I'm happy to pay it forward and send mine to anyone here - just send along a DM. Good luck everyone!

I benefited a lot from reading the statements of people on the forum willing to send theirs to me, so I'm happy to pay it forward and send mine to anyone here - just send along a DM. Good luck everyone!

With so many schools ditching the GRE, I would have rediverted 100% of that energy to getting even more abreast of the field and refining my writing sample. To the first point, SEL provides overviews of trends based on era that I found incredibly valuable, though I'd imagine you will already have a leg up as a Master's student, and teachers in your area can help as well. To the second, I'd work on  writing sample extensively (of course) and give it not only to your mentors, but to people in the dept outside your area, if possible. I only gave mine to a newly-retired prof in my field and I regret it because (while I value his opinion tremendously) I think I pigeonholed myself a bit. Your readers are going to be all over the place in terms of specialty, theory, etc, so you want to be able to make yourself understandable and ideally appealing to as many as you can.
Not hedging your bets on a job seems wise, of course. Not specifically to you, but to anyone here: please don't go into academia because you can't think of anything else to do with your degree. Data shows we humanities folks do just fine on the job market after an adjustment period (and if you ever want to talk about the vagaries of getting a job in corporate America, let me know). But I'm also deciding to do this with plenty of middle-class job prospects elsewhere (I'm an older student) because frankly, it's way more meaningful. So I'm not personally going to discourage you. If the school you get into is a good one, they'll also provide resources for alt-ac trajectories.

In the field of Chinese History, the greatest problem facing young white scholars is the lack of access to archives. In China, the accessibility of archives is extremely unstable. Many archives that are not open to the public can be accessed through personal connections. However, I don't think doing Chinese history as non-Chinese is necessarily a disadvantage. As someone who grew up in China, I need to keep reminding myself that "The past is a foreign country," but many Chinese scholars do not realize this, and it creates problems. I think a non-Chinese perspective is very valuable to the field, but unfortunately, the Chinese archival and field environment is not friendly enough for non-Chinese scholars.

In studying US history, I sometimes feel that I understand the intellectual environment of the nineteenth-century US better than many Americans do. This is because China today is in the midst of a similar historical process, including urbanization, rapid economic growth, and the prevalence of social Darwinism.
 
 
 
 

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Just want to chime in to second Bumblebea on the point that you don’t need to have “relevant” job experience. The modern economy changes constantly and is forever inventing new positions and even just new names for positions that sound trendier. (My old position has about three different names, and I made a point of putting all of them on my resume, lol.) It means jack. Everyone, even people who currently have jobs, needs to be updated in a general sort of way about where the industry is going, what the new (and generally idiotic) lingo is, and what software skills are required going forward. Some tech valley nonsense startup might be calling a perfectly viable position for you “Solutions Ninja.” You never know.
(This reminds me of one of my most Office-Space-y stories, where one of the absolutely essential members of my department at a very big company, a web developer, told me he’d been on contract for seven years because he hadn’t realized that they were calling web developers “Communications Analysts” for some reason and hadn’t seen any benefitted web developer positions available at the company!)
You don’t need to overcomplicate researching jobs. Just literally go into Indeed and type in keywords of skills you have. “Writing” and “content” are a good start, but don’t shy away from learning some basic software so you can do something more specialized or getting a certification. You just do need some kind of job experience, so get that for yourself one way or another.

@Bumblebea This is all very fascinating to me. I read your post with great interest (although I am not in the humanities, it is always interesting to read others' accounts who have also braved the academic job market). I definitely agree with you that aspiring faculty should give themselves a time limit for amount of time they are willing to be on the academic job market. In my field, it is commonly the case that PhD graduates need to do a postdoc or two in order to land a TT position. In my specific field, I would strongly encourage PhD alumni to weigh their other options if they come up empty-handed on the academic job market after a second postdoc (~4-5 years out of the PhD). This is not to say that my field is comparable to English lit, but in any field, there does seem to be a time limit before a PhD becomes too "stale," and it's best to cut your losses.
I also agree with you that it may be worthwhile to pursue a PhD even with all of the sunk costs, but it is also important to have realistic expectations re: job market and not to romanticize the professorship (or any job). There can certainly be a lot of tedium in academia, just like any other job, and I often have to devote a substantial amount of my day-to-day doing paperwork and working on things unrelated to research/teaching. And you do have to deal with constant rejections (rejections for articles, grants, book contracts, job applications, etc.). I think this can be tough for some people's egos, if they are used to excelling in school. I've gotten used to it by now, but it was really demoralizing for me at first. 

Anyway, I don't want to venture "out of my lane" too much. But I wanted to say that I really appreciated your detailed post, and a lot of the things you said ring true universally in academia, not just in English lit!

Well, a few small quibbles with your quibbles. 
I don't think this is really necessary, unless you have your heart set on a very specialized field. It's very difficult to predict what the nonacademic world is going to value in ten years, and I would argue that work experience for the sake of work experience is valuable enough. Full disclosure: between getting my Ph.D., doing a postdoc, and teaching for five years, I was away from the nonacademic workforce for a whopping twelve years. The job I worked after graduating college? No longer exists. But it gave me some transferrable skills and, more importantly, it proved to employers that I wasn't just some "Ivory Tower academic" who didn't know how "the real world" worked. (It's an unfair perception, but one that a lot of employers still hold.) 
Having said that, I did do a few things after I lost my TT job to "freshen my skills"--I took some online courses through the Society of Technical Communication. I also volunteered to write press releases and copy for some nonprofit orgs, just so I could start to put together a portfolio of more recent "deliverables" (I hate that word, but that's the word we use). I reworked an academic paper to make it a "think piece" that got published in a major venue--another thing for my portfolio, and one that raised my profile.  
If you're nearing the end of grad school right now and aren't sure what you want to do next, I'd recommend looking through your old papers, projects, and syllabi, and think about what can be remade as public writing or "copy" that you can put in a portfolio. Especially syllabi blurbs and course advertisements, since we spend a lot of time pimping our classes to uninterested undergrads--something I stressed in interviews ("oh, you want someone to write copy? I persuaded 40 students to take a class in 18th-century literature by doing X, Y, and Z!"). 
I did not mean to imply otherwise. Adjunctification is a long, slow process that started a few decades ago. My point was simply that many of us who entered grad school around the time of the recession were told that things would turn around in four or five years and there'd be a big hiring boom once the economy came back. That never happened. Universities just learned how to exploit people better, and the number of TT jobs dropped while the number of NTT jobs ballooned. Even after the economy rebounded, university hiring did not. And why would it? With an army of adjuncts and lecturers to exploit, they have no incentive to act ethically or humanely.
Having said that, I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe hiring will come back in five or ten years. But based on past experience, I'm guessing that this pandemic demonstrated to universities just how much they can get away with in terms of labor exploitation. Hopefully I'm wrong. 
Interestingly, this hasn't yet happened on the scale that people predicted. Last year, everyone predicted mass closures of smaller, less-elite colleges. It didn't happen. Universities are apparently more resilient than we thought. This article from the Chronicle really lays this out: 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-havent-more-colleges-closed
It was predicted that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 colleges would close due to the financial strain of the pandemic. Only ten have closed so far. It's possible that more will close, but so far universities have proved to be pretty durable.
That being said, financially "unhealthy" institutions tend to not spend a lot of money hiring humanities professors. This paragraph sums it up: 
Colleges have also reduced or transformed certain programs and practices in response to evolving environments — as well as to reduce their costs. For example, over the years, the proportion of tenure-line faculty has declined while the proportion of lower-cost contingent faculty has increased. Colleges have also eliminated or restructured departments and degree programs to make their offerings more marketable to prospective students. In short, institutions have proved they are willing to make adjustments, reorganizations, and even substantial cuts to lower expenses and keep up with market demand. This willingness to adapt has no doubt been a factor in keeping many colleges financially afloat. 
I think it's safe to say that, as long as institutions remain financially unhealthy, we won't see a lot of growth in programs such as English, history, philosophy, religion, or classics. But these institutions will probably remain in business because they've learned that they can just yell "we're running out of money" and shrink humanities programs while growing their more "professional" programs. 
There's also the Johns Hopkins situation. A year ago, JHU proposed a series of budget cuts and austerity measures in response to the pandemic, including cutting benefits and laying people off. Faculty called bullshit on the idea that the university was running out of cash. As it turned out, the faculty were right. They demanded a forensic audit, which revealed a much rosier picture of the university's financial health than the administration had tried to paint. 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-era-of-artificial-scarcity
Obviously, Johns Hopkins is a major prestige university. It's not Caldwell University or Ohio Dominican or some other college that's barely hanging on, so JHU professors have a lot more clout to throw around ... but the situation demonstrates how universities often justify making cuts--by telling everyone that they're on the brink of financial ruin. And faculty tend to fall in line. JHU represents one situation where the faculty didn't fall in line, and they discovered just how badly the university administration was lying to them.
My point in all this is to say that the hiring situation in the humanities seems to operate independent of whatever the economy is doing, and more in tandem with how people perceive the humanities to be doing, and, more importantly, with what administrators can get away with. And right now? Administrators know they can get away with murder. They can get away with paying professors very little and making deep cuts to the humanities under the banner of "we don't have enough money and not enough people are majoring in history/English/foreign language." 
But all this is beside my point. What I want to say to prospective graduate students is this: It is totally your life. If you decide you want to go to graduate school despite the dim forecast, then that is your choice and you have every right to make it. If you decide not to go, then that is also your choice. Probably a wiser one! But you won't ruin your life by getting a PhD. Now, when you graduate into nothing, you might feel that way. You may indeed feel like "I have ruined my life by giving up seven years for nothing." But you'll be okay. If you can write a dissertation and survive grad school politics, lol, then you can weather the nonacademic job market. Trust me on that one.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them.
Long version:
I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities.
I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. 
I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. 
To give more of a rundown:
I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. 
I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. 
I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced.
Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life.
After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace.
So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left.
A couple other pieces of advice:
The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) 
My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. 
Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. 
Having said that:
I don't regret getting my PhD. 
Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. 
I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. 
Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.)
Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly.
I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. 
I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. 
The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be.
Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). 
It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary.
So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

A lot of excellent points in this thread, that I hope newly-admitted PhD students are taking to heart.  One I will add:
Take advantage of the resources at your school, not just the resources of your program.  Odds are, the people in your program won't know a thing about preparing for a non-academic job.  The vast majority of English faculty at PhD granting institutions have never held/applied for one.  But your school will have tons of resources, and quite probably a whole office, for job placement/development.  Don't dismiss those resources just because they are intended for the undergrads.  Develop a resume alongside your CV and keep both updated accordingly.  Do an internship during your program.  If you make a point of contributing just one thing to each world (ac and alt-ac) in every semester and every summer, then by the time you finish your program, you'll be ready to put your best foot forward regardless of the path you decide to walk (and you'll be better prepared to pivot if you start down a path and realize that it's not what you'd hoped).

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

As they say, "Office Space is a documentary," lol. 
It really sounds like you did luck out, and that's deeply worth valuing and sticking with. If you like the place where you have to spend 40 hours a week, and aren't pushed to spend more, there's not much more to reasonably ask for. I have many issues with the way industry works under capitalism. However, that doesn’t mean that every company will crush your soul or that you can’t find yourself with good colleagues, interesting work, and reasonable working conditions. Your point later is well taken that there’s a big bias against the private sector among academics, and while I completely understand why that’s the case (since we tend to think in big-picture, systemic terms), it’s also true that those conditions *can be* more humane and opportunities *certainly are* more plentiful there and they shouldn't, for reasons of survival, be discounted. 
Just as you wouldn’t want the person who got lucky and made it to be representative of the academic prospects of the people here, I wouldn’t want people to think that white collar work is a proverbial field of free time and job opportunities and good salaries. It *can* be that. But it fully depends on how you machete your way through a hostile economic jungle, and how lucky you are. You could also end up in an awful, dehumanizing situation with abusive bosses and incredibly tedious work. So you have to do your best to minimize those chances.
My major point here is the one that there are tradeoffs for everything and people need to think carefully about what kind of working life they can find tolerable. Do you need job security? Don’t freelance. Do you hate commutes? Maybe freelancing is worth the job security tradeoff for you. Do you want meaningful, helping-the-world-be-a-better-place work? You will probably want to work with nonprofits (though the nonprofit industrial complex is another ethical minefield as well). Do you really need stellar benefits? You probably need a public sector or solid white collar job, unfortunately. Just as academia is a huge tradeoff in terms of time spent, salary, meaningfulness of the work, and job prospects, so is everything else, and because you need an alt-ac plan no matter who you are, you should consider what you’re willing to give up and what you need. 
I think perhaps I haphazardly stuck nonprofits (which have overworked/underpaid issues) with public sector jobs, which tend to have the problems you're listing. I've worked as a contractor for government organizations and have generally found them my most pleasant (if not well-paying) jobs, but I'm not surprised to hear your report. If, in your personal calculus, you like benefits, job security, and work with a mission better than innovation, flexibility, and keeping busy, you might find it better. Or not! It depends again on the situation. I don't personally mind downtime (there is always personal reading to do!), but I certainly don't like process and procedure-based work and would have likely been miserable there too.
I would say the one thing you're never going to be able to fully avoid is interpersonal drama. That everyone is likely to have to confront at one time or another in any job situation. But everything else is worth thinking about as you try to angle the alt-ac resume all of us are going to need.

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread.

Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet.

I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add:
The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week.  You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best.  The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out.  Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily.
There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. 
For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. 
Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout.
I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle.  
However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Not a fan of Kelsky by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like this is good information for people to be aware of, being offered in good faith from someone who's managed to come out the other side with a stable job and career prospects, which is more than many folks who end up exploited and overworked in adjunct/VAP hell can say. Plus I think it's valuable to hear someone who's recently made the transition confirm that pivoting into industry takes a whole lot of work that can't be done overnight.
 

dissertator here (so i've seen several cohorts come and go) and wanted to add something about alt-ac: your department, wherever you end up, will be very ill-prepared to help you transition to alternative jobs or develop skills outside of traditional academic skills. your advisors are people who never had to think about alt-ac; they've most likely been in academia their whole adult lives so even if they mean well, they can't offer you much in preparing for the tremendous likelihood that you will not receive an academic job and will need to pivot and market yourself in a different way '
so basically, you need to be prepared to do your academic work while also developing skills that will make you more marketable in the "real world." i've been developing communications/marketing skills since my first year here through a campus job, which is nice and hopefully will lead to something that can pay the bills after i graduate (i'm one of the suckers who has bought into the sunk-cost fallacy and decided to just finish the phd since i'm already dissertating) but it's also tiring to be seeking out these professional development opportunities on top of normal academic duties 
also, i've seen one person in my program get an R1 job the whole time i've been here. the market is bleak bleak bleak. everyone thinks they will be the exception but that's not how exceptions work. if you're going to enter the phd no matter what, i encourage you to start preparing for alternative employment from day 1 

oh and one more thing, once you're in grad school, you'll be told time and time again that if you want an academic job, you should be prepared to move anywhere for it. when i was a naive 22 year old entering my phd program, i thought to myself, oh sure, i'll move anywhere because i love the profession! now, i'm several years older, i have a partner whose field simply doesn't exist in rural alabama, i've spent several years living and working in the Midwest and i've realized "you know, i don't want to just move anywhere for the pursuit of an academic job. actually, i only really want to live near a major metropolitan area, like where i grew up, and where my partner will actually have job opportunities and ideally i'd like to be driving distance from my family." and if you want to be in academia, you can't be choosy like that.
so that's something to consider and prepare for because a phd is long and life happens and sure, at the beginning of your phd, you think you'd be happy wherever as long as you can pursue an "academic life" but four years into your phd, you realize "an academic life" isn't such an exalted thing anyway and wow i'd really love to live somewhere with a major airport and varied food offerings.
you're all great at writing and have the ability to pivot to jobs like marketing and communications and technical writing which are much more flexible in terms of where jobs are located. i'm not trying to convince folks not to pursue a phd because that's probably not possible, but i really encourage everyone who is entering this year to start building a resume outside of academia from day 1 and go in with the expectation that you will not secure an academic job.
i have a peer reviewed publication, great teaching evals, a stellar history of department service, "trendy" research interests, and excellent relationships with my advisors — all told, i've enjoyed my time here and i will go on the job market (in a limited capacity because i'm not willing to move anywhere). but i have zero expectation of securing an academic job. i'll still probably be crushed when i go on the market and get rejected but at least i'll have been preparing for that rejection for six years. that's all you can really do imo: have no expectations. 

Yes, with a touch of self-destructiveness (hint: never name names in an open forum) and a generous dose of defensiveness.
Your admission that you're still seeking "a job that doesn't drive [you] crazy and gives [you] the comfort to pay my mortgage, go on vacation (...eventually), and pursue [your] hobbies and interests" suggests that you're no nearer to knowing the answer to the question "What am I going to do with my life?" than when you were in graduate school.
The statement also suggests that you may not be as familiar with the demands of working in the private sector as you would have readers believe. ("Managing a team of technical writers at a Fortune 100 company" is an ambiguous job description.)
Even the most satisfying and lucrative jobs are bedeviling. Home ownership is much more than paying a mortgage -- it is also utilities, insurance, taxes, dealing with neighbors, project management, maintenance, and deferred maintenance. Vacations are more and more deferred and increasingly disrupted by work. Hobbies and interests are hard to maintain as workdays lengthen and workweeks expand. 401k's alone may not earn enough money for one's retirement. And, if you haven't discovered already, a cult of personality in corporate America can be at least as corrosively soul crushing as one in the Ivory Tower--especially if that cult has set up shop in HR. IMO, your overall argument would have been stronger had you bumped that infamous thread with a post in which you outlined the steps you took to remedy what you found wrong in your department during your time at Ohio State.
What committees did you join? How did you seek to remedy bad relationships with professors? Were your experiences actually as commonplace as you allege? What kind of training did you get for going on the job market? Were you a competitive job applicant with knowledge of in-demand fields or did you have the misfortune of specializing in the wrong fields at the wrong time? Do you bear any responsibility for your sour relationships with the professors you named? I also think your comments would be less controversial if you had offered guidance on how to manage expectations and be prepared to pivot.