Musings bordering on ranting

I see posts almost daily around here from aspiring professional pilots who are looking for that career "shortcut." They don't want to flight instruct. Here we go. Don't get me wrong, working for certain 141 pilot mills or a poorly operated 61 school can be tough. But, hear me out. Working as a freelance instructor can be pretty cool. For $50-100/hr you get to bullshit around a coffee pot about the stuff you love, and then you get to go do stalls, landings, approaches, chandelles, etc. etc. - you know, the fun parts of flying. Don't agree? Level off FL450 in a bizjet going coast to coast with a 50kt headwind, realizing you have literally nothing to do for the next 4 hours. You have the potential to meet some cool people and fly some cool equipment as a CFI. Even if teaching isn't your favorite thing in the world, it's not a bad way to build flight time and professional experience (and even network around FBOs). Instead, everyone wants to run off and fly banners/jumpers/survey, atleast they dodged that "terrible flight instructor gig" they think while they fly in circles all day for garbage pay, half of them in clapped out hunks of metal. Or you get the pilots who managed to network well or who had the family connections. Good for you, now you're sitting in the right seat of a turboprop or jet. If you're lucky, it's a make/model that requires an SIC and you can actually log time. Which is great until you're logging barely 300hrs a year. Then even when you do hit about 1500-2000 hours 5 years later, no one will take you seriously for a left seat upgrade because the largest plane you've ever truly been in charge of is a 172. I've seen it over and over, pilots I came up in the ranks with and now with students mapping out their own careers. That shortcut is going to look enticing, and it might be a temporary upgrade. But let's be honest, the pilot who studies material well enough to pass the CFI oral and teach it knows the material better than the CPL who didn't. The pilot who refined his airmenship/airwork until he could do it from both seats and teach it at the same time has better stick skills than the CPL who didn't. That extra professional development sets them ahead. With very few exceptions, the people who got their CFI, even if they didn't teach for more than a couple hundred hours of dual, have outpaced CPLs. They consistently are flying bigger airplanes, for better pay, and from the left seat sooner. And those exceptions to the rule that did make it to the left seat of a jet with a CPL? Most of them could have sped things up if they had gotten their CFI. Final thought, don't forget, aviation tends to be a "good old boys club." Guess what, most of the old pilots at the top of the food chain deciding whether or not to give you a shot look at the CFI as a rite of passage.

tldr: skipping CFI isn't a shortcut