

Pay in Oil Fields, Not College, Is Luring Youths in Montana - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/us/26montana.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

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jasonkester
Didn't everybody else know about this in college? In Washington, it was Crab
Boats and Canneries in Alaska that people would disappear off to for the
summer and come back $40k richer. In the South, I had heard it was Oil Rigs.

But the story is the same: Trade a few months of your life (along with a non-
trivial chance that you'd also trade life itself) for a healthy pile of cash
and the kind of 20 hr/day suffering that only an 18 year old can withstand.

Plenty of guys did it, and everybody I knew was aware that it was an option.
Nobody, however, at least in my circle, considered even for a second trying to
turn that sort of hell into a career.

Reading the article, I don't see that having changed. Sure there are people
willing to do such work full time. But chances are they're not the same folks
for whom university was ever a serious option.

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micro_cam
This article and most of the comments ignore a major factor. I suspect that
location and lifestyle play as large a roll as salary in this decision. It is
hard to give up wide open spaces and recreational opportunities once you are
used to them, let alone family and friends. Waking up at 4am isn't even that
big a deal when you do the same thing on the weekend to ski, climb, hunt, fish
etc.

I recently moved to Western Montana to work remotely for my old job (far from
the oil fields though some do comute to work two week on week off
arrangements). The Northern Rockies are full of people trying to figure out
how to live here and make a decent living. For some this means an advanced
degree to get them into the medical, legal, forestry, teaching etc fields but
the cliche of PHD's waiting tables is common as well.

Some companies and the national lab system have taken advantage of this
willing work force (there is a glaxo smith klien vacine facility in a small
town near me for example) but not enough. It is a pity that fracking
technology is booming while improvements to the electrical grid and wind/solar
development procedes slowly despite great potential in the region.

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bencpeters
Agree 100%. One of the things that pushed me into software over EE in the
first place was the ability to do some non-trivial portion of work remotely
and have more control over where I live. I'm currently living further south in
the rockies (in the ski/climb/MTB mecca that is Salt Lake City) where you CAN
have a regular job and ski 100 days a winter, but I can definitely see moving
to a more remote-work based schedule living in Jackson, WY or Bozeman, MT at
some point in the future!

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mseebach
If your idea of what you're going to be doing during college and how it will
benefit you is such that getting up at 4am and working 15 hours for $50k/year
is appealing in comparison, it _most definitely_ is the right option.

Education is expensive, both in actual cost and opportunity cost. If you're
not looking forward to applying yourself to four years of intellectual
challenges (and hard work), it's a huge waste.

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rdl
What is wrong with going to a job like that for a year or a few years, then
going to school later, with some experience working, traveling, etc. Or then
picking up a trade like electrical or plumbing, either in the energy sector or
elsewhere?

I used to be really disdainful of "engineering" vs. science/math/cs, but once
I actually started hacking on hardware, I got a lot more interested in ee,
mechanical engineering, and even chemistry, plus infrastructure (power
systems, physical layers of networking, etc., and logistics).

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teemingwithlife
This is exactly what I'm doing. I was able to score a high paying, relatively
entry-level job in the South Texas oilfields and saved up quite a bit of money
over the course of a year. I ended up quitting my job and enrolling in a CS
program as a full-time student, which was the plan all along.

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jiggy2011
$40,000 a year for a job where you "sometimes" work 15 hour days and have to
get up at 4AM doesn't actually sound that great.

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michael_miller
You're living in a bubble! A good portion of students can't find _any_ job
after graduation, let alone a crappy one. The job isn't even that crappy: $40k
a year goes a long way in Montana. Wolfram Alpha says the cost of living in
NYC is 2.06x what it is in Billings, Montana. Earning the equivalent of 80k
NYC dollars is not a bad gig, even if it means working like a dog (isn't that
what i-bankers do?).

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jiggy2011
I don't live in a bubble.

What the article doesn't really mention is future earning potential. $40K
doesn't look bad when you are 19, but if you are late 30s with a house and
kids and are still doing physical work and a 3 hour commute everyday it
doesn't look so good.

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randomdata
On the flip side, 18% of university graduates fail to even earn $20,000 per
year. If you are going to roll the dice, $40K now and no income by age 40 is
_far_ better than $15K for the rest of your life. There are no guarantees in
life, so why not make hay when the sun is shining?

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jiggy2011
Well that's an 18% "chance", I'm guessing a large number of those 18% will be
people who either graduated doing something useless or had some other reason
they could not/did not work a high paying job. Such as starting a family and
only working part time, or some medical reason. So not quite rolling the dice.

I would still be reasonably confident that if you have a chance to do a good
degree from a good school your outlook is a heck of a lot better than that.

Of course the future is never clear, but that is as much a risk for people who
don't go to college to those who do.

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glesica
Nope, you're living in a bubble. Not everyone went to a "good" school. This is
one of the things that cracks me up about the HN community. It seems like
everyone went to Stanford or MIT and the dumb kids went to CMU.

The _vast_ , _vast_ majority of people do not go to prestigious schools (if
they did, those schools would no longer be prestigious, in some sense).

Additionally, these same people often lack social connections that, regardless
of what people claim, are often key to getting into a good career track.

The whole "useful degree" argument also fails to hold water. Not everyone has
the predisposition or personality to be an engineer. Those people have to do
something. Most of the things they are able to do pay very little. So for
these people, the chance to make $40k per year for a few years might be quite
appealing.

So yes, if you just graduated from MIT with a technical degree and/or your
parents are reasonably well-connected, then you are probably doing OK.
Everyone else is struggling.

Stop pretending this isn't the case, entitlement isn't an attractive
personality trait.

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jiggy2011
Well, I didn't attend Stanford , MIT or CMU nor do I know anybody who did.

I also live somewhere that is about is far away from Silicon Valley
economically (and geographically) as you can be in the developed world at
least.

There are plenty of useful things you can study that aren't engineering.

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drpgq
Similar to the way Alberta has been for a while, although $40,000 isn't that
impressive.

~~~
cynicalkane
He's a 19 year old in Montana. He can get anything he'd reasonably need or
want, and then some.

