Pay in Oil Fields, Not College, Is Luring Youths in Montana

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/us/26montana.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

by danso • 14 years ago

18 43 14 years ago

jiggy201111• 14 years ago

$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.

bmj• 14 years ago

Compare this to racking up massive debt going to college without any guarantee of a decent job upon graduation.

randomdata10• 14 years ago

Not to mention, assuming four years of study is the alternative, it puts one about $1.6M ahead by retirement, even ignoring the costs of education itself.

michael_miller• 14 years ago

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?).

jiggy201111• 14 years ago

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.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

From what I've heard rents are pretty near NYC rents in the towns closest to the oil. Either Billings, Montana is far enough away that you can't commute, or Wolfram Alpha's numbers are out of date. The article even mentions $1500 rent.

The thing about cost of living adjustments to salaries is that sacrificing a standard of living to save more money is much easier in high cost of living areas.

TylerE• 14 years ago

The only people in a new york investment bank making $80k/yr are the janitors.

LargeWu• 14 years ago

Having grown up in western ND, I keep myself pretty well informed on the situation in the oil fields.

First of all, Billings is nowhere near any of the current or probable future oil activity. The cost of living in Billings is irrelevant. In fact, it is likely that, unless you own a house already, the cost of living in or near the active oil activity actually exceeds New York City. Rent for a house or apartment can run several thousands of dollars, if you can even find one. There are entire families living year-round in camper trailers, and paying $1500/mo for the privilege of parking it somewhere. Or, you can live in a man-camp, which while cheaper, is basically the equivalent of an army barracks, where you get a bed and meals. Or, you could commute 2-3 hours each way, each day if you like, which lowers your cost of living, but have fun with that during the winter.

It's an extremely hard lifestyle. There's a reason North Dakota has thousands and thousands of unfilled jobs. Much of it is dangerous, back-breaking physical labor for 12-16 hours a day, which you have to perform whether it's 100 degrees or 30 below zero.

jetti• 14 years ago

What other jobs can you do with only a high school education and make that kind of money? College isn't for everybody. For those who decide not to go, this sounds like it beats working multiple minimum wage jobs.

protomyth• 14 years ago

I'd say the pay listed in the article is a bit off. McDonald's workers in Williston ND (not far from the MT border ) make $15/hr or $31,200 starting.

Any quote of $40,000 is probably base salary without the overtime everyone is getting. If the kid learned how to do a vocation in high school / at home (e.g. welding), then they are probably getting a lot more. They started recruiting out of Canada because they were having a tough time getting welders in the USA[1].

The article does point out the biggest problem, finding a place to sleep. If I had the capital, I would probably build a capsule hotel[2] (modified a bit for Americans) with laundry and a drug store in the area. I have an uncle in the area renting 3 people parking places / power cord for their RV for $300/mo each and a mobile home for $1,200/mo. If you ever wanted to run a food truck or a business based on long hours / problematic shelter, this is a good place to try.

1) any job that cannot be done over the wire cannot be outsourced

2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRT4dU6r-KQ

rprasad• 14 years ago

You are definitely living in a bubble. $40,000 [edit: $50,000k] a year plus benefits straight out of high school, with no experience or education requirements is an awesome job.

Sure, these guys have to work occasional 15 hour days, and get up at 4am. But so do many hackers their age, and lawyers and (business) analysts will frequently work 12 hours days regularly for not much more pay.

To put it in perspective (rough nationwide averages): teachers routinely make $30,000 starting. Most business majors will make $40k-50k starting as analysts or consultancy associates. Most lawyers will make between $30k-$80k (depending on the state and area of practice) if they can even find a paying job. Even engineers and programmers (as a group) only average $40k-$60k starting (not all STEM grads make as much as programmers).

tptacek• 14 years ago

Firsthand: graduates from top tier law schools with good grades have a very good shot at 150k starting, even recently.

I know you're referring to lawyers in general, and top tier grads are a small subset. Just nerding out a little.

mseebach2• 14 years ago

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.

rdl• 14 years ago

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).

teemingwithlife• 14 years ago

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.

mseebach2• 14 years ago

There is nothing wrong with it, if it's the plan and you can stick to it. If it's not, and you're looking at dislocating your comfortable life with a spouse and a kid and one-upping the neighbor to go to college, chances are it's not going to happen, and you risk ending up stuck and miserable.

drpgq• 14 years ago

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

cynicalkane• 14 years ago

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

jasonkester• 14 years ago

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.

micro_cam• 14 years ago

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.

bencpeters• 14 years ago

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!

Pay in Oil Fields, Not College, Is Luring Youths in Montana

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