Plano, TX? Even though his salary is about $10K less, the cost of living is so much less in Texas he will probably be breaking even. He won't have to pay state income tax in Texas and housing and cost of living is MUCH cheaper. He could actually own a home in Texas for that salary and start building equity...there's hardly any way he could own a home in CA for even $10K more than he would be making here, I think. He could buy a decent house in Garland and commute about 20 minutes into Plano if Plano is too expensive.
You are absolutely correct. The cost of living is just as important to look at as the dollar figure. I am not very familiar with DFW. Am I correct in assuming by your post that Plano is expensive to live in?
Plano is pretty expensive. Houses are probably $200,000+. I would not advise him to live in Garland though. There are a lot of gangs around that area.
Depending on which salary calculator you use, Bakersfield, CA. isn't that much more expensive to live in than the DFW/Plano area, especially if he's going to be renting. The expense of living in Plano depends on housing - apartment or house? Plano is kind of like a middle-of-the-road Sugar Land. It has expensive homes and not too expensive homes, but you can commute there from less expensive places, so that's not that big a deal. I've lived in Garland, worked in Plano, Richardson, etc. Garland is starting to get bad. Stay away from the Mesquite area, too. Plano and Richardson housing prices can be nuts (on average well over $250,000 or so). You can rent an apartment as an alternative. Supermac34 kind of got the relationship. Except that Plano isn't as "pretty" as the Woodlands area is. Plano does have a hell of a selection of restaurants, though.
I'm about to start paying 650 dollars a month for a 1 bedroom apartment in Plano. But there really isn't anything cheaper that's closer to where I'm going to work. I figure the extra 20 min commute would easily have put me over the couple of hundred dollars in difference when you factor in gas, car depreciation, and 40 min personal time that's being spent on the road. On the other hand, that's a really high price for a recent graduate with 30k debt to pay for housing.
I'm a little concerned because I know that the telecom industry is VERY cyclical. Software is also very cyclical. I predict that the MetaSolv job won't have legs. I suspect that the Schlumberger job will keep him moving every 2/3 years.
When I graduated from UT in 2002, Schlumberger offered me the Field Engineer job. I think after like 4 or 5 years in the field, they move you into a design or program management type role of your choice. The salary was partially dependent on location. If you work offshore, the pay is much better. Bottom line, the turnover for Field Engineers at Schlumberger is VERY high. Most college grads don't last more than 1.5 years. It's a very stressful job being on call 24-7 at some remote drilling location in the boonies. Really, this job should be a last resort for engineers that have no other job offers.
Let me ask you this. How was Schlumberger's pay offer in comparison to the other offers you got (i.e. were you in a situation where you accepted less to go elsewhere)? If the answer is no, then would you have accepted less to work at your current job?
The software industry didn't really crash. There's a reason : software is in every industry. What actually happened was that software-producing companies in industries that collapsed collapsed. I work for a medical software company that was expanding and growing when telecom companies were dying. There will always be industries that use software. It's not like all of a sudden someone's going to say "hey, we don't need software in any industry!" It's one of the reasons when I looked for my current job I told myself I needed to find a good company in a good industry and not necessarily the highest salaries or anything.
If I worked offshore, the pay would have been more than the others. Staying onshore, however, was less than most of the other offers I got.
I suspect your nephew is working already, and I don't know all the differences between an industrial engineer and a petroleum engineer, but it sounds like there should be plenty of opportunity for engineers in the oilfield services sector, and not just at Schlumberger. ******************************** Pursuit of New Oil Supplies Runs Into a Bottleneck Crude Hits $60, but Industry Finds Past Cuts Are Slowing Efforts to Ramp Up Output By BHUSHAN BAHREE and RUSSELL GOLD Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL June 28, 2005 Oil's sustained rise -- punctuated by yesterday's close above $60 a barrel -- is at last spurring energy companies to boost spending on new production. But two decades of penny pinching during an era of low prices have taken their toll on the industrial capacity and expertise needed to bring new supplies online. The growth in spending, which is fueling a boom in new orders for everything from oil-drilling services to liquefied natural-gas plants, is expected to lead to a jump in oil-pumping and refining capacity later this decade, which could help to ease prices. For now, however, the investment boom is creating a problem of its own: Companies in the oil-services sector are grappling with order backlogs that mean delays in building oil and gas projects -- and higher prices for building them. Those delays and higher costs could, in turn, underpin oil prices until the new projects finally start coming on stream. What's more, there is growing concern that there won't be enough technical expertise available to design these complex projects. The number of petroleum engineers in the U.S. -- long the main global supplier of such talent -- has fallen by nearly half since the 1980s. "There is no doubt that in the longer term the industry will solve the supply issue," Andrew Gould, chief executive of Schlumberger Ltd., one of the world's largest oilfield-services providers, said in an email exchange. But, he added, aging equipment such as drilling rigs and a shortage of skilled professionals are crimping contractors' ability to execute. "The oil-service industry is not in particularly good shape to meet the needs of a rapid world-wide ramp up in activity." In Qatar, which is trying to rapidly exploit its gas reserves, the world's third-largest, the government said in April that it would postpone three projects to convert gas into liquid fuels. Energy Minister Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah said the delay, which will be for at least three years, was due in part to concerns about a paucity of material and engineers to design the plants. In a recent interview, Mr. Attiyah said he had "never seen such high costs in my career. Projects have become very expensive." The cost of the three gas-to-liquids plants hasn't been disclosed by the oil companies that are bankrolling them -- Marathon Oil Corp., ConocoPhillips and a joint venture between Chevron Corp. and Sasol Ltd. Based on similar-sized plants, the cost could easily top $10 billion. Officials in Saudi Arabia, the largest oil exporter and the owner of nearly a quarter of the Earth's oil reserves, also say the cost of oil projects has soared. Saudi Arabia earlier this year embarked on a $50 billion program to expand its petroleum industry over the next five years. But Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi this month said energy-project costs had risen as much as 60%, due to a shortage of engineering talent, equipment and raw materials. Engineering executives say one reason they are having trouble keeping up is that oil companies haven't invested enough in new production in recent decades to justify big work forces at the services giants. Thus oil-service providers face a shortage of professionals -- tens of thousands of whom have been laid off or have retired in the past 20 years or so. "A lot of skilled people have either been laid off, or have retired from the industry in the last 18 years," said Schlumberger's Mr. Gould. "Recruiting and training their replacements takes time and requires a global approach." Yesterday, concerns about tight supplies of oil-based fuels like diesel, as refiners operate near capacity to meet summer gasoline demand, pushed U.S. benchmark crude oil for August delivery to $60.54 a barrel, up 70 cents. That's the highest settlement since oil futures started trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1983, though in inflation-adjusted terms it is still below the $94.77 price, in today's dollars, hit in April 1980. But the recent spike has been large enough to spur an increase in global exploration and development. Through May, an average of 2,585 drilling rigs have been active world-wide, according to a count by Baker Hughes Inc. That's the highest level of activity since 1985, although still 28% lower than the number of active rigs that year. While better technology lets the industry use fewer rigs to find oil and gas deposits than in 1985, the difference between the two periods also stems from the large number of rigs mothballed after years of lower activity and companies seeking to restrain capital spending. The oil-price surge came as the booming Chinese and Indian economies joined the rich West in burning vastly more fuel. That caught the energy industry flat-footed, with little spare pumping capacity. Now, "there is little doubt that there is a capital-spending orgy under way," says Art Smith, chairman and chief executive of John S. Herold Inc., an oil-industry consulting firm based in Norwalk, Conn. "It's developing toward the type of stampede we saw in the late 1970s," Mr. Smith said. Back then, Western oil companies rushed to expand in the wake of the oil crises of that decade, when many international companies were kicked out of oil and gas concessions by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The major oil companies quickly turned to developing oil resources in places like Alaska and the North Sea. Today, once again, the order books of construction and oil-services firms are bulging, and backlogs are building. Comprehensive data on global investment in the sector aren't available. But Schlumberger's Mr. Gould said in a recent speech that figures published by energy companies suggest investment in petroleum exploration and production alone will rise by about 10% in 2005 from about $162 billion in 2004. He personally thinks the increase will be sharper. Much of the rise in investment, industry executives say, is coming from state-owned oil companies. Schlumberger said late last year that over the past three years, its revenue from national oil companies accelerated while business with international oil companies held steady. The backlog of work at Fluor Corp. a giant engineering and construction firm based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., was $15.4 billion at the end of March, up 30% from a year earlier. That figure includes both energy and other projects. New orders at Technip SA, a major French energy-services supplier, totaled $2.26 billion in the first quarter this year -- more than double a year earlier. However, Technip said its order backlog at the end of March was up about 11% from a year earlier, at $8.76 billion. The wave of orders is inflating the price of everything the energy industry needs to expand -- from drilling rigs to steel pipe. "Drilling costs have skyrocketed," said Herold's Mr. Smith. He said an industry gathering was told by one industry executive that his cost of drilling an onshore well in the U.S. had risen to $1.5 million from $800,000 just 15 months ago. The stickiest problem, however, may be finding enough experts to execute oil projects. The U.S. oil sector's main lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, said last month that industry employment peaked at more than 860,000 jobs in 1982, then shed more than half a million jobs through 2000. And API says enrollment in petroleum-engineering programs at U.S. universities stood at about 1,500 students in 2003, down 85% from a 1985 peak. Yet the companies surveyed by API, which represent just 17% of the industry, said they expect to need more than 5,000 engineers in the next five years. WSJ link:http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB...page_one_us
hi every body o i want to know the real challenges of working in slb ???? and how can i treat with these problems ???? the resboncibilities etails ??? the resboncibilities , Taxes , being in charge if i damage any thing , the bad groub i will work with , the bad manager , if l leave the work after little months or i failed in some studing courses will they take money of studing courses ...... l they give me off days if iam sick , should i hire a house or they prepare every thing for me , the language,,,,, i searched alot , but most Discussions about the salaies and hard work in general i want the details ........plz
I've lived hear long enough to consider myself a Texan. Having lived in France from 9-16, 1st language French, w/French uncles & aunts (though i'm Mediterranean) ..... i support their manipulating office dynamics to perpetuate "French culture". It's a small country, their language & culture IS distinct & it's commendable that advantage goes to le Francais...no? Dar Al-Handasah (arabic), Schlumberger (french), Siemens (german), Dumez (french) rightfully give advantage. Okay - i know nothing about it's inner workings (though one of my best friends in college was the housesitter for Monsieur Capot or Mr Percival...i'm not sure which name is correct - dude was NEVER in Houston....when i think of the unfortunate things that happened to his initially fine, eventually pitiable Roche Bobois furniture! I blame Caligula 21.)
