May 1973 Houston Lighting & Power made me my first job offer of $300 a month when I graduated from college
They hired a draftsman from my class at $900 a month.
Said that they would not pay surveyor crew members that much.
?ÿI laughed at the 2nd in command of surveying and walked out the door and came back to NE Texas and stayed.
In May of 1977 I was offered a job surveying for a construction company out of Houston.?ÿ They offered me $100,000 per year with 2 months off.?ÿ Of course this was to go to the Gulf of Oman to lay out an offshore tanker loading dock.?ÿ For a fellow who was making $5 per hour a year before it was hard to turn down.?ÿ But (1) I had been married about 3 months and my wife wasn't invited?ÿ, (2) as I told the fellow, "If all else fails I can walk home to Georgia from Texas, I can't walk home from over there."
May 1973 Houston Lighting & Power made me my first job offer of $300 a month when I graduated from college
They hired a draftsman from my class at $900 a month.
Said that they would not pay surveyor crew members that much.
?ÿI laughed at the 2nd in command of surveying and walked out the door and came back to NE Texas and stayed.
In May of 1977 I was offered a job surveying for a construction company out of Houston.?ÿ They offered me $100,000 per year with 2 months off.?ÿ Of course this was to go to the Gulf of Oman to lay out an offshore tanker loading dock.?ÿ For a fellow who was making $5 per hour a year before it was hard to turn down.?ÿ But (1) I had been married about 3 months and my wife wasn't invited?ÿ, (2) as I told the fellow, "If all else fails I can walk home to Georgia from Texas, I can't walk home from over there."
Andy
I hear ya.
About that time a friend of mine was working in Saudi Arabia. One day a "telegram" showed up from the head office in the US. "Close the office, you're all fired, good luck."
He had (as I recall) $128 dollars in his pocket, and no ride home. He ended up "hitch hiking" and walking home. It took him about 3 months.
Just saw a help wanted ad looking for a party chief with 5+ years of experience.
Salary range was $37,000K - $45,000; the company is located in a community with a median house price of $450,000 in a state with a median house price of $290,000.?ÿ
?ÿ
And that is why we as profession are slowly killing are selfs. People wonder why we can't get the?ÿ younger interested in surveying.?ÿ
I heard an interesting take on this at our conference last month:
The reason the numbers are so low, for students enrolling in surveying classes; is because they can get an entry level position on a construction site and make $58.93 per hour. No formal education required...
I heard an interesting take on this at our conference last month:
The reason the numbers are so low, for students enrolling in surveying classes; is because they can get an entry level position on a construction site and make $58.93 per hour. No formal education required...
Those numbers almost certainly include the value of benefits.?ÿ Even so, the actual hourly rate that goes to the employees wages is probably in the mid 30s per hour.?ÿ Pretty darn good for hub farmers.
I heard an interesting take on this at our conference last month:
The reason the numbers are so low, for students enrolling in surveying classes; is because they can get an entry level position on a construction site and make $58.93 per hour. No formal education required...
Those numbers almost certainly include the value of benefits.?ÿ Even so, the actual hourly rate that goes to the employees wages is probably in the mid 30s per hour.?ÿ Pretty darn good for hub farmers.
Something is fishy there, the surveyor only makes 1.50 more than the chainman?
I do not think the construction trades are stealing workforce from the Land Surveying talent pool in any real capacity, and certainly not from those who would otherwise enroll in a academic program to kick off their career.?ÿ
Most of the Union hands have never seen the free world of boundary and topographic mapping, in my experience.
I heard an interesting take on this at our conference last month:
The reason the numbers are so low, for students enrolling in surveying classes; is because they can get an entry level position on a construction site and make $58.93 per hour. No formal education required...
Those numbers almost certainly include the value of benefits.?ÿ Even so, the actual hourly rate that goes to the employees wages is probably in the mid 30s per hour.?ÿ Pretty darn good for hub farmers.
Something is fishy there, the surveyor only makes 1.50 more than the chainman?
I was in OE Local 3 in northern CA about 15 years ago and I recall that there wasn't a big margin between journeyman chainman and chief, but it was a little wider than the numbers posted here.?ÿ As I recall, there was about $5 per hr between chainman and chief with the I-man position (still had it on the books but almost no one used it) being halfway between.
I didn't know whether to be irritated or amused when I would be issued a chainman from the hall and find that the knucklehead wasn't smart enough, clean enough, nor diligent enough to hold a steady job mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms at a fast food joint, but was there getting paid to make my job more difficult at 3 times the rate of the fast food janitor.
But then, at least half of the chiefs I'd met in Local 3 back then were nothing more than halfway decent chainmen who learned how to access the right coordinate file on the DC for the job they were on, and which buttons to push to make the measuring gizmo tell them where to plant the next hub.?ÿ Few could understand plans better than to pick the elevations for the MH or CB they were staking.?ÿ A long way from the days when a chief would be handed a set of plans and was counted on as the last step of QC to ensure that the plans were right before taking them to the field, and having to do minor calcs on the fly, in one's head to keep the rodmen moving from one point to the next.
