[DyslexicAtheist]

been there. done that :)

not as dangerous as the article says. at least not the diving part. most of the injuries are people mishandling high-pressure systems (valves, plumbing), electrical hazards (water+electricity), gas leaks, burns ... basically anything that can go wrong on construction sites, but only you're out at sea exposed to the elements. those few times that accidents do happen with divers in a saturation chambers / diving bell (aka "in the bin") it's cited for decades. people are naturally scared of darkness, deep water. so when accidents do happen it makes for a gripping story told over and over. how else to pass time when you're waiting on the weather to get better on a rocky boat.

what's pretty cool is the survival training, e.g. practice escaping from a sinking helicopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Z8sGRje90 I have seen big tough man in their 40ies panic and in tears trying to stay calm while the sinking helicopter fully floods, and you can't open the doors until the cabin is fully flooded.

Another good one: part of the course is simulation of a burning rig. they lock you into a warehouse heated to around 60-70°C breathing air with a gas-mask, full body safety clothes (the heat alone can make you panic), then you have to navigate through a metal maze with a buddy (you're linked to your sobbing partner over radio-comms), and it's pitch black. You are only allowed to get out together and if one of you it bucks up you start over. Fantastic character building and understanding your mental limits.

Sometimes I sit in front of my code thinking why did I get out of this job. I fought so hard to get there and gave it all up for computers & code. The truth is that most of the time offshore life is quite boring. Guess my boredom with software made me go into IoT since I get to mess with physical systems again.

[yardie]

I have a friend who works in the North Sea and I envy his life. We met and sailed the Mediterranean together. I took 2 years off to go sailing full time while he managed to work it into his schedule.

He is 3 on, 2 off or 2 on, 3 off the rig. While I’m back in the office he can continue to sail indefinitely. You can accomplish so much with a job that gives you plenty of time off every month.

[GordonS]

It's not so romantic if you have a family - and from the other side, as a kid, it wasn't nice for us having my dad away for weeks at a time.

[yardie]

It appears to be well paid. And as a kid that grew up poor if the choice was 3 weeks of parental non contact or mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner, well see you in a few weeks, mom!

[vertex-four]

There's a lot of training involved in going offshore, and if you're able to go through training to get out of poverty, there's a hundred other careers to go for that don't involve multiple weeks away from family.

[GordonS]

To be fair, we lived in an area where oil and gas are the biggest industries, and my dad was a geologist. But still, I wish he'd just been around more.

[erikpukinskis]

Is it important for families to be together 7 days a week?

[vertex-four]

I don’t see what that has to do with my comment. I’d suggest that it’s difficult to form a connection with someone who is not present in your life for significant periods of time on a regular basis, but of course it’s a sliding scale.

[mbrameld]

This feel like the setup for a false dichotomy...

[watwut]

It is not so much 3 weeks of non contact one time, but more of "parent is rarely there".

[GordonS]

It's only well paid when you're away - when you're onshore the pay goes down.

[fjsolwmv]

The tragic longing is part of the romance.

[Retric]

The population is tiny which means even if the accident rate is low per time, the risk per diver is extremely high.

It depends on you benchmark, but people think of police officer as a dangerous job and they mostly die in car accidents.

[DyslexicAtheist]

you're right of course. location also matters, e.g. it's far more dangerous in the Gulf of Mexico where you work with horrible equipment in an extremely deep location and little oversight. my point though was that it is dangerous but not for the reasons given. I have seen horrible accidents but none of them were under water or in decompression.

[fjsolwmv]

Isn't there something about how general aviation pilots mostly die flying if they don't retire from it young?

[toomanybeersies]

There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. That's the saying anyway.

[japhyr]

This article was fascinating. It never mentioned pay, though. Do these people get paid really well after all this specialized training, and commitment?

[piker]

> They needed his salary (not surprisingly, saturation divers are well-compensated, up to $1,400 per day), so his wife told him to finish the job.

[DyslexicAtheist]

I see from the article that salaries haven't changed much since the 90ies.

[gaius]

Yeah - phenomenal money in the 90s and everyone wore a Rolex... now the money is pretty decent while working but big gaps between jobs

[fjsolwmv]

Great money but assuming that's not a 250+ day/yr billable utilization it's not substantially better than working for a major webtech company, and a lot more grueling and dangerous.

[salvar]

> basically anything that can go wrong on construction sites, but only you're out at sea exposed to the elements

Sounds... dangerous.

[kk58]

What were you doing offshore? Commissioning for topsides is it? How did you pivot from field to coding job?

[DyslexicAtheist]

I was a Commercial Diver moving into Life Support Technician/ Superviser work. Then got a lot of free time (the mentioned boredom) so started getting into Linux, Scripting, C, ... then wrote a program that would implement the Oceaneering Manual in code (how much gas do you need for a 30 day job with 6 divers in a chamber, how much soda for the CO2 scrubbers, if they work on 500 ft and live at 470 ft and you do X number of bell-runs) then spent more time and had more fun implementing this than doing the actual LST work. I also worked a lot together with the ROV operators (who aren't just operating them but the good ones are building them from scratch), and these guys were a real inspiration. I could have chosen ROV's but it what I wanted to get away from was my future life at sea. nuff said I ended up finding a job back on land as a software engineer and now had time to take evening courses and get deeper into CompSci

[fjsolwmv]

You're in good company. Linus Torvalds wrote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)

[DyslexicAtheist]

LMAO I had no idea. Thanks for this :D