3 ms·

Apropos of nothing: I had no idea "roustabout" was an actual job title. I'd always assumed it was just some sort of archaic insult that you'd occasionally hear

Apropos of nothing: I had no idea "roustabout" was an actual job title. I'd always assumed it was just some sort of archaic insult that you'd occasionally hear from the likes of Monty Burns. The dictionary has any number of definitions for the term, but the most common seems to be "An unskilled laborer who lives by odd jobs." If that's indeed the intended description, then we need to take a deeper dive into this issue. I suspect that we have quite a few "roustabouts" getting stuck at the bottom rungs of our labor force, and I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. There are large swaths of the country (particularly in the South and rural Midwest) where people are simply not keeping up with the education or "skills" necessary to remain relevant to the modern workforce. In large part, this is where I hope services like Khan Academy, Udemy, etc., can start to make a serious impact. It's all well and good for highly educated, well compensated, relatively comfortable folks in the Bay Area to teach themselves a course or two in their spare time. That's awesome. But I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education of those in our country being left behind.

VLM 13y ago
google for oil field roustabout. It boils down to being a maintenance man / janitor at an oil drill site. All the weather, some of the danger, cruddy locale, but the pay isn't much better than working plant maint in a factory. Probably a negative stereotype but roustabouts don't seem to sweat as much as the drill crew. Then again losing life and limb is kind of business as usual for the drill crew (well, its improved over the years...) but its moderately unusual to kill/maim a roustabout. If you think about it, someone has to be stuck doing minor onsite maintenance. I mean, you're not going to pay the toolpusher $175K/yr to paint over rust, are you? I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch. If you need 50K roustabouts to keep the oil flowing, and you teach them to be "CSS developers", then all you're going to do is crash "CSS development" into poverty and not get any oil. I'm not sure there's as much "force" or lack of choice as you think, and selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  "I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch." I didn't say or imply either of those things, so I apologize if I wasn't clear. Rather, I'm suggesting that such sites have a lot of potential to make a serious impact in areas where people are most in need of skills. I did come across oil field roustabouts in my Googling, and if that's the primary definition of the term as implied in this article, I stand corrected. "selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway." Again, I'm not sure where you're reading this into what I wrote. In no way whatsoever did I say, or even suggest that. My personal policy is that, if someone's misinterpreting me, it's probably my bad. I probably wasn't clear enough. But honestly, I think you're reading a lot into my post that simply wasn't intended and/or wasn't there.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Come on man, "archaic insult" "getting stuck" "bottom rungs" "not keeping up" "remain relevant" "those in our country being left behind". Yeah, I'm sure you're talking about techies working at internet startups there LOL. You may not like being called out, but it doesn't mean I was misinterpreting or reading into. "I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education" Basically how can a plant maint / building super move up. Although, why exactly do they need to? One logical upgrade path is trades, like electrician / plumber but that runs into license and union issues, and they mostly do OTJ anyway. I don't have the figures, but some roustabouts get killed OTJ trying to upgrade themselves without actually knowing as much as they think they do, aka I know I'm not an electrician but I'll "help" with that damaged wiring or whatever. An effective way to get killed is to think you're a rigger or think you're an ironworker, but not really know how to do it. This career field given actual training and OTJ supervision is a logical upgrade path for roustabouts. Sticking in the oil field business you pretty much have to trade risk for money and promotion opportunity so you'll easily go into manual labor roughneck work on the drilling crew, but that's primarily OTJ and what non-OTJ exists seems to do pretty well. All the way up to petroleum engineer from a university. Really the only gain you'll get from online would be transfer out of the biz entirely, go into "CSS web developer" or whatever. And you're not doing online from the middle of nowhere on land, or a offshore platform 250 miles from the nearest wifi... maybe satellite link or something you could download? Even if a roughneck decided to become a Scala coder in his spare time, now you've got a Scala coder in the center of north dakota with no job prospects within hundreds of miles... Because of this, I don't think online classes would have any impact at all? Finally if you succeed, and "trap" a guy who likes to work outdoors and walk around eight hours/day and do hardware work into writing source code in a cube for 12 hours a day in the downtown of a city, you might have won by some popular societal standard of human worth, but has the guy who was trapped won? It can be a difficult perspective problem, but there are a lot of people who genuinely like working outdoors, or genuinely like working with their hands. Forcing them not to do that, is not exactly "fixing" them.

VLM 13y ago

google for oil field roustabout. It boils down to being a maintenance man / janitor at an oil drill site. All the weather, some of the danger, cruddy locale, but the pay isn't much better than working plant maint in a factory. Probably a negative stereotype but roustabouts don't seem to sweat as much as the drill crew. Then again losing life and limb is kind of business as usual for the drill crew (well, its improved over the years...) but its moderately unusual to kill/maim a roustabout. If you think about it, someone has to be stuck doing minor onsite maintenance. I mean, you're not going to pay the toolpusher $175K/yr to paint over rust, are you? I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch. If you need 50K roustabouts to keep the oil flowing, and you teach them to be "CSS developers", then all you're going to do is crash "CSS development" into poverty and not get any oil. I'm not sure there's as much "force" or lack of choice as you think, and selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway.

jonnathanson 13y ago
"I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch." I didn't say or imply either of those things, so I apologize if I wasn't clear. Rather, I'm suggesting that such sites have a lot of potential to make a serious impact in areas where people are most in need of skills. I did come across oil field roustabouts in my Googling, and if that's the primary definition of the term as implied in this article, I stand corrected. "selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway." Again, I'm not sure where you're reading this into what I wrote. In no way whatsoever did I say, or even suggest that. My personal policy is that, if someone's misinterpreting me, it's probably my bad. I probably wasn't clear enough. But honestly, I think you're reading a lot into my post that simply wasn't intended and/or wasn't there.
- VLM 13y ago
  Come on man, "archaic insult" "getting stuck" "bottom rungs" "not keeping up" "remain relevant" "those in our country being left behind". Yeah, I'm sure you're talking about techies working at internet startups there LOL. You may not like being called out, but it doesn't mean I was misinterpreting or reading into. "I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education" Basically how can a plant maint / building super move up. Although, why exactly do they need to? One logical upgrade path is trades, like electrician / plumber but that runs into license and union issues, and they mostly do OTJ anyway. I don't have the figures, but some roustabouts get killed OTJ trying to upgrade themselves without actually knowing as much as they think they do, aka I know I'm not an electrician but I'll "help" with that damaged wiring or whatever. An effective way to get killed is to think you're a rigger or think you're an ironworker, but not really know how to do it. This career field given actual training and OTJ supervision is a logical upgrade path for roustabouts. Sticking in the oil field business you pretty much have to trade risk for money and promotion opportunity so you'll easily go into manual labor roughneck work on the drilling crew, but that's primarily OTJ and what non-OTJ exists seems to do pretty well. All the way up to petroleum engineer from a university. Really the only gain you'll get from online would be transfer out of the biz entirely, go into "CSS web developer" or whatever. And you're not doing online from the middle of nowhere on land, or a offshore platform 250 miles from the nearest wifi... maybe satellite link or something you could download? Even if a roughneck decided to become a Scala coder in his spare time, now you've got a Scala coder in the center of north dakota with no job prospects within hundreds of miles... Because of this, I don't think online classes would have any impact at all? Finally if you succeed, and "trap" a guy who likes to work outdoors and walk around eight hours/day and do hardware work into writing source code in a cube for 12 hours a day in the downtown of a city, you might have won by some popular societal standard of human worth, but has the guy who was trapped won? It can be a difficult perspective problem, but there are a lot of people who genuinely like working outdoors, or genuinely like working with their hands. Forcing them not to do that, is not exactly "fixing" them.