I worked in the Pilbara for one of the big miners in an 'automated' laboratory for a couple of years after graduating. AMA.
Couple of quick points for anyone tempted to make the move: As an employee you get to interact with some pretty amazing tech, but most of it is created by other firms. Direct employees typically end up operating, maintaining and fixing things when they break. It's a great place to get hands on experience solving problems under time pressure. If you want to work heavily in the code base of automated robots/ trucks / trains, find a firm that does the contracting work to work for.
Secondly, don't do it just for the money, the job becomes your life. The article wasn't really about employee benefits but they did mention a salary without saying exactly what it was for.
Michael, after 35 years earns 145,000 p.a. including superannuation.A typical truck driver on a FIFO (fly in fly out) roster will fly up to the mine and work 7 12.5 hour day shifts, followed by 7 12.5 hour night shifts, and then fly back to the city to recover for a week (6 1/2 days). This is repeated about 17 times a year.
14days * 12.5hour shift * 17 stints = 2975 hours. $145, 000 / 2975 = approx AU$48 dollars per hour, including super.
For that 20 year old on $92,000 it works out about $31 an hour, assuming the same roster. getting that job is not exactly easy either.
The money is not bad, especially since you have nowhere to spend it on while at the mine, but the guys who do this long term have it in their blood and live to work at the mine.
Your social and dating life ( if you have one at all) gets fairly messed up on that roster, and fatigue from night shift can get to you after awhile.
Fun Fact: The mines tend to prefer female truck drivers as they are more gentle on the equipment.
I'll second the need to rank Universities based upon a course. As a non UK resident I have only heard of a handful of the universities. I'm sure there are some lesser known Universities with great departments, try not to make me click on every university to find them...
After some further investigation I see you've implemented a decent attempt at solving this problem with the 'similar universities' table (However there is a built in assumption that i can find a university at my academic level. Also as an aside, check your algorithm, Oxford Computer Science is similar to Cambridge CS but not vice versa).
The analytical side of me would still strongly prefer all universities for the selected course ranked in a table, especially if I can reorder the table by metrics as rossj suggests.
Have you tried orienteering? You get the running around in the woods like an 8 year old plus the mental challenge of navigating and route selection. The community is also generally intelligent and you get to see some awesome places too.
I’m currently reading ‘The 4 hour work week’ and I just purchased ‘God created the integers’. I tend to read most of my non-fiction in bits and pieces when i have spare chunks of time. I tend to do most of my light reading on holiday and go cover to cover in a couple of days. I’ve followed Grisham for what seems like forever, and while its a bit hit and miss i’ve liked alot of the short stories by stephen king / richard bachman. Over the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed ‘making money’ - Pratchett, ‘The Godfather’ - Puzo, ‘grapes of wrath’ - Steinbeck, ‘vernon god little’ - Pierre & ‘shogun’ - Clavell.
Whenever I travel I’ll try and read a book set in the country I’m traveling to.
As a child I just couldn’t put down the Macdonald Hall series of books by Gordon Korman - they were side splittingly funny. Highly recommend Christmas present for any child you know.
No, not me I'm afraid, but a good question that I couldn't get google to answer (in 30 seconds). I did however find this one credited to Mark Twain - 'Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the diference'