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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Personally I’d rather be a scientist doing a stint in Antarctica than be any kind of astronaut, although I know there is no use for a software engineer over there.

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I think this person is in IT: https://brr.fyi

May not be a software engineer, but they have an interesting job.

There are computers and electronics systems in Antartica, so they obviously need technicians/engineers to maintain those, I know someone who has been there for some months doing that. It's not software development but you might apply if you know some sysadmin/technician things.

The Cambridge based British Antarctic Survey group hire sysadmins which don’t look particular senior however the pay sucks which could be an issue for those with mortgages etc. £25k or something if I remember correctly.

25k?! That’s only slightly above minimum wage, isn’t it? That has to be the worst-paid sysadmin job in the UK, surely.

My first tech job at 19 was sysadmin in Exeter for £13k lol, as a first line technician. Pretty sure the only reason I got that job was I didn’t care about salaries so just said what I was earning at an electronics store.

£25k is definitely low though.

The most I've ever made in my life was $28k. I'd probably be perfectly happy with 25k to be honest, at least until real self driving cars exist, that's pretty much the one expensive luxury thing I want besides a few vacations.

Your priorities are messed up. A self driving car for what, so you don’t have to drive back and forth between your $25k job?

> Your priorities are messed up.

They could be from a country with a lost CoL so $28k is a huge deal, they could be living the life they want doing a job they love, etc... Just so happens some future tech is interesting enough that they wish they could afford that too. Not everyone is in tech for the FAANG bucks!

Although if GP wishes they could earn more I assume any account holder on HN is technical enough to find a remote job paying more than that if they wanted.

I'm in the US, where the CoL is pretty high, but I'm also very clumsy and really don't have any business being on the road, which is probably my #1 career weakness by far, entry level embedded systems is often very onsite heavy.

I'm super clumsy and really shouldn't be on the road at all. Before I moved I spent hours on the bus every day, here I can mostly only do remote since the bus is so limited.

Full self driving would complete change everything. I could look at jobs I've never even thought about, because of the need for transportation.

Universities always pay the professional-ish help poorly.

You want to be a janitor or a deputy Vice Provost or something to work at a college.

Well yeah, it's a government job so it's probably going to suck money-wise; the guy I know ended up losing money I believe because he had to buy a lot of snow clothes and paid travel expenses on his own account.

Moreover, I believe he had a really bad time there because the population in the base was mostly military and they treated him like shit in the most military bootcamp style with physical aggressions and such. So, he ended up not completing the whole term. (This probably will depend on the country of course).

It’s a research institute so I don’t think it’s directly a government role, more like a university. I see adverts at Oxford University for sysadmins at around £45-65k so it’s on the low side for what I consider comparable jobs, but my thinking might be flawed

It's pretty bad considering Oxford prices.

(Source: I am an Oxford resident.)

Agreed, although most companies in Oxford never really matched living costs either (well, housing costs) - Oxford Uni pay staff comparably to other companies in the area (like Elsevier or Oxford Computer Consultants). Let alone the low salaries in academia there...

It depends what you do.

If you do embedded software/embedded hardware (microcontrollers, FPGA, kernel dev kinda stuff), you'd probably have a spot with the experiment operators. Maintaining the experiments generally requires a decent bit of low level software and hardware experience even if you aren't necessarily sitting down and coding every day.

And if you are good with interpreting/processing data you may also still be able to land a seat with the experiment operators since they do that as well.

Or if you have Ops/DevOps, SysAdmin, or DB Admin experience, you likely could secure a slot in IT.

You likely wouldn't get the job the first time around but if you keep submitting applications, eventually you are likely to secure a job down on the ice.

This person’s blog pops up every once in a while in HN but might be a good inspiration [1].

[1] https://brr.fyi/

https://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs/ doesn't have anything right now but they used to have a bunch of sysadmin/sre positions ("do you know ethernet cabling and python" kind of thing - they used to recruit at pycon US.) So there are definitely opportunities...

I feel like astronaut is only a good idea if you really enjoy long airplane rides.

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