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Comment by scuff3d | Hacker News Reader

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scuff3d·

"six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour"

WTF? I figured the only way you'd get someone to go up there (who's not a researcher) would be to pay well. Crazy...

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With room and board covered, I'd think a lot of people would be willing to go for free just for the adventure of it.

Article says room and board, plus cost of transportation, are covered. So that $13/hr goes quite a bit further than it would if a chunk of it was going towards paying for food and rent. (And if you were paying for the cost of the plane flight, then nobody would take the job). Can't calculate the equivalent compensation without knowing where the author lives normally, but it might (VERY rough guess) be the equivalent of $20 to $25 per hour.

Can probably ignore rent savings. In the article the author says she missed her husband, kids, and dog so she still had some of the same costs going on back home.

And Wikipedia says she earned a Ph.D. in 2004 and lives in NYC [1]

Probably safe to say she didn't go for the money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_LeFavour

I knew some people who did it in the 90s and 2000s. At least then it was comparable to other "extreme" cooking jobs like tugboats, oil rigs, mining camps. Reputation was that pay was generally less than those but the setting more interesting and you were less likely to get raped.

Are you kidding? It's Antarctica. Rich people will pay a small fortune just to get a glimpse of the place! For the opportunity to spend a season living there, I'd gladly accept a low-paying job. I'd probably do it for free.

(Alas, I doubt my life will ever work out in such a way that I'll have that opportunity.)

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