Ask HN: Are there tech jobs in oil and gas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there tech jobs in oil and gas?

6 pointsallsystemsgo15 comments

What are some of the more interesting roles?

Yes, there are oil and gas jobs for CS majors / tech people. I went to school at UT Austin, which as you might imagine, has a nontrivial number of these companies recruiting. However, my takeaways from these companies:

- You'll most likely be working in Houston / San Antonio (probably not where you want to be working)

- They pay well by general, non-tech, new grad standards, but don't expect the "standard" 100K salary + 50K signing bonus + 30K/year stock that's become standard fare in the Valley. That said, the cost of living in Texas is significantly lower than the Valley (plus, no state income tax!), so you might come out ahead here.

- Not a ton of startups in the space, due to the large amount of capital required. You're basically working for the big guys. This means that there isn't much upside. WYSIWYG, you aren't going to become an overnight millionaire.

- Culture is much more corporate than Valley companies. So don't expect free food / drink / laundry / massages / gym memberships / rail passes. And you may have to wear clothing other than jeans + flipflops to work.

Major companies in this space recruiting CS people: Valero, Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66.

All the above said, there are some pretty cool technical challenges that these companies face. Where do you drill? How do you analyze seismic data to figure out on a macro level where to explore? What about when you start drilling and find oil, what's the best way to extract it? These companies have massive quantities of data gathered from sensors as they're drilling / exploring, and they need to crunch through it to minimize waste and maximize the possibility of hitting large amounts of easily extractable oil. The oil/gas space is definitely gratifying from a solving-real-problems-instead-of-social-media-BS perspective.

I'm actually based out of Houston so it would be an easy transition. I'm used to that sort of culture. From the limited amount of searching I have done I have seen mostly SCADA type work. It doesn't seem to be solving the 'real problems' that are far more gratifying.

In other words, I want to be solving interesting problems like you cited, and not debugging a reporting tool.

I actually went to a UT satellite school for my MS.

I'll take a look at the companies you've mentioned. I have quite a few contacts at many oil and gas companies so I'll leverage those.

Just want to second the culture part. From what I've seen and experiences related to me from friends the culture at these guys is very rigid and 'corporate'. For example I've heard that at Valero in San Antonio men can't have facial hair of any sort.

I'm based in San Antonio and have never heard that of Valero employees. Culture isn't very strict there from what I've heard.

When I graduated in 2010 from a school down in Texas with a BS in Comp Sci, I was constantly being solicited for interviews with the big guys...Valero, Chevron etc.. These companies also had a very large recruiting presence at all the career fairs.

So at least at that time I know there was a need for development positions in this field. Just like most large companies there are plenty of internal tools that need maintenance and development.

Right, I guess what I want to avoid is maintenance of some sort of reporting tool and make sure the role helps me learn about how a particular area of the industry works, to allow for some upward movement. I guess that's why I'm partial to data mining

Just out of curiosity are you only interested in Oil/Gas or are you open to other fields as well? If yes how come? (purely out of curiosity, not judging either way)

Mainly because I know so many people in oil and gas though their roles are not technical, and because of my proximity to Houston.

I have a lot of friends who graduated in electrical engineering or a similar degree and got jobs in the oil field. Most of them work as rig engineers and work 6 days a week, travel constantly, on call 24/7, ready to drive 5+ hours on a whim, etc. They make a lot of money, but most of them hate it.

I'm not sure what you are looking to find out about without further elaboration. There are all the usual tech roles you'd expect in any other industry as well as some specialist roles.

Well I've poked around through some different listings, roles, etc, and I'm a bit surprised that there are so few data mining roles at various oil and gas firms. One would think seismic data mining would be a huge area. I'm quite interested in data mining and software dev.

I've found quite a number of SCADA roles but, this isn't unique to the industry, and I don't know exactly how interesting the role would be.

There are large budgets for geological data analysis, but in contrast to most businesses the oil and gas industry actually has physical constitutive models for the phenomena they track; so, instead of domain-agnostic data mining, they are much more interested in being able to solve partial differential equations that model oil flows through various materials so that they can identify useful areas to explore (or optimize a drill insertion etc.). Traditional data mining of the form "when variable x is > 5 and variable y is < 10, expect z to be 42" is not nearly powerful enough in its current form to compete with domain models derived from physics.

Silly aside: you might find that the wide variety of non-CS engineers in the oil and gas business will be amused by the idea that "tech jobs" means software jobs ;-)

I have a few old contacts in the industry working for some of Europe's largest O&G firms. I'll drop them an email to see if there are any blog posts floating about that elaborate on the topic a bit further.

I appreciate that. Thanks for the info.

I'm also very interested in this...with a degree in Chemical Engineering and a huge interest in programming, I'd love to hear about any opportunities.

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