First of all, its a vacuum. It’s easier to get hired, and easier to move up, but you can’t just show up and get a PM job from being a pipe fitter. If they were going to do that (and they don’t), they’d take a pipe fitter who’s been out here humping it for a few years and move him up. If you’re fresh from Ontario, you have to get in line. And yeah, there’s a lot of “It’s who you know and who you blow” going on, but trust me, the people who have been out here for a few years know a lot more people than people working in Windsor.

With respect to #14 squidly77 list of 1 to 6:

The current situation means that people at 2 are getting promoted to 3 or 4 quicker than they ever have, and getting paid more than the ever have. It doesn’t mean that people from Onterrible (I’m one of them) are getting plopped in at #6.

I’ve worked both the labour end of the oil patch, and the engineering end (currently an engineer at an EPC) and found it easy to work your way up and get paid well, but by no means are you put in charge of anyting, or put above anyone who has been here longer than you and knows more. The people who have been out here a while will get vacuumed up the chain first.

And people who think it’s easy to work the oil patch on the labour or trades end of things… think again. I’ve seen a lot of people come out here thinking they were going to get rich, only to not be able to hack it and go home with their tail between there legs. And I spent 2.5 years humping it from Fort Nelson BC, to Fort Mac, to 100 miles north of where God ran out of crayons, and all points in between. And I made more money than I do on the engineering end of it. The money is good… but if you think its easy, you need to give your head a shake.

Anyway, I wouldn’t want people to think that you’re going to get a silver spoon stuck in your mouth the moment you get off the greyhound in fort Mac. Hell, I couldn’t even get a cab….

If you understood what Keynsianism was, you would grasp its over all impact on Western Economies and society…the reason we can be undercut price wise is because we have distorted and misallocated wealth and wealth allocation in our economies….and because our high school grads come out of school with knowledge of all the bad words not to say and how to put a condom on a banana peel…and our University entrants spend 5 or 6 years studying fuzzy marxist illiberal arts “disciplines” AFTER they take their remedial year of literacy to make up for all the damage done in the name of education k-12… Keynsianism expanded government which distorted and perverted and monopolized education all the while loosing inflation upon the land and convincing a couple of genrations that a coffee slurpee really is worth $6 and that they really are worthy of a $500k mortgage at age 28 or 34….