Pros
Safety mentality is strong.
Great training grounds for moving to other companies.
Diverse types of jobs (possibly)
Cons
It’s a confusing structure: they want you to work 180 days offshore. While offshore you make 24 hour pay, but the hourly pay is low (starting at like 10.50 an hour) so you really want to get long jobs to get significant pay. While you’re on call, you get 40 hours of pay, unless you’re training where you get 2x pay. At 11.25, you could potentially get 70k, but that’s assuming there’s 180 days of work and some boats don’t let trainees on the jobs. Oftentimes, there’s three companies on the boat and survey is expected to work extreme hours and it can be difficult to establish a routine. For every two days worked, one day is given paid off call, but they’ll still call or ask you to do required training or testing. Raises are based on a point system, which the points are based on party chief assessments. Staff development give reviews every three months, but if you don’t have much work, they can’t give reviews apparently and the raise from both are minimal. They want people to manage very quickly, which leads to stressful times. The different teams do not work together well and so every job has an unpredictable amount of struggle. Most of the people are great, but there are some “good ole boys” that have “old fashioned” ways of thinking. One employee in particular played a translated speech of Hitler for a coworker and shared antisemitic conspiracy theories for about four hours on my first job. A lot of the longer term employees recount horror stories like war veterans, but stick around because they have a more consistent schedule than the newbies. High turnover for working in the field. Boat conditions are subpar unless you’re on a drill ship.