How are you making money?

Dirt Kingwrote:

Mineral exploration and commercial fishing, gotta give up 3-6 months of the year to do just that, but get the rest of the year to do whatever.

I film people doing mineral exploration and commercial fishing. Same, my goal is to work 20-25 weeks / year and climb the rest. 

non climbing guide work (whitewater/sport fishing) has been my jam. You essentially get paid to work out, they buy as much food as u can eat, they house you or give you a spot for ur tent, for some reason they still pay ya, and all that time with the bros does a good job of stagnating your maturity which might be my favorite aspect lol

Mental health counselor at a large high school and a teachers union member. Work 182 days a year. But I have kids too so my time for any large trips is very limited for a few years. 

Just got a job working as an environmental specialist for a state agency. For my first few years, time off is going to be interesting, but after a little while, I'll have tons of paid time. My wife wants to be a work-from-home grant writer too, so hopefully she and I can start taking weeks in the summer to go romp around the SE and climb awesome stuff. 

No one is a dirtbag? Maybe Cedar is right, dirtbags are a dying breed. Wonder if his $1000 scholarships will light some fires.

Nathan Doylewrote:

No one is a dirtbag? Maybe Cedar is right, dirtbags are a dying breed. Wonder if his $1000 scholarships will light some fires.

Spam is $5 a can now. How the hell can anyone afford to be a dirtbag???

Marc Hwrote:

I feel like there might be some important punctuation that’s missing. 

Yes, punctuation can save lives.
as in, “Let’s eat, grandma.” vs “Let’s eat grandma.”

Caleb BRwrote:

Spam is $5 a can now. How the hell can anyone afford to be a dirtbag???

Expat Dirtbag is the new black.

Sam Mwrote:

Boom years are over somewhat...after the crypto bust and the interest rate rises, there are no longer insane sums of money being flung around. Instead there are lay-offs left right and center.

There was a period where yeah you could have swung a stupidly well paid, fully remote Web dev job, knocking React boilerplate, as a boot camp grad. Not anymore I don't think. If you don't have a CS degree or real experience in a specialty, ChatGPT can code better than you.

Disagree with this. I was laid off this spring, but the market for Software Engineers is still very hot; I've had no problem finding fully remote work for a six figure salary, even in the current market. True, it is a bit flooded with junior engineers at the moment, but the demand for software development is only going to increase with time. 

And ChatGPT can write code, but it cannot design software (yet). That has always been and always will be the challenging part of software engineering. I think it is a good choice for climbing as much as possible.

FrankBS thinks this is a fair and competitive wage:

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/124314422/5k-room-board-for-experienced-climber?page=2#ForumMessage-124333047

Not what I do, but I knew a guy when I was in college who was an inspector of those elevated water towers all over the heartland of the US. He'd work all summer driving around in a RV making BANK and then spend the fall/winter surfing. You could do the same with climbing. It's a job that required a tolerance for both high places and tight spaces, and good safety practices. 

i feel like being a school teacher in a climbing adjacent town (that has a fall winter spring oriented season) would be the move. get off work at 3 ish, can climb into the evenings. winter, spring, and summer breaks for trips. 

Healthcare. 

Jeremy Bell wrote:

I worked as a barista for a decade and still do. I traveled around the country living in my van working at different coffee shops. Free food, free coffee, free Wi-Fi, free camping plus it’s a cool gig

If you like alpine starts everyday, I guess it's okay.

Sam Mwrote:

Boom years are over somewhat...after the crypto bust and the interest rate rises, there are no longer insane sums of money being flung around. Instead there are lay-offs left right and center.

There was a period where yeah you could have swung a stupidly well paid, fully remote Web dev job, knocking React boilerplate, as a boot camp grad. Not anymore I don't think. If you don't have a CS degree or real experience in a specialty, ChatGPT can code better than you.

This feels pretty out of touch.  Sounds like your experience is big tech companies and startups.  Yea Facebook has been doing layoffs but that doesn't actually effect most software devs.
Every fourtune 500 company has a huge IT department and tons of programmer jobs.  Hell, any company with more than a couple hundred employees has dedicated IT resources. Mid size companies are desparate to hire devs.

I have absolutely zero qualms about telling college students to study IT or software dev, it's probably the single most consistent fast track to upper-middle class available to the average joe.  And it's inherently future-proof.  

i shoot birds at the airport

Sam May wrote:

ChatGPT can [do X] better than you.

Since OP just graduated from high school and I've been working on autoregressive models for code generation since before the Attention paper, I figured I'd share an anecdote.

My last year of HS was 08-09. The 2001 crash was a relatively fresh memory and we were entering another recession. The prevailing wisdom was to not major in CS. Tech was in another bubble and programming would be off-shored anyways.

Today's "AI automation" fears about ChatGPT feel very similar to the "offshoring" fears from 15 years ago. NB: offshoring did happen! The predictions weren't wrong! But developer compensation exploded at the same time.

Forecasting the impact of technology on labor markets is nontrivial.

To answer OP's question: I made money during high school and shortly thereafter by building LAMP websites. This dovetails well with the point above. My skill-set was hilariously obsolete by the time I graduated from college, even without automation and offshoring. An "early 20s climbing trip money" gig doesn't necessarily need to translate via a straight path into a sustainable career.

Finance is my true passion but it makes me crazy, depressed and angry. Climbing aligns my synapses and hypos.  I climb just enough to be able to fly 200,000 miles a year and work 60 hour weeks and some weekends.  If I climbed a bit more I could up my output to 80 hour weeks. 

Wali Kwrote:

i feel like being a school teacher in a climbing adjacent town (that has a fall winter spring oriented season) would be the move. get off work at 3 ish, can climb into the evenings. winter, spring, and summer breaks for trips. 

And usually good medical coverage year round and a pension (until that's gutted too... hopefully not). Yes, your holidays are strictly defined by the calendar, but 186 total working days and usually being off by 3:30-4:00 isn't too bad. The job is tough, but never boring. Starting pay is laughably bad, but a guaranteed bump every year and with additional post-grad units, and you can usually count on COL bumps to the salary schedule each year. 

Furthermore you can make the mistake I did and later go into administration, work 230 days and until all hours of the night and weekend cleaning up messes and make actually good money. Now I can go anywhere I want to climb and never have the time to actually go.

But fr... we need teachers. Badly. Please consider if you're at least marginally interested.

I work in environmental consulting, doing pre-construction wildlife surveys (usually desert tortoise) before development projects break ground. Usually it’s for solar farms, mines, or really any development on public land. Most of the survey work is during 4 months of the year during the field season. Tons of hiking, hot days, living out of your car usually. Pretty fun though.

Other work during the year is being the on-site biologist at these projects, acting to make sure environmental regulations are being followed. Long days on a construction site, construction worker hours. Think 60-75hrs a week, 6-7 days a week. Can be pretty brutal mentally tbh.

As an entree level *employee*, pay is just okay. However many times you can get hired by companies as a sub-contractor and pay rates are much much higher, well worth it. The big plus is you just take whatever work you want. It allows me a binge-work-binge-play lifestyle currently. I’ll work pretty full on 4-5 months of the year, take the rest off and do trips and travel.