I had a friend that was a fracking engineer and made big bucks working on drilling sites. Constant travel, awful hours, "culture" of working all the time.

He took a big paycut to start working for the state government but he has good benefits, good retirement, and normal hours that you can actually raise a family with. And while all of his peers have scattered the nation looking for jobs when natural gas prices crashed, he's still sitting pretty with his same steady job.

So there is a lot more than just salary to working for the government.