As expected isn't it? Studying mathematics and statistics does not bring in money if you go work as academics or "just" field investigator for engineering and manufacturing firms. As he studied OR in grad school, he is applying what he has learned and optimized his income in the shortest possible time. =)
I have 2 advanced degrees in OR (Operations Research). The optimization approaches often revolve around linear programming - including dynamic programming, mixed integer programming and goal programming. Lots of cool stuff in this discipline including a ton of statistical analytic methods.