Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

@7rqo+16u2AUWy You guys have presented a very lucid and truthful picture of what lies beneath CSR. A supposedly planner for CSR manager moved to Houston and man it is hard to find people as incompetent as these (yet they are the biggest loud mouth and talker). CSR management chose the worst whose sole job was to kiss management a55 and moved them to other orgs to increase the suffering.

@5ydn+16u2AUWy - I agree with you, that the rot starts at the top. CSR became an empire and Jon #1 for all of its managers and planners was to ensure that it never reduced in size or suffered a budget cut. Of course, the stewardships at Board level are presented by VP’s and Presidents, so they know how to manipulate the system. Besides which, by the time you get to Board level, all they want to see are colorful charts - not data or words.

However, I would argue that the influence of senior managers and the I&D culture of modern CSR have led to a 3rd rate R&D organization that relies on its own self-praise and arrogance, while being staffed by engineers and chemists who truly couldn’t hold a post-doc position in a top 500 university.

Maybe the problem isn’t the scientist or engineer working in research and development; just maybe it’s the unqualified and incompetent illuminated who happens to move from checking timesheets and powerpoints to devise strategy in a domain for which s/he has no experitse.

They read a trendy book and start regurgitating buzzwords like “team of teams”, “agile”, etc. Etc. I know first hand the purposeful id!ot in charge of the Digital Blueprint. Just masters degree and a flair for speaking without really understanding the subject, he dines his counterparts in Silicon Valley. Those guys laugh behind his back, they know he’s over his head, and that he’ll take anything that doesn’t make him look like the fool he is.

The illuminated comes back from California to announce what he’s discovered we must do, only to be told we have been doing it for a while; he didn’t bother to ask or he didn’t understood when he was told.

So what happens? Rebrands what already exists, calls it his idea and touts the success. California guys laugh harder. Now the logically step would be to let people with real expertise talk to CA, but he would then be exposed as the mor0n he is. So that ain’t gonna happen. He continues to be liaison, point person, and designate s broken telephone.

In between he gets called to serve as translator -because we can’t pay professionals to do so- and the most important partnership in the most critical area of research is hampered because we have a bottleneck with mr. Showoff rubbing shoulders with women government officials we need to f!uff.

That’s the story of why research goes to hell, and scientists and engineers learn to survive and plow along while these anointed imbec!ls play musical chairs.

But Woods / Tillerson / Raymond / etc. said:
"Research is the life-blood of our company".

Holy moly - I guess they forgot it's the dead-ancestor carbon bubbling out the ground that's the real 'life-blood'. And the death of us all. All for free.

O happy day.

@3upi+16u2AUWy, its all true, except it's not super secret. Research VP and associated minions have been pushing like mad for IBM contracts for years - any contract. As yall know,p IBM is as expensive as it is inefficient and useless, so I don't get it; If I didn't know any better I would suspect corruption, but I suspect they are just smitten by the ol'big blue brand name of their youth, and after all company money is just there to be spent.

@3pwp+16u2AUWy - interesting about the experience with RTD and IBM. I heard that CSR have spent 3 years or more trying to identify a project or area (e.g. modeling) that could use IBM’s “Watson” technology. So far, they’ve come up blank, but that hasn’t stopped the CSR VP from trying to force this nonsense on someone.

Someone told me that last fall, one of the big chiefs at IBM visited Clinton for a secret, top level meeting with management. Apparently there were no site announcements or presentations. I was told that it only came out because they closed off the walking path (used by employees at lunch time) for his IBM helicopter to land there.

If you really want to check factual contributions of CSR employees: Check all journal publications where they are either as first authors or as corresponding author. This is a well established and solid method to assess real contributions.

You may find that entire Clinton site comes up with zilch over past 5 years or a decade.

Lol at the notes about IBM awards. This is a form of organized crime/ oops I meant organized corruption from two very incompetents large organizations (EM - CSR/URC and IBM).

IBM is getting free money for their useless activities and in return handing out useless awards costs them nothing.

CSR VP touts CSR/his achievement for having few people's name added to someone else's research. Some poor faculty have to do this as they are getting free money to do their independent research. I know some faculty members from MIT who were funded by CSR filth and they would never add CSR folks name in their publication as authors.

Lol at the email from EMRE.
Something worse happened at RTD. They made a big splash about a recognition from IBM to a “leader in Artificial Intelligence”, which you would assume is someone recognized by her peers and externally for her scientific accomplishments.

Well, she has none. No expertise, no tract record of publications, no AI patents, no real recognition. She’s only the manager who signed the big check awarding the work/partnership with IBM. It’s basically a gift that can’t be reciprocated.

Obviously, this was received by the rest of us who actively work in the space with mockery and disdain.

It’s unbelievable that PR keeps making these morale-eroding blunders.

https://www.ibm.com/watson/women-leaders-in-ai/dr-xiaojun-huang

I concur. Whoever thought using the word “digital” as a buzz word should have their job terminated and be made an example of. They sound like a bunch of mo–ns selling buzzwords than people who can tell right from left. I see they’re claiming victories in the “digital data” space. Last I checked, we stopped using paper and pencil in the 20th century but hey, it’s the new buzzword next to agile.

@2tkx+16u2AUWy - it’s a very similar story in CSR. Lots of projects that could have been completed very quickly by someone in their sophomore year at college, if it wasn’t for the company’s control requirements and managers’ needs to oversee, review and interfere with everything.

Most recently, the CSR VP sent out a broadcast e-mail to the entire EMRE population, praising 4 individuals (2 per project) for having papers published in “Nature” and “Science”. What he failed to mention is that both projects are run by teams consisting of 2 CSR employees and 4 academics at universities The CSR employees do nothing but direct and steward the projects - it was the academics that wrote and submitted the papers to the journals. It’s nothing but a con job in CSR

I noticed URC (Upstream Research Company in the past and RTD). Please allow me to share an observation of research work:

ACTUAL WORK: There was a project, the scope of which I swear could be done by a high school senior in two weeks. 

So what we at URC did:

: A team of few PhDs was formed which conducted pre studies, had many management reviews (s—ing up activities) and created a gate process and plan and spent months after months making  bulleted presentations after presentations for business alignment (more s—ing up).

: Then the URC team executed this project over several years. The final product was commercially available off the shelf sensor and batteries inside a plastic wrapper. 

: The team suited up a dummy with PhD degree with elaborate PPE stuff (hard hat, steel toe boot, gloves, safety glasses, fire r—dant coveralls) had this person go little north of Houston and had a photo session. Guess what? The team flashed pictures with bulleted victory claims using buzz words such as: Safety and use of proper PPE, Field Installation, Delivery of Value from research to field/business application. Everyone celebrated and claimed victory from project lead to VP level. Everyone involved in this innocent fraud was well rewarded. 

: This entire project could have been done in few weeks with a high school student yet the sad part is that the PhD mo–ns were pushed to make a multi year project out of it and were heavily rewarded for processes not on the actual intellectual merit. Many who got rewarded will continue on with delusion of distorted view of merit.

This should pretty much tell you the state of affairs of our research organizations. Now tell me are we sure that cutting the bottom 20% is the only place where we need to make the cuts? I am sure CSR is no different.

Wasn’t the pitch for outsourcing that the people are “so smart” and all degree?
Look up the paper mills and real rankings of the schools.

Wells?

So you cast your broad 'Cancer!' net across the research/technology thems, right?
But it's cancer that actually casts nets like these, on any protoplasm it doesn't care for.
Perhaps the real cancer is folks of your style.

If you weren't PIP'd - likely because the company knows it's underpaying your happy 'productive' self.

URC, RTD, CSR, EMIT a couple of comments from reading these posts.

EMIT - If I call the help desk, it is a problem mere mortals can't fix. I call and get a ticket number then ask that it be assigned local. I know most of the local guys on a first name basis. Much better luck than using folks overseas.

URC - in times like these an effort should be made to place a lot of those people in UOG, where they have a chance to make money for the company and might learn something.

I worked at URC for a long time.

19. O. was mediocre at best. URC never did anything great. But it was functional and honest. At least provided technical support for asset teams.

Things went really really bad really quickly when C.L. came. She has terrible vision and taste. Promoted both wrong people and wrong technology. Poisoned the culture big time. After her tenure URC turned from mediocre to completely dysfunctional. And sadly now she’s corporate planning.

I worked at URC.

My supervisor and division manager were both educated, technically smart and nice guys. Under the dysfunctional leadership of VP (C. L.) and President (S. O.) , both the supervisor and the function manager drank the kool aid and put all their energy in useless safety, paper pushing, and powerpoint highlights activities for close to a decade.

Monkeys (employees) who had no talent put 120% effort in diligently creating unnecessary paperwork, and paper pusher fake safety donkeys got constantly rewarded under their disabled leadership. Over close a decade of same supervisor and manager combo systematically trained (ruined) a generation of technical employees.

The damage caused by them goes beyond their reach as they promoted mo–nic dumb workers as high performing employees.

And the saddest part of this story is that my supervisor and manager were better (they were plain stupid but atleast had integrity) compared to other perhaps younger function managers at URC. Some managers and supervisors were/are brutally manipulative. One female manager is known to be arrogant and thrived on sycophants.

Not giving a clean chit to employees either. Most of them never did anything. Just made powerpoint highlights and said yes to bosses.

The whole valuation process was so id–tic and dumb that it is unfathomable how people with PhD could talk so much nonsense for months and months. Dumb sh– people will do for money and paycheck with a smile .. ugh!!!

It's very clear the poster knows his job is secure -
though a robot can pump mud and pull a chain, it is a secure job.

The poor bullied coward. Sad.

@1ynd+16u2AUWy - it’s already happened !!

Outsourcing will be EMIT's downfall.

EMIT is objectively awful. Filling out 18 different forms, talking to a dozen different people in India, Houston, and Argentina and sitting through countless hours of risk assessment, vulnerability, MOC discussions just to get a 2MB piece of software installed ... two months after I no longer need it.

The way management talks you could almost believe the cloud was invented last year. BP had 2,000 data scientists ten years ago. No wonder we haven’t invented anything new since the 80’s.

This is the most ignorant post I’ve read.
Anti-intellectualism isn’t going to save you, Bubba.
Exxon either becomes a technology company or succumbs like big coal.

@kso the Dallas boys don’t care (nor do senior Houston management) because they all still get white glove IT service by employees who know how to get things done. Someone needs to give EMIT Management the bright idea to get rid of those services and we’ll see how quickly they start screaming

The struggle with IT help is real! we spend hours trying to get help. I have had people disconnect in IT Chat when they cannot help me or just stop talking and not respond for hours. It’s horrible. At times I’ve found myself spending most of my work day trying to resolve Issues with them.

The worst thing to happen to IT support was contracting it out, to reduce headcount. Now any requests go into the ether and end up with contractor in India who doesn’t even seem to have been trained in the company’s operating system or the software suites.

I was working remotely with one of those guys a couple of years ago. It got to 8 pm EST and I had just rebooted my laptop after his latest unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem. This time, he lost some of my certificates so I could not any of the MS Office programs excerpt Skype or Outlook. Then, in the middle of a conversation on the Windows Remote Support window, he just says that his shift has finished, he’s going home and signs off - leaving me dead in the water.

The cheek of it was that I then received an e-mail telling me that the ticket was closed (I.e. job done) and asking me for customer feedback. It was only by submitting very critical feedback that I eventually talked to an EMIT supervisor who put me through to another - more knowledgeable agent - who undid everything the first guy had done and eventually fixed the original problem.

The boys in Dallas don’t care about these types of issue and how much time is wasted, only that they “seem” to be saving money. The company is going to hell in a hand basket.

When people are struggling due to real hardship, some are still busy in fake charades and trying to s— to hire ups.

A CSR manager was recently touting his safe and efficient COVID-19 relocation publicly.

Leadership = Please people above
Vision = Wait for people above for their orders and implement this order on people below you calling it a great vision and strategy

EMIT is good except top level managers trying to get free foot ball tickets from the IT Vendors and getting rid of valuable people