Over 250 geoscientists were let go last week.
What’s happening with the over abundance of bosses and want to be bosses - planners, advisors, etc??
Will they pick up the slack? Are they even qualified anymore to do technical work?
Or are we going for subsurface work without geos?
16 replies (most recent on top)
Upper management = unflushable
They asked of technical: “who can you live without?”.
If they asked the same for management, we’d answer: all. We can’t live without them all.
After spending time in the 6th floor with cousins it’s so obvious they get paid so much to do so little. They can never be wrong and they are never accountable.
After geo and projects it is time to cut facility and more EMIT. Way too many facility engineers, way too many managers and advisors. They always find excuse that they operate expensive machinery, integrity, reliability, and all of that just to save jobs. Our model should be XTO before we changed them. Lean and agile...once they were.
Nobody is saying EM should not have geoscientists. The point is EM has too many, way too many, as per any standard you want to use (competitors, market, consulting firms, etc.). Yes, a good geologist to find oil is more important that facility engineer, project people, but we dont need that many. Agree, they were able to hide for years saying that their work is time intensive, it is half science half creativity, and a lot of other BS such as they needed to do a,b,c. Finally, it was time to clean the house. In addition, too many geologists created the same unnecessary and low value work for other disciplines.
We have the worst exploration team in the world.
Because it’s MANAGED BY ENGINEERS. Who’s brilliant idea was it to put a production engineer with no exploration or research experience in charge of Exploration and Research? Oh yes, our great King DWW.
the problem is not the geoscientists, it's about the geoscientists with PhD, they think they're still in academia and never complete meaningful work. They go twice a year to fancy conferences in Europe, spend money in field trips, write papers for journals. And rarely deliver relevant support for business units... it's time for a change. Geoscience was critical in the 80's-90's when exploration was booming. TBH I am very jealous of the geoscientist work, they never commit with anybody because their work is qualitative and nobody can proof they're wrong
A geoscientist is someone who does a ton of meaningless, low value work, adding no value but claiming they do and that without them subsurface would be dull. They do all of this and we have not discovered anything in the last two decades. Numbers say the best. We have the worst exploration team in the world.
Good decision for geoscientists to let them go. At XOM a geoscientist is someone who pretends to work, argues with engineers, trying to do engineering work just to put as many people on the team as possible and build an empire. We have 5 geoscientists and one engineer ratio, and it should be different way around like our competitors.
“A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid, liquid, and gaseous matter that constitutes the Earth and other terrestrial planets, as well as the processes that shape them.
Geologists usually study geology, although backgrounds in physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences are also useful”
Are we studying other planets or subsurface earthly formations?
Again, if you work for Exxonmobil and don’t understand what a Geoscientist is then that says more about you than them.
From previous post:
What is a “Geoscientist”. A geologist who studied rocks and got a Bachelor of Science? Or is it a Scientist who is over schooled and received a doctorate? I’m old school and just started hearing of “Geoscientists” on this site.
A janitor is still a janitor even if we call him a Facilites Maintenace Technician.
MBAs what a joke
There should be no advisor positions.
Subsurface work without geos, for sure. That's been the trend industry-wide for a while now, not just at Exxon. They've been canning those guys and gals at every firm in the racket. I think it's partly symptomatic of the MBAs taking over the reins from the 20th century leaders of these companies (who all either founded them or grew them into flourishing businesses). All they care about is reducing costs and being properly lubed up to take it up the fanny from the shareholders, who are typically other MBAs or general finance guys who understand oil and gas even less than the executives do. Naturally, they see employees who are expensive and make subjective interpretations about the subsurface (why can't you just give me the number??!) so it's easy, in their mind, to reduce costs by firing them. And the consequences of losing collective understanding of where your product comes from will be dealt with later.
1063 US involuntary as of 3 days ago
We will contract it out for lump sum to SLB / HAL. Managers are going to sign and accept it, then when the hole runs dry they will blame on the supervisors and the supervisors in turn will PIP the remaining geos. A perfect solution !!
Since 52+ was protected. We are guaranteed to have a more than 10% per year reduction in older folks and executives. I expect shifting some to non-supervisory or special project or senior advisor positions. Expat to Guyana/Brazil start-ups with express understanding of no job on return. Consolidate, eliminate and reduce levels for all jobs vacated on retirement. PIO (Present incumbent only) status for many positions. This means positions reclassified lower not the incumbents in the position. I expect people replacing older will have an average of 2 CLs beow the incumbent and will have plenty of time and low activity to grow (in place) to the higher CL. Longer assignments. Instead of 3 years...expect 4 to 5 years in a job. All this happened in past layoffs. TOTALLY PREDICTABKE