People might not be happy but they're not letting that affect their day-to-day life and that's a good thing. I've been a part of a team (this was before XOM) where the manager and the overall toxic culture completely destroyed morale to the point where nobody talked outside of work-related stuff or even smiled anymore. It was dark and I would hate to find myself in a similar situation ever again. I'm just glad that despite everything, people here seem determined to not let it bring them down.
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@1qku+1f783CPr
“Experienced people are treated as Gods”
Really???!!!!
Can I join your group?
I don’t know what you’re working but you might open your eyes to the fact that experienced (and higher paid) technical people have been hunted to extinction by our management, either in the layoff (if younger than 52), or through the mega-PIP, which was repurposed precisely to target people over 55 (with a cover of younger people to avoid age discrimination lawsuits).
The only “experienced” people treated “like gods” are those in management or technical management. However, you might note that their experience is not in working but in either doing nothing useful or taking bad decisions.
@esr+1f783CPr Lol what? As a young person who left along with many of my friends, I can tell you it’s BECAUSE the experienced employees get treated significantly BETTER than the younger employees. You all get paid, staffed on better projects regardless of talent but just because of age, XOM pay is largely age based there’s no way for me to increase my CL or pay because of my YEE regardless of what I do. You want young employees to stay? Stop treating the experienced people as Gods and the young as people who can be on call every week because they don’t have kids. Pay people based on their skill and what they bring to the company, not just based on their age. PIP some of the management layers and start PIPing the large glut of experienced people who do nothing and are just counting the years to their pension. Why should I put in 10 years of taking sh-t and sh-t pay to then hopefully be treated well? I can go anywhere else and be judged on the value i bring and not my age.
Shhhhhh don’t give them any ideas!
I am shocked by the young individuals that I know that quit in 2021.
Some great talent leaving the company.
Lesson Learned: Treat the experienced employees poorly - the young employees notice and exit.
OP, you’ve got it completely wrong. I’m looking at my young colleagues, 5-10 years of service, max 15-16 - that’s what’s left - and they are dangling between deep despair and blissful rejection of the reality.
The stress level in the last two years has been such that if you can’t (yet) find something else and leave, you’re forced to ignore reality or else you go crazy.
That’s not “keeping up the spirits”, it’s just brittle wishful thinking. You want the workplace to be normal again and you keep telling yourself that the profits are up, the bad times are over, everything should just go back to normal.
And then comes ranking time again and people get this spike of despair tearing up the positive spin. What on earth should you claim in your PDS to not fall below the others in the musical chairs game? Why is the big, endless PIP still on? Will your toxic teammates succeed to sink you this year? And if you survive one more year, what about those positions that keep popping up in Bangalore? You’ve already put 10-15 years in this, do you really have any chance to make it to 52 (NRE) or they will whack you right when you’re getting too old to find another job? EM has you doing specialized things, which others mostly consider useless.
And if you’re a manager, do you think that the system that always protects you will survive the next downturn?
Maybe if I had been on the team you’re on I wouldn’t have left. Everyone on my team (of the US part) was in their late 30s or older and all of them were pretty depressed about having to stay because of the pension and how they couldn’t just move their families to another city and not having transferable skills etc. it was pretty demoralizing. You can see why as a 24 year old I was like I gotta get tf outta here (in additional to all the other reasons)
I didn't say XOM is a great employer, on the contrary. What I said is that people are keeping up their spirits despite how awful XOM is.