I thought we were an oil & gas (ok... energy) company... but all I run into in the office anymore are scrum masters, product owners, value drivers (what!?)... do we have earth scientists and engineers anymore? Seems to me we're transitioning into a giant tech project management company.
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"post hydrocarbon world"??? So... No Computers, electronics, or cellphones? Cool.
We got along without them for centuries, so wtf.
Back to the topic of the thread. Management is struggling to find a future as oil and gas gradually declines over the next decades. That future is unclear, so they are fishing in many ponds without much clue while trying to preserve current cash flow. One option is to take the money (return it to investors), whereas another option is to find new opportunities. The equestion is what can a company heavy with subsurface experience do in a post-hydrocarbon world that will leverage our current strengths. The are possibilities, but no simple answers.
"I prefer the threads" ... is this still another post from the one guy who posts on every thread "how is this related to layoffs?". You were culled years ago: It is time to get over it and move on with your life!
I prefer the threads to be what I click on and related to the site name. I can find click-bait anywhere, just as I can find topics on Reddit from whiny millennials who hate their job and the fact that they have to work at all and can't have everything for free.
The title at the top of this section is;
Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs
I can't imagine that someone would just come along and click on it and expect a layoffs related discussion, lol.
The Wendy troll is the same guy who used to complain about topics not being layoff related. He seems Canadian. They like rules.
Sir this is a Wendy’s
The handwriting was on the wall for me when management gushed about how great Agile was going to work for us. I took the EOI in 2020 and never looked back until I looked at this site. Good Luck and Good Night.
Many of these scrum master kids come from basket weaving academic backgrounds, too, if they even have college degrees. They take 3-month full-stack coding courses and acquire little certificates. It's a big racket. They post these little certificates on LinkedIn and say, "Look at me"!
In my previous incarnation as a reservoir engineer, I too thought my primary job was to focus on putting more oil in the g-n barrel. When companies were interested in making money, that was a successful work strategy. Today, IMHO, I am not so sure that focusing on producing more oil is the correct choice to make. It should be though.
All this talk just reaffirms just how happy I am to have retired in 2016 after 30 years of service and with Chevron giving me a 1 year salary bonus farewell payment. Retirement Life is great.
I have abided by a simple principle in my career at Chevron, but it seems to be lost on most people these days: If something doesn’t put more barrels in the pipeline or save us money, we shouldn’t do it.
Where’s your growth mindset… you fixed mindset, backward thinking, Neanderthal. Wake up like the rest of us headquartered here in CA Silicon Valley. Don’t you want to be cutting edge? If not we’ll grab you by your unisex scrum sack and toss you out.
Ahhh yes. Yet another explanation for the downfall of Chevron. Joined this mighty oil giant recently only to be disappointed by the worthless “digital transformation” path and all the trendiness managers have bought into, leading the way. Millions spent and wasted …the entire workforce chasing tail on things that add little value or matter much. most shocking of all is the employee staff satisfied or content with operating at this level or collecting the paycheck….believing beloved Chevron still has the competitive edge.
Yeah, basically MKW was convinced we need to be like Facebook (Meta) or Google. The problem is we are an oil company not a software company. So yes we can get better with digital tools, but also we need to focus on finding, producing and refining oil first and foremost.
Now we have a bunch of people that are convinced a PowerBI dashboard will solve all our problems.
My petrotech experience is the smart eggheads (mostly CTC people) go to academia, the smart high-pots (there are some) go to banks or asset brokerage houses, the smart oil finders go to smaller companies where their skills are utilized and they're well compensated for it. If you're "good", there's always a place for you to go, even in this market. If you desire to be a chapter lead or scrum master, there's always Chevron.
What you're seeing is the net result of being bamboozled by Microsoft, various 'consultants', BCG, and whatever trendy just came out of Silicon Valley. Petrotechs? The good ones with skills and experience EOI'd in 2020. We're stuck now with identity-crisis petrotechs, they don't know if they want to describe rocks or write code, two mutually exclusive skills.
I have seen at least half a dozen internal digital products which save man-years of work vs doing things the old manual way or with a broken spreadsheet.
I have yet to see a finalized digital work product that provides any value built in house
Let them finish figuring out what personal pronoun to use on their emails and then they will address what’s next to raise the ESG score. The actual real things that matter to the business will have to wait!
Stay tuned. They are still trying to figure it out!!