This post from 2021 on Reddit. What’s different now? has there been ANY improvement?
Sh---y culture and a massive push from leadership with an initiative called TMTS (transforming manufacturing technical support). Essentially they are taking engineering jobs at sites and their research center in Houston and outsourcing the work to tech centers in Malaysia and India. Individual contributor roles are basically being outsources.
In addition to that, people are fed up with the arbitrary forced ranking system. Basically people are ranked in a bucket from 1 to 5. Last year they changed the way that people are ranked from at least having some sort of safety net on how far you can drop in performance. I.e 1/5 to 2/5 only to now being theoretically able to go from top to bottom. If you are in the bottom bucket, you are forced into a PIP with little chance of passing and essentially being fired. When you are placed on PIP, you either get the option to take PIL for 3 month salary to resign or go on the plan to potentially pass/fail in 3 months.
Last year when the virus hit and crude prices suffered. Company publically announced they had no layoff plans yet moved their forced PIP target from 3% to 8% mainly targeting long term highly paid employees forcing many out with only 3 month severance. New hires suddenly got put into a new group (typically unranked until the 2nd cycle) where they were fired on the spot. Many I know that were let go had less than 6 months experience. Then they removed the 401k in October and it has still not been returned with no timeline to returning either. This was all before the public layoffs that they announced with literally the lowest severance payout when comparing to all the other integrated major oil companies. This company is a very top heavy organization with what is considered a protected class of employees (managers). Pretty much only technical individual contributors were let go with either layoffs or PIP.
Last year, in December when all those notified that they were being laid off, the board awarded themselves restricted stock bonuses for the year similar to their compensation from the previous year. In no way did they try to reduce their compensation while saying headcount and 401k reductions were required.
This year in march, they announced no layoff plans again yet kept the 8% PIP target again. To add salt to the wounds, HR required a mandatory training for all employees on the spinned benefits of the PIP program and how it improves the relative company performance and how 90% of employees that took the PIP passed last year while convienetly leaving out the stats on those that opted to take the PIL or left before completing (many of the older people did just that).
Because of all the headcount cuts and shifting of work, many of us have just picked up vastly more work without any sign of cutting low value work tasks. Because of shrinking company, many are no longer moving and seeing career growth. Many have been stuck in unnecessary roles for 2 years now.
The CEO is currently doubling down on the only oil strategy with many seeing the companies strategy of greenwashing environmental issues as not planning for the future. Many in the company do not feel valued, overworked, do not see a long term future of this company and completely untrusting of the current performance system.