The oldster nailed it!
7 replies (most recent on top)
I know one guy who got laid off, after which, not knowing what to do....started to short Crude Oil futures...soon, he was making more money sitting at home than he ever made working in an office...its called adapting...life gave him lemons, and he made lemonade
Yea, I started my career in the 70's and this is not my first rodeo. Same scenario, back then, oil was heading to $100 and we were paving the streets in gold. Then crash,750,000 folks lost their jobs in Houston. A common saying that still holds true today, "Management sure looks smart at $100 and sure dumb at $10". My take, is in the 80's we went through a step change to find our way to become more efficient through technology implementation. In the early years, we were held responsible for our results. As we became more efficient, we started introducing more and more processes, making EVERYTHING more complex. Now, we are held accountable for the process and good results are a bonus. The good, is the industry will overcome this scenario. The hope is we will go through an evaluation that processes don't mean results. Reality, processes protect bad decisions but does not allow one to learn from those mistakes, no matter what the process evaluation states. Think of it, a contract might have been 100 pages. Now we execute based on 1000's of pages, larger than "War and Peace". Does anybody really know. Conclusion, we may have more information readily available, but the bottom line is to exploit the hydrocarbons and get it to market. That has not changed, or at least I think not.
I posted this somewhere else, but might be more appropriately placed here:
If the past is any indicator, there will probably be more lay-offs, particularly if oil prices remain low. During the 80's, Gulf had 2 layoff rounds. One in '82, and another in '84. Then the merger took place in '85 and with it there were BIG layoffs. When prices hit their lows in '86, CVX did another BIG round, then smaller ones in '88, '90. Six rounds of layoffs in 8 years. In some offices 80% of the folks that were there in '81 were out of the business by '88. If the office even existed. Those were some dark years. Then there were some additional, smaller, location-, or business-specific layoffs in the 90's. Some folks took it pretty hard. Others took it as an opportunity to define completely different career paths. My advice is free and worth about as much: If you like what you are doing, stay with it, hope for the best, block out the noise, re-dedicate yourself to your passion, your work, and improving your craft. If you don't like what you're doing, or if you get laid off, take this as an opportunity to re-steer the ship. Get out, find something else that you really like/want to do. I knew one guy who got laid off in '86 and went to work at a ski area as a lift operator - loved to ski, living in the mtns. Quickly worked his way up to management. Happy camper. Good luck to all.
Anon 125907 is correct. 10-15% is nothing. The previous slump in the 1980s-1990s lasted about 15 years. Oil dropped from $60 to $30 in only a few months. It hovered at $30 or lower for years. It got as low as about $10. Try a layoff of about 25-30% of the remaining workforce every 2-3 years for a decade and a half. By the time prices finally started to firm up, layoffs were like doing liposuction on a skeleton. A significant percentage of the survivors were on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medicines, or both. People wonder why the demographics of the industry are like they are - lots of late-50s to 60s with a big age gap to the under-40s. It is because we hired no one for years. Petroleum engineering departments at universities pretty much collapsed because there were no jobs for graduates, no money for university research to support professors or grad students, and therefore no students. Oil prices didn't get back to $60/bbl until about 2005. Hope with all your might that this is not a repeat of the 1980s. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. The fact that I lived through that says I'm nearing retirement. I'll suck it up and deal with this ROM because I enjoy my work, I am still productive, and I'm not yet quite ready to hang it up. If, however, this turns into a repetitive exercise, I'll gladly get out of the way of the younger folks. It's just not worth it to have to deal with this crap again.
The Alpha cuts amount to roughly 10% of Houston employees. That's child's play compared to the 80s. If low prices continue, it will get worse...especially as Phase 4 projects complete and there are no jobs for the project people to move to because of capex cuts.
For starters, who ever is posting the same thing twice, should be banned from the forum. Don't be a pain in the @ss.