The most experienced hands are being shown the door when they are needed most to guide through many changes. An arbitrary rule closed the jobs of anybody here for a year and a half or less. Almost without exception these people are adding little value in disciplines in which it takes time to get up to speed here, such as in earth science.
Precious little time is being allowed for expats to hand off projects in busy teams. Apparently local management lobbied San Ramon for later departures and were told that if the employees were essential that more jobs should have been "closed" or preserved as "open"...but were they not dictating quotas to the business unit? Sounds like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. A scramble will be on to shift Thai workers to take over projects from expats, but then a month later many of them will be axed in "Project Spring" and this could be a large number of them. Apparently somebody leaked a slide to a Thai language newspaper that claimed that 30-40 percent of the Thai staff will lose their jobs. An e-mail saying that somebody was being disciplined for an infraction of IT compliance appears to have validated that this was a correct figure. In a town hall meeting for Thai staff there also was no denial of the number in the leak.
New rules about perforating reservoirs ignore sound reservoir management practices. Some have called it a "slash and burn" approach.
Quite a few people are speculating from all of this that it appears that Chevron has lost interest in staying in the Gulf of Thailand and renewing contracts, but instead is undergoing brutal personnel cuts ahead of selling this place.