I was hired many years ago by Baker Hughes at Houston Technology Center, which was used to be a very exciting place for technology development. You were able to work with many oil/gas industry's well-known researchers and engineers. However, this long term downturn gradually slowed down the activities of this site while many colleagues had been retired, left, and laid off. I felt depressed at the end.
I was not surprised at all when I received reduction in force (RIF) notice.
It’s not just the downturn, Celle successfully performed a coup to take over almost all R&D activities from HTC. The Celle engineers also happen to be quite removed from practical drilling operations, save maybe the North Sea. Is it good in the long turn for BH? We’ll see but it isn’t so far.
When I worked at GE Oil and Gas we laid off an engineer who had a Masters from a MIT and another engineer with a Masters from Duke.
I am not surprised to see these layoffs coming down on brilliant people.
That shows BH sees no future for itself. Going back to being just a nuts and bolts service provider run by grunts until someone wants to buy it.