A dinosaur media company cheers on a dinosaur energy company's demise.
> a culture that’s increasingly out of step with the world around it. Those interviewed describe an organization trapped in amber, whose insular and fear-based culture—once a beacon of corporate America—has become a drag on innovation, risk taking, and career satisfaction.
It's a giant, old company, with 1000s of employees who were not at that town hall because they don't do things like that. They live in Texas, not in Palo Alto or Manhattan.
I'm not going to defend either of those dinosaurs! However, I happen to know one prominent startup that used to be in Palo Alto has major problems with toxicity and tunnel vision and lack of meritocracy despite having only a few thousand employees (tiny next to Exxon, and makes even less per employee despite being a flagship SV firm whose chief asset is software), and there are plenty more Silicon Valley companies like it. I've also worked for a giant profitable Manhattan company which is slow to innovate. I've worked in several startups and also large companies, and simply put, large dinosaurs have problems that tiny companies don't have, so don't just wave your hand and say Texas.
The article does read like a political hack job. I'm not denying the individual stories. Just that it is logical to make conclusions about the greater company from a few people with a grievance.
Indeed, the high profitability suggests that the people working there can function pretty well and work together efficiently. The company didn't win the lotto. Every few pennies the company earned must come from a very complex supply chain working correctly so that car drivers will buy gas from Exxon and not a competitor. There might be some individual pockets of toxic behavior, but I submit that the profits show that they're few and relatively rare.
Toxic cultures thrive in companies like Exxon where todays profits are largely the result of past investments.
A disgruntled employee isn’t going to destroy walk in business at Exxon, and they don’t need to constantly innovate to keep up with changing customer demands. It’s essentially a one dimensional business where increasing production and lowering costs is enough to reach profitability. That makes useful metrics straightforward and a lot of nuances of effective management seemingly pointless.
No. Crude prices are driving all the profitability and hide all deficiencies. With the current crude prices you can put a toddler in the C suite and BigOil.co will still be printing cash like crazy
Thank you for saying this. I worked in various places and while some were noticeably worse than others, most were in the acceptable range. It is possible that I have been taught to accept the current norm, but it is difficult to take articles with more emotion manipulating words in the forefront ( 'toxic', ) and then matter-of-fact assertions 'authoritarian culture' ( like most corporations aren't by default just that ).
Still, talk about Keilor not getting the memo on Zeitgeist. The recession in place is sufficiently odd, partly because while most indicator suggest that it is either here or incoming ( with self-fulfilling prophecy of most company leaders saying it will ), the employment rate remains low despite the fact that employment induced inflation has been conveniently selected as THE factor tackle by business and government officials.
And he says to his employees: Go somewhere else. It is bold to say it charitably.
> I submit that the profits show that they're few and relatively rare.
I submit that a person making such a statement cannot know the history of workers rights. Naked oppression & exploitation is highly profitable; this has been proven repeatedly throughout history.
I'd expect a political hit piece to dive into Exxon's record in Russia given the current geopolitical tensions. Those include, for example, ex-CEO Rex Tillerson's meetings with Russia's fossil fuel czar, Igor Sechin, Exxon's role in building the technologically advanced Sakhalin natural gas project and its LNG export system, etc. For anyone interested in that history, Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" has a whole chapter on it:
> "Where BP had planned to swap stock, Exxon, which is based in Texas, agreed to give Rosneft assets elsewhere in the world, including some that Exxon owns in the deepwater zones of the Gulf of Mexico and on land in Texas. In announcing the arrangement at a surprise signing in the Russian resort town of Sochi, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin described a sweeping global alliance — and a potentially vast investment by Exxon in the Russian Arctic."
As far as work culture, I can't imagine Chevron being any worse that Exxon, and descriptions of Facebook's internal pressures on employees don't seem all that different from Exxon's.
Why must it be true every penny they earn is through real work? They have earned a lot of tax breaks and free gov cash over the years to stabilize business. Maybe it’s all a weird web of savings and investing, years of inflating their wealth through word of mouth, making us believe they turn a profit. They fought to keep alternatives at bay through political and scientific manipulation. How do you know they even make money; have you looked through their books?
You’re trusting word of mouth without verification. You’re making their success a given.
I think one factor the article doesn't mention is how alternative opportunities change at oil companies depending on the oil price. When oil is at $30/bbl, having a job at a big, boring, stable company like Exxon is very attractive. No one else in the industry is hiring, small companies are going under, there is motivation to keep your head down and ride it out.
When oil goes to $100 a barrel, there is a sudden explosion of opportunities for people with the right education and experience at a company like Exxon. They're looking at all these alternative things they could be doing for similar or better pay and start thinking about all the things that have annoyed them at the company.
In other words, maybe Exxon has an unusually stuffy or toxic environment for the industry, but I think a bigger factor might be that Chris Rock line "Men are as faithful as their options." Workers are as loyal to their employers as their options.
Seem about the same situation and questions as any company right now - high attrition, management indifferent to stopping it, future work practices undecided (or decided to the disdain of the employees), etc.
It should be clear that working at a fundamentally harmful company, like Exxon, Marlboro, or Peabody is going to self-select for certain types of people [late clarification: in leadership roles] and those people are simply not care about the wellbeing of others as much. I feel for the people highlighted in the article, and everybody wants to feed there family so I don't begrudge people working hard on land rigs in the Bakken, semi-submersibles in the Gulf, or even the development teams writing Exxon's reservoir modeling software or IT teams running them. But it is a company that has contributed to unbelievable harm to the planet and I would expect them to treat their line employees worse than an average employer for the same reason.
You're comparing two fossil fuel companies (Exxon and Peabody) to a tobacco company (Marlboro). I get calling the latter a "fundamentally harmful company", but to say that fossil fuel companies are fundamentally harmful is ridiculous the point of satire. Cheap energy from fossil fuels have done more to lift people around the globe out of crushing poverty than any company you think is above "unbelievably harming" the planet.
The harms of a tobacco company are mostly limited to their users, especially since smoking bans have been implemented in restaurants and bars.
The harms of an oil company literally effect every human on earth. There is nothing I can do and nowhere I can go to avoid their harms. I'd consider Exxon among the worst of the worst, since they knew about climate change since the 70's and denied/buried the science.
> Cheap energy from fossil fuels have done more to lift people around the globe out of crushing poverty than any company you think is above "unbelievably harming" the planet.
I would actually argue that cheap energy has been one of the dominant factors in _creating_ poverty in the first place. It seems extremely unlikely that we could sustain the current global population without cheap fossil fuels, and other modern technologies. This created extreme dependency and contingency. The ideology that cheap energy is an unalloyed good, lifting people from poverty, assumes that unfettered growth on human population is always a good thing. Also, who is deciding what poverty is? The north american indigenous people certainly do not seem to view modern life as progress.
With 7 billion people on earth, I speculate that the absolute amount of human suffering has never been higher than it is at this moment both in material and spiritual terms. How do we celebrate that there are "only" one billion people living in poverty when three hundred years ago, there weren't even one billion people alive? And we are now living with the potential for suffering and mass death on a scale that would never have been possible without these technologies.
All of this discussion also takes a completely anthrocentric perspective. If we consider that the suffering of animals, and perhaps even plants, has any meaning, it's hard to see modern life, facilitated by cheap fossil fuels, as anything less than a catastrophe. So, yeah, I am with the parent commenter.
The concept that the Earth is overpopulated, and that "convenient technology" is the cause and the solution is rapid "depopulation", is a very dangerous path. You didn't say that was where you were going, but it appears that's what you are alluding to.
There are other answers to the problem of overpopulation and poverty. We have to be careful about the "scarcity mindset". Which can cause a toxic and warped view of the world, that leads to creating even more problems.
Technology can very much be an answer, among others. Colonizing Mars because of advancements in space related technologies, can mean plenty of room for growth. Solar, nuclear, and other alternative energy can change the structure and direction of societies. New kinds of birth control, can gradually decrease populations. And the answer isn't always technology. For instance women who go to college and work, are less likely to have children or a relative decrease in children and family size.
Being more financially well-off or even rich, doesn't mean an end to human suffering. There is no limit on greed, envy, hate, fear, prejudice, theft, etc... Which can cause conflicts, war, death, and various forms of suffering.
> If we consider that the suffering of animals, and perhaps even plants, has any meaning
Would you have been against cavemen cutting down trees and burning them to stay warm, then? Would you stop cows from eating grass, to alleviate the suffering of plants?
Why exist at all, when existence itself consumes resources that some other creature might have used?
I'm happy to stand by my comment. Tobacco by comparison causes negligible harm, it's just the callous disrespect for harm to others in comparison to profit that they have in common. Fossil fuel is going to end human civilization as we know it within the lifetime of people born in this century, at current rates. Saying that it has lifted people out of poverty is like saying heroin makes people happy.
> Fossil fuel is going to end human civilization as we know it within the lifetime of people born in this century
And New Yorkers in the 1900s thought that the existential crisis facing their city was too much horseshit in the streets, and scientists in the 1960s thought an ice age was imminent. But sure! Civilization will collapse because of fossil fuels.
Mark my words: more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from the fallout of so-called "green" policies and the increasingly authoritarian approach to achieve those objectives, than ever will from climate-related disasters. Just look at Sri Lanka for a sneak peek.
To me this comment falls somewhere between "No true Scotsman" and whataboutism. Just because we're benefiting from history, doesn't mean we can't criticize it.
Just today, this [1] came out. It's time we use our oil-derived products and wealth to demand change.
> To me this comment falls somewhere between "No true Scotsman" and whataboutism. Just because we're benefiting from history, doesn't mean we can't criticize it.
To me, that's somewhat like: your parents went to college, got good jobs, and sacrificed, all so you could have a better life than they did.
But hey, that doesn't mean you can't criticize them for being heteronormative.
> It should be clear that working at a fundamentally harmful company, like Exxon, Marlboro, or Peabody is going to self-select for certain types of people and those people are simply not care about the wellbeing of others as much.
I don't really buy this. Have you seen Palantir's commitment to DEI?[0] How about Lockheed-Martin's commitment to the LGBT community?[1] On the flip side, I've heard plenty of people say Intel is a nightmare to work in, and they're (for the most part) fairly neutral in terms of "harmfulness." And hey, Blizzard-Activision just makes video games, certainly they have a positive and welcoming culture that cares about the wellbeing of their employees, right?
My point is, company culture is completely orthogonal to the industry a company serves. Pretending that big oil or tobacco employs exclusively people wearing 19th century robber baron outfits holding big sacks with dollar signs painted on them is naive. Everyone below the executive level is a person trying to feed their family before anything else.
I've worked at Exxon through many of the events described by the article. I know some people say it sounds like a political jab, but the article is completely correct for the most part.
Exxon derailed regarding job security/attractiveness from 2019 onwards. Specially in the IT divisions. People were saying how underpaid they were compared to FAANG/Tech in general and the "leader" of the IT division (who has no background in Tech whatsoever) really told people to leave if they thing so highly of themselves. No apologies ever issued through what was a gross thing to say out loud.
Exxon's culture is indeed ridiculous (the whole safety first brainwash included) and the quality of its workers decrease by the day, as the company fails to address their needs/wants.
That being said, it is no secret oil/gas in necessary to keep our living standards, but goddammit, Exxon is a terrible place to work. Clueless VPs, Managers, Supervisors and Coworkers.
>Exxon spokesperson Amy von Walter rejects those characterizations. “The idea that ExxonMobil’s culture is what these employees say it is doesn’t hold water for two reasons: how many people join this company each year and how long people stay,” she wrote in an email.
Yeah, I feel like if you're focusing on "how long people stay", and also "how many people join" you're looking at entrenched middle management and rapid turnover of new hires.
What's really going on in that situation is that people are building little internal fiefdoms and engaging in petty middle management power plays like trying to sabotage each other's projects in case they make your own team look bad, and bloating your own department with unnecessary hires to enhance your own prestige. If you let certain kinds of people settle in to middle management they become like barnacles that are impossible to dislodge.
> "One thing Woods didn’t cut was Exxon’s dividend, which is the third-largest in the S&P 500 and costs $15 billion a year. Employees recall the justification as basically this: A large portion of Exxon’s shareholder base comprised retail investors who relied on the dividend for income. “There might be many good business reasons to keep it, but don’t pretend to care about Grandma and her dividend when you’ve just fired thousands of employees,” says one former employee who quit in 2021 after more than a decade at Exxon."
This really points to a fundamental feature of the modern American economy - it is financialized to an unprecedented degree relative to the 20th century. The real power sits with the shareholders more than with industry.
This dividend issue also explains why the USA, which is also something of a petro-state (currently being the worlds largest fossil fuel producer since fracking took off), isn't really interested in developoing renewable energy. Renewable energy would destroy that whole market, and wouldn't replace those dividends.
This isn't too hard to understand, though some deliberately seem to avoid thinking about it. Renewable energy is mostly durable goods - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other storage systems. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels are a nice simple model - i.e., no fuel sales. This is offset a little bit by selling electricity over the power grid, and synthetic fuel production from air and water is another source of continual revenue (international jet travel requires this, in the absence of fossil fuels) - but make no mistake, those dividend payouts from continual sales at the pump over the lifetime of an internal-combustion vehicle will wither and die as renewable energy takes over.
All in all, I think that's why the Wall Street investment banks like Blackrock etc. are not moving investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables - all they'll see from that is a steep drop in profits.
Incidentally, this is not strictly a problem with investment capitalism - all countries that export fossil fuels face this economic dead end, be it socialist Venezuela, authoritarian Iran, capitalist America, etc. This is also why the main leaders in renewable manufacturing are places like China, Germany and Japan, which have no such resources (or only dirty coal).
Renewable energy investment makes up about 80% of investment in the power sector, and annual increases continue to outpace oil and gas investment (this year may be weird because of the Energy crisis in Europe). Renewables are not everywhere today because it takes time for the industry to mature and for utilization to increase, not because there is a conspiracy by Big Oil to somehow control investment flows.
I can't evaluate the counterfactual of what would have happened if they hadn't done that, but it may have deterred even more investment in renewables that should have been occurring over the last couple of decades.
I'd say it's more like a conspiracy by Big Investment to control energy markets to maximize profitability, and renewable energy is just less profitable than fossil fuels, for the fairly obvious reason that you can't easily meter sunlight and wind. OPEC can't decide 'less sunlight this quarter', for example.
> Keillor started by thanking everyone for their hard work over the past year, presented awards to three top-performing teams, and then opened the floor to questions. It was at this point things started to unravel, according to four people present who spoke on condition of anonymity. The software developers, data analysts, and technicians who run Exxon’s vast computing network, which helps the company manage everything from drilling wells to pipeline flows, were in no mood to celebrate. Emboldened by the virtual format, they began firing off tough questions. They wanted to know if there would be more layoffs, whether remote working would continue after the pandemic, and whether Exxon was willing to raise pay to the level of major tech companies.
> To an outside observer, the scene might have appeared like a slightly tense version of your average corporate town hall. But within Exxon, famous for its top-down, buttoned-up, authoritarian culture, where employees rarely challenge their superiors, and certainly not in an open forum, the moment had the strong whiff of rebellion. As Keillor bristled, other managers stepped in to take some questions, deflecting attention from the boss. But eventually, Keillor had had enough and snapped.
> If you want to be a “hotshot” and triple your pay working for Amazon, then go right ahead, the people recall him saying. “Good luck to you.”
> Rather than be humbled by the scolding, staffers began circulating memes mocking the event in private chat groups, which rapidly spread across the company. One depicted a long-term career at Exxon as a car hurtling off a highway. Another compared the awards ceremony to a piece of tape used to patch a leaking barrel of water. Others suggested it was about time employees take Keillor up on his advice and quit.
> A year and a half later, even as its stock surges again and Exxon makes more money than it has in its 140-year history, the company has experienced the highest attrition since its merger with Mobil in 1999. Of the 12,000 departures globally in the past two years, less than half were from layoffs. “Like nearly every company, attrition increased in the last two years, but we don’t see that as a long-term trend,” Exxon said in a statement. “Importantly, we are seeing good results when hiring top talent for roles throughout the company, at entry-level and for senior executive positions.”
> But a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation involving interviews with more than 40 current and former employees (many of whom requested anonymity because Exxon hasn’t authorized them to speak publicly), as well as reviews of dozens of internal documents, reveals one overriding reason talent is fleeing: a culture that’s increasingly out of step with the world around it. Those interviewed describe an organization trapped in amber, whose insular and fear-based culture—once a beacon of corporate America—has become a drag on innovation, risk taking, and career satisfaction. Although many expressed pride at working for an industry leader, they were also frustrated by how slow it was to invest in some of the energy industry’s biggest breakthroughs over the past decade, including shale oil and low-carbon technologies, making it a place where the best and brightest no longer want to spend their best years. “I was bored at my job,” says Avery Smith, who earned more than $100,000 a year as a data scientist right after graduating from college and quit last year, echoing what many other former employees told Businessweek. “I was pretty fed up with not innovating.”
> Exxon’s performance ranking system, which pits employees against each other, dominates the day to day. Subordinates are told not to speak out against their bosses in meetings for fear of being placed at the bottom of the rank and pushed out. Employees are reluctant to raise problems or speak freely about environmental issues. Senior managers too often promote people who look and sound like themselves at the expense of technical experts willing to deliver hard messages, and some employees of color say they’ve been marginalized. “Agreeability to senior leadership has become more important than capability,” says one executive who left the company last year after two decades. “Unfortunately this accelerated during the pandemic.”
>> and whether Exxon was willing to raise pay to the level of major tech companies.
Why would oil companies need to hire the same kinds of engineers that a SV giant would need? If they can get that kind of salary, more power to them, but I don't see the challenges being similar enough except on a smaller scale with device drivers for industrial equipment, etc.
What kind of systems do you think run the oil drills/manages refineries? Or simulate potential drilling sites? You think Exxon doesn't have data-centers? Or that everything is still analog buttons with a digital device driver on the end like the 80s?
I work for a large defense contractor, you know what I'm working on right now? I'm coding up REST services, and a couple of months ago I was helping to spin up a Kubernetes cluster.
Traditional industry may not have the same scaling needs as say, Facebook or Google, but you don't have to be an Aircraft Carrier to be in the Navy.
Seems like any industry views its IT as a cost center by default until said otherwise, even if their revenue comes from software. There is no cure for shortsightedness.
IT is a cost center in every business, including software.
It contributes to the ultimate profit in the same way that HR, Legal, and Finance do. Indirectly, in support of the actual revenue-generating functions.
Can't generate revenue without a product to sell. I'd say that's pretty direct. And before you come back and go spoken like a developer. Clearly the most successful businesses and business people in history agree with my assessment, it's why an engineers total comp is so high at actual tech companies.
I'm not sure what you're saying, but IT and software developers are not the same thing. IT is the support department that support what the developers do by managing the internal tools and hardware that the developers use.
And if you think developer comp is high, in Hollywood the revenue-generators make more for a few hours of work than GAMMA developers will make in a year in a rising stock market.
Clearly the most successful businesses and business people in history agree with my assessment
Objectively false. The most successful businesses in history, adjusted for inflation, are the railroad and oil barons, followed by the Hollywood studios. And note that at least two of the GAMMA companies are now worth less than a retail chain.
So I disagree with a lot of your points for other reasons, but I totally jumped into the chain without seeing that they were talking exclusively about IT, I misread the chain. So that's my bad, I'll see myself out.
I think that a lot of people in this thread are expecting too much. Spinning up REST services and some kube clusters and maintaining them isn't why FAANG/MAANGA whatever make 300k+ a year and like 450k+ at the staff level. They make that because they're architecting and scaling services to literally something like 50% of the global population, and theoretically with deep knowledge of the distributed systems algos and gotchas needed to do so. And because of the difference in profitability of these tech cos compared to typical industries.
Like if you have normal modern tech skills you shouldn't expect to make top 0.1%th percentile of the industry salaries. People with those normal skills make 50th percentile and up salaries. Which are high relative to other industries, but not top of our industry high, sorry.
Your (the general your, not you in particular) labor is valuable but not that valuable :P
Not to mention that the available amount of positions at these top tech companies are limited. Not everyone will get to them, because there just aren't enough.
Edit:
However, I'm a big believer in the idea of "You can eat what you can catch." So if you can otherwise raise your earning power to that of a FAANG Eng for doing normal work -- more power to you.
Having worked with people who both came from and went to Google and Facebook, that has not been my experience. Sure maybe a select few fall into that category, and all of the people I've worked with who went to/from FAANG were technically talented and decent to work with, but they got things wrong too. They weren't gods among engineers. At no point did I look at something they coded and think "no way I could have done that". In fact they generally produced over-complicated, poorly documented modules.
So maybe demanding 300-400k/year is a bit much just due to the difference in industry/business models, but even the entry level FAANG salaries can be superior. Managers at my company are constantly complaining in all-hands meetings about losing people to better paying positions in the more-private sector. So they are competing with SV to some degree, and should act accordingly or be generally happy with second-tier talent. Sounds like Exxon is fine with being in the second category. From my perspective the Exxon engineers in question are just asking why they aren't being paid market rate. Labor-scarcity often pushes salaries up more than talent.
"were technically talented and decent to work with" that is my point in it's entirety.
I didn't say they were gods among engineers I said they had skillsets general engs don't have or learn just from working at normal co. Getting things wrong is still very much a human thing, which everyone is, technical talent -- which is what these tech cos look for means they can pick up the skillset while at whatever acronym co they're at.
To be clear I don't idolize these engs or anything.
Sure, but I could say the same about roughly 2/3 of my immediate co-workers, and most of the rest are at least good to work with.
Maybe I misinterpreted your comment, but you seemed to imply that engineers at FAANG making FAANG-level salaries in part earn those salaries due to rare technical acumen. My point is, for many of them, that probably isn't the case. Sure the 300/400k positions will go to the Wozniak and Carmack-equivalents of the world, but the 150k entry/mid level positions at FAANG are still well above entry/mid level for traditional industry despite, as best I can tell, performing roughly the same work with roughly the same talent. I don't know exactly what kind of salary the disgruntled Exxon engineers had in mind, but I don't think a market correction to that 150k level would be out of order if these companies really want to put their money where their mouth is, particularly given inflation and, in the case of Exxon, record profits.
To be clear I expect entry and mid level FAANG to be clearing 200k+. I agree the rest of the industry should be making about 150k. But in case it's unclear most of that 200k+ comes in the form of RSUs or other equity compensation. I don't expect Exxon to compete on that because their stock can't support it, they can probably compete on the cash portion though.
I don't expect FAANG people to have "rare technical acumen" I do think most people working at a FAANG are 80th percentile and up. So upper quartile in technical capability. Thing is Carmack and Dean types are 0.1% talent, they make anywhere from 700k to over a million at a FAANG. I don't think you're correctly level set on what people are earning. A person making 400k at a FAANG is like a staff engineer. But their base salary is probably 200-250k? The rest of that is bonuses and equity compensation in the form of RSUs.
For the record I'm in this earning bracket (not the dean/carmack one, but a high earning senior dev) so I have some idea of what I'm talking about with these numbers.
Well I've never worked in FAANG, so yeah my knowledge of exact compensation levels is Glassdoor stats, which largely match up with what you're saying.
Perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed. Even just comparing to FAANG base salaries: From the perspective of a big defense contractor, we recently had a new grad start on our team, level 1 software engineer with a bachelor's in computer science from a mid-rank university, and he's making 85k/year. Maybe in 5 years he can expect to make about 115k between yearly raises and promotion to level 2, maybe 130k if he busts his ass and makes level 3 in that time. 200k+ is reserved for the engineers that manage to get their names on patents and know the right people/get lucky, and typically have decades of experience at the company and extremely deep knowledge of a high-value subject.
Also once you get to like Carmack/Dean levels it's like pointless to talk about their compensation because the answer is "a lot" and super variable, I don't have that level of leverage so I can't tell you but it's not something even an above average, or even a really good engineer can begin to contemplate, we're talking one in several generations type of talent. You could tell me Jeff Dean clears 10M from google yearly and I'd be like sure, makes sense.
I'm assuming this was rhetorical, but since I imagine there are plenty of people who don't actually know:
Kube is a descendant of Borg, and for those who don't know that's Google's internal container management solution. General web services are a little more muddy but most of the top frameworks and services are the conception of devs either in or formerly from FAANG/MAANG/ACRONYM whatever.
Like there's still a reason having those names on your resume is used as signal in a lot of places. It doesn't always mean the dev is the best thing since sliced bread, but I get why people use it as signal.
Right. Take their annual report, divide the net income by the number of employees. Call that 'X'.
Then do the same for some big tech companies. Call that 'Y'. The employee count is way less than for Exxon.
Most likely, Y >> X. Vastly greater.
So to a corporate bean counter, the "value" of an Exxon employee, X, is about what they're paying them now. Hiring one more, even a brilliant tech guy, will have a negligible effect on any numbers they care about. Especially since he'll be frustrated by the dinosaur culture and his inability to have any impact.
You can say "you're wrong, what about <new energy thing>?" Well, this finance guy understands Exxon's numbers pretty well.
Amazon had a net income of $33b in 2021 with ~1600000 employees: ~$20k/employee. Exxon had $23b with 63000 employees: ~$360k/employee. I'm just using numbers from a quick search, and it won't be great because they both have a lot of subcontractors, temporary workers, etc.
The point is that this metric is dominated by the most numerous workers, which probably isn't IT outside of big tech (or even in big tech). The real metric is impact that a particular hire has on the bottom line, which is hard to measure. Really, I think it is more about their separate job markets: Exxon posts positions in Dallas and pays what they have to to fill their positions, Amazon does the same in Seattle and gets a very different set of candidates.
You actually did the research I suggested! I'm so thrilled.
I wouldn't use Amazon since they have so many warehouse workers, unless you can restrict it to IT.
I was imagining some data scientist (call her "Diane") at Exxon, getting so-so wages in Dallas, and yearning to triple her salary at Facebook. Exxon just can't do that for Diane, because they have too many middle-managers who make only 30% more than Diane does now.
This comparison is slightly flawed due to some nuances with hiring practices in O&G. At least on the downstream side of the business, Exxon runs a skeleton crew and hires A LOT of contractors and or people employed by EPCs. This is so done you can quickly and dramatically downsize when the price of oil or refined products goes the wrong way.
That's not how it works. The number of high paying jobs is low compared to all the "normal" jobs out there. Keep in mind that average US dev makes about $110k. We can't all be in the top of a distribution.
The positions at big tech are limited. The vast majority of engineers work for "regular" companies who can't compete with the massive profits and easy money. The risk of losing people to big tech is relatively low.
We've had about 35ish% turnover during the last two years. This is multiple times higher than normal. We still managed to retain the other 65ish%. I worked on a team that had over 100% turnover during that time (half lost externally and half moved in the company). You know what, that manager didn't care. She told me they expected to burn people out in 1-2 years and weren't going to compete with companies offering 50-100% raises. So it wasn't a big deal because they expect to lose people, won't compete, and they still retain the majority of people because the availability of better places to go are pretty low.
> She told me they expected to burn people out in 1-2 years and weren't going to compete with companies offering 50-100% raises.
I remember a manager at an SV startup we were working with, tell me, essentially, the same thing.
They burned their engineers out. Many were H1Bs. Worked sick hours, In the couple of years we worked with them, they had, probably, a 75% turnover. Their managers shrugged. I would have been fired, if my team had had that kind of turnover.
But I totally understand what is happening with Exxon. That kind of problem starts at the top.
And there is some crazy tech, used in oil companies. My mother was a geologist, and she was using crazy tech, back in the 1950s, for prospecting.
For the same reason most don't - lack of skill or barriers to entry like LeetCode (plus family stuff). The vast majority of devs work for "normal" companies. Hence normal companies don't need to compete with big tech. That's why HR benchmarks comp within the industry/location/etc that matches the company.
The data analytic side of oil majors is extremely sophisticated and complex: these are groups dealing with massive sets of all-sensor geologic data and using them to make multi-billion-dollar bets as to what's going to happen thousands of feet under the earth under complex and immense temperature and pressure gradients.
Even outside of those departments, the challenges are significant (though companies underinvest in digital in those areas). Every downstream refinery, for example, is a unique beast full of custom equipment, sensors, and systems, so tying those into digital twins in a scalable, effective, and efficient way is a massively hard problem, and one that has potentially dire real-world consequences. Midstream distribution is full of complex optimization issues from both physical and financial points of view. And upstream E&P, in addition to the geology side mentioned above, is full of literal life-and-death decisions that require sophisticated real-time analytic models that can guide driller behavior.
Leaving aside the moral issues raised by working for carbon-intensive energy industries, the technical challenges are significant, impressive, and fascinating to work on -- more so, I would argue, than trying to slightly increase social media ad click rates.
Big oil needs a lot of compute for various engineering tasks like prospecting and simulations. Depending on how much they do in house those are pretty hard problems and that also means data on a large scale.
Sounds like you believe Big Oil only exists to pull crude out of the ground which is limiting your imagination on why they need these kinds of engineers.
I met an academically trained modeller who worked for some Big Oil.. it was a stretch for him to even mention what he did, since the whole industry is a big villain among most of the educated people. This fellow wrote custom 3D modelling for geological exploration.. it was all "bespoke" and very little to do with FOSS or emerging tech. He was paid well enough, and it was specialized.. so his models went on for more than a decade last I heard..
So I have to laugh a bit when apologists here declare Big Oil Tech with the "power of HPC" or whatever.. they are in a ghetto niche full of expensive equipment. Also I think it is telling that the math guy was not a rank-and-file employee, but instead sheltered in an academic town with lots of time for careful math at a very decent salary.
To name a few: deep water drilling with underwater autonomous vehicles, extremely remote sites in the middle of the ocean or Arctic, dangerous high pressure pipelines, and some crazy geographic modeling. All these requires lots of high tech equipment and robust sensors.
This is happening because of how much Exxon pays their other engineers, geologists, etc. and how these employees are caught in between 2 boom and bust industries (energy & tech). They see competitive pay for other job titles and layoffs are common when markets shift but are likely seen as a back-office function to be managed as "overhead" would (low pay, outsourcing, etc)
I was under the impression that if you wanted to hire employees for ethically dubious industries you better be willing to pay them enough that they can ignore their conscious.
Sounds like a company that sticks to its morals despite the pressure from youngens that would bankrupt them. From now on I'll try to buy only Exxon. It's good to know some companies have morals!
