When Shell was still Dutch it wasn’t perfect either. People always looked out for their own but the culture was better: less brutal when it came to reorgs, more care for people and a lot more innovation and entrepreneurship instead of just cutting cost. Shell has definitely gotten worse since the center of gravity shifted from the Netherlands to London. Looking back though, hiring your own isn’t a Dutch trait. Everyone does it, with India now leading the pack.
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@162 you are off rootcausing it.
there are numerous studies that prove that IQ distributes evenly regardless of the creed, skin color, etc. - there is some variation at the edges, it does not meaningfully change the statement.
on the social level, things do differ - that'd be how we organize schools, laws and norms, incentives and opportunities. for example, if a nation is building a nuclear bo-b and developing an large scale military footprint, it will need an army of engineers to support that. case in point is france under napoleon and the scientific wave it triggered. the same happened in imperial britain or post-bismarck germany . the silicon valley was built for this purpose (navy & darpa), russians are excellent hard core engineers, china, israel too, etc. so, if a country wants and invests in tech talent, given enough time, it'll produce it.
mix this with large population, english with colonial legacy, globalization and profit driven outsourcing, tech/communication/remote work breakthroughs, it becomes clear what kind of threads are driving usa-india labor dynamics. it has very little to do with good or bad schools, one group being smarter or harder working than other. now we can have a discussion if an immigrant works harder than someone who's been around for a generation or two, but that discussion would have to be general and removed from ethnic considerations as it's driven by universal principles and unavoidable selection bias (immigrants largely chose to leave and work hard to survive).
@35t wow you nailed it, thinking back these are indeed 2 major buckets where I can put the ones i've worked with.
@162 India made the strategic decision to invest in education, especially math, to lift their people out of poverty, at the same time USA decided to repurpose its schools for goals other than the education of their youths. USA dropped the ball and India snapped it right up. And working with Hindu-Arabic numerals allowed iii's to ply their skills anywhere in the world even if they didn't understand the local language, but the English-language markets were their natural markets to infiltrate. It is wrong to conclude that India produces better, or even more, engineers. Real engineers from India are fewer in absolute terms despite the much larger local population and mostly of lower skills. Look closely at Shell's hires. Indian engineers fall into two groups. First, the iii's that just radiate with arrogance and contempt and a sense of superiority, address you with disdain as inferior and stupid, and think they can automate a spreadsheet or code an algorithm to generate an output for a problem they really don't understand, will not take the time to understand but will never ever admit that they don't understand. The second group are the hard working CAD mouse jockeys, who can at least do something but your insurance company would never allow you to set them loose on a real engineering problem. Their skills plateau at a lower level than those of a real engineer because it doesn't make sense for India to fund the overeducation of more jobseekers than there are jobs. But what's the story with this second group? They are neurodivergent and incapable of normal social interaction. They are weird and whiny and weak, almost re--rded when you take the computer away from them. And still not capable of approaching a problem with a real engineer. Neither group is very good, and you can't categorically claim that iii's are superior because Indian high schools are stem-focused.
@162 The nature of the experience and training, the extreme goods and bads, are the same limited-opportunity entry-level foot in the door American professionals compete for.You are not that special. Few Indians or Americans are able to perform and willing to make such sacrifices. But this is nothing to brag about. These work visa programs are one of several modern versions of slave labor in modern America. Total contractual servitude is a version of indentured servitude of yore. Sacrificing the beneficial role you have in the lives of others and in your community and giving all that benefit to an employer is sick. You are complicit in perpetuating a system that abuses you, your family, and your people, and degrades the minimum standards for working conditions that a civilized society should expect in a developed economy. If you expect a cookie because you are proud of your willingness to prost---te yourself, you get only pity at best.
@163 wah! Waaah! WAAHH!!
@1md don't forget the best part, data breaches and relentless scammers!
the current leader in ai coding? what do you mean? ai coding is all invented and run by american and chinese companies. can you elaborate? do you mean user count? any evidence?
as you say, it doesn’t matter anyway. i agree - prompting sometimes is not the same thing as competently using ai in your role to its fullest extent.
it’s easy to make something sound good when you only mention good things about it.
india is full of fake credentials. shell and any other company practicing there has to be very skilled in dealing with this fraud. that school curriculum isn’t even particularly impressive, it’s fairly normal in the western world. india has bowed out of numerous global standards for rating education quality and gone with its own for a reason.
we even see fake doctors and fake lawyers with fake indian credentials starting to get busted in the US. it knows no end.
the reason that the US school made you retake those courses are because they deemed it very unlikely that they met american standards and because they wanted more of your money. they do it with american students sometimes as well. it is a misunderstanding to interpret that as a sign that there is no calculus in american undergrad. by the way, i am voting to end H1B and CPT and OPT because i think it’s silly that we have tax incentives for giving away our college slots and jobs. no other country currently or ever has done this.
finally, chevron has had an awful time building their center of excellence because people show up for the job who weren’t even the one in the interviews. it’s a low integrity culture with lots of cheating, and we have the data to prove it. this is not simply an allegation.
having lots of warm barely qualified bodies isn’t a draw in an AI world. because companies need way fewer bodies now. outsourcing has costs besides salaries. the ideal team is lean and all in the same time zone from top to bottom. this is why the indian stock market has crashed. being cheap and abundant is not good enough. it’s all about commanding ai agents to be as productive as possible.
you’re just going to report this and get it deleted like you ALWAYS do when it comes to criticism so i’m probable wasting my time. but if even one person read this and googled to confirm that all of this is true then i am happy.
They are many.
@1g2 guess who is the current leader in AI coding- India! Doing prompts in chat gpt is not AI Fyi.
@1g2 I am not sure what you are talking about. What I do know is that the current work ethic, ability and willingness to learn, and grow in the largest population in the world with a workforce average age of 37 cannot be replicated in any other nation. Chinas one child policy is going to hit the very hard, most Indian high schools follow a curriculum that is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in the UsA, I took a bunch of undergraduate courses as pre requisites and a top three engineering school in the US and it was a repeat of the calculus I had done in 10th grade. Indian schools start coding in 6th grade in a public school. How is any other country except Finland going to match that? Then there is English, most of India can converse better than any other Asian country. So you get an endless pool of cheap labor, tech savvy, learning culture that is ready for any global challenge. How can you not take advantage of that in a global economy?
undercurrent the market and bragging about abandoning your family is not the flex you think it is.
the future for india in knowledge work is not looking good. i will laugh when ai replaces you. its already begun. hence your stock market and modhi running around trying to get more H1Bs in to send home remittances before it’s too late. the game is up.
@yr Indians are humble, it does come across as sycophantic for the less emotionally intelligent. We also have the colonial mentality, quite difficult to shake off given the trauma. But time will make us shake this off as you can see the evolving leadership all over.
@10d Lebanese favoring Indians is ethnic nepotism? Gimme a break! As American managers when an Indian on h1b routinely put in 60-80 hours a week as loyalty to the company for sponsorship you were gleefully looking great to upper leadership with how much work you were getting out of us. we just happen to gain a lot of experience in a very short time. We would volunteer for the hardest work fronts, forget family and would not worry about any family birthdays or anniversaries. That is partly survival mode as well, but that’s how it’s playing out with Indians in India now. Compared to a local Indian salary, multinational corporations pay them 3-4 times so they work a lot and will learn much faster, coincidentally being tech and data savvy. If you cannot match that work ethic because you have a sense of entitlement, and do not want to give up your personal time for work, then look inwards.
@11d not quite following your comment. I made a post about the SOC take over last year on layoff. I posted the margin to revenue ratio of SOC before the takeover and of RDS. RDS was a global joke without the US arm and knew it. We had high value refineries and r&d in California, Houston and wood river. The wood river labs are now a neat little shell museum on the site of the p66 wood river refinery. Our old headquarters, the Hilton in St. Louis which still carries the Shell name and brand atop the building. Deepwater truly began with cognac over twice the depth) not the Brent field. With cognac, RDS knew it was behind and needed us.
the problem with your speech is that european leadership and idealism is what has caused this decline above all else
offshore wind and EV charging and direct carbon capture is not america’s fault. better check how much your useless pet projects cost before you blame the workers
even right now, wael has only invested in BPs leftovers and one wildcat and only because we have run out the clock on time to get anything going for assets. he is now paying high prices for mediocre opportunities and framing it as bold genius. and taking credit on stock price pumps caused by an oil war
Shell Oil was basically left alone (all US staff) until the mid-80s when RDS bought the remaining publicly traded shares.
SOC was still, for the most part, left alone until it was run into the ground with its first annual loss in the early 90s.
The change in culture began then, more expats both ways, but the Europeans needed to protect their investment. If the US can’t run it, we will.
You can grouse and groan but there are reasons why SOC is where it is today and it isn’t all any one demographics’s doing.
Of course. Wael is Lebanese. And many GMs are now Indian. Ethnic nepotism is not exclusive to the Dutch.
The truth is that Americans are the only group that doesn’t do this, and that’s why they are being offshored like crazy.
The center of gravity has shifted from the Netherlands—not to London or Canada, but to Lebanon. More people from the Middle East are climbing the ladder, alongside a sycophantic India, regardless of who’s at the helm, at the lower levels.
Nah, its the same. Just different leaders calling different shots. Doesn't matter where the company is domiciled. Less innovation and entrepreneurship is a feature, not a bug, in the new system. There is less money for science projects that never lead to returns.
As painful as it might feel, if you are not directly tied to the money making part of any company, you are going to feel the reorg pain sooner or later. The best advice is to save your money, stay relevant on the external market and keep your network strong... there should not need to be a reorg for people to know and practice this.