You can replace us when we quit but our replacements will never have the knowledge of why decisions were made 5,10, 20 years ago. You will have to repeat mistakes and relearn what we already know. The cost of losing what we know will be immense. Good luck surviving the Exxodus. It has only just begun.
https://lnkd.in/p/gYki6pGh
@dc Structurally, yes. Same with contractors. Money also comes out of a different (and larger) pot.
A lot of people who post here don’t seem to know how a corporation is run.
No one does anything extraordinary in XOM. So everyone is replaceable much easier compared to innovative industries
@da consultants are useless. Work gets done by the contractors.
Come on, we are a commodity business. Time to let your giant ego go
@da you think consultants are cheaper? Ha
Handover with the Indians is terrible. They need everything as detailed as possible because they lack critical thinking.
@OP Plot twist: they hire a consultant to do exactly that for a fraction of what it costs to keep you on staff.
Cost is negligent when all the drama goes away. i get BTCs are gossipy as heck but what you gonna do?
Good riddance.
@cn It's the magical "knowledge transfer" process we hear so much about! LOL
@cq there is a cost to attrition
people leave, get fired, retired and companies keep doing what they do...
@ax wow. You really think someone can “document” decades of experience in handover notes. You sir are an id--t.
There is a cost for PIPing old guys that have lessons learned as well as sponsoring and promoting id--ts.
Biggest cost to EM is the id--t they placed in charge of Exploration that instructed his staff to conclude that Guyana had no chance of success and to recommend selling 109% of EM’s interest. Luckily this was rejected by Dallas. Every engineer in Exploration thought Guyana had high chance of success but the Manager of Exploration forbid that to be presented to Dallas.
Wells was instructed to go drill the cheapest dry hole possible, actual instruction was to drill cheapest dry hole so EM could sell all interest in Guyana.
That id--t cost EM billion$.
They don't care.
They only care about the savings or profits for their next PDS session and promotion. It doesn’t matter if things still work on a lean basis driving the rest of the employees insane and giving them heart attacks, and it doesn’t even matter if things break and there’s a catastrophe, because they will be able to point the finger downwards and blame the people who are sitting at the bottom.
They’ll fail to give us the resources to keep ourselves safe, will tell them about that, and then when something breaks, and someone gets seriously hurt, they’re going to ask seriously infuriating questions like why didn’t you tell us? Or what could you have done to prevent this?
All the old timers say that, yet we do just fine after they are gone. Besides, the old timers didn’t like documenting things, that’s why knowledge is just in their heads. They had their own personal file cabinets they burned when they left.
This is such an undervalued post. I've been around a long time and I always laugh at the end of a project when people go over the "lessons learned". They are often the same ones we learned 20 years ago. So much for documentation.
The other aspect of letting go late career people is the loss of knowing who to go to. In my area one of the junior guys was having trouble with something (I'm being purposely vague) and he asked me for help. I didn't know but I knew the guy who had that job 10 years ago and got them connected. The junior guy not only got the help he needed but also learned about some other aspects of the job that the senior guy wanted to work on but never had the time. I think this aspect of our jobs will be lost going forward because, imo, the younger people don't have the opportunities to network like we did in the past. There's too much communication by IM instead of in person. You don't develop the connections that come from learning about the person when you interact face to face.
@ax The cool thing is that they don't know what they don't know. You only have to document what you want to document. No need to provide the entire sausage making recipe.
That's why complete and comprehensive SOPs and process documentation is a requirement, as part of resignation.
We're already seeing mistakes repeated. It's all so unnecessary.
lol like your knowledge and experience really matter? The first batch of losers said that and we are doing just fine.