It’s pretty clear Exxon stopped valuing its employees long ago. They’ve been hiring outsiders for management and completely ignoring our best workers. Most people now just join to gain experience and move on. It's no surprise we are slipping. Long-term careers here? Not anymore, and everyone notices the change. It's sad to see a company lose its way.
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@1wsu Hard to give specific examples without knowing your boss, but here’s a few general guidelines that work in most cases:
- Fluff his ego by acting deferential and seeking his guidance.
- Make his success and status depend entirely on your deliverables, but without others knowing it.
- Manage key information. You don’t have to tell him everything, nor should you.
The idea is that you use the asymmetrical nature of your relationship to control him without him ever realizing it. Keep in mind that he was put in charge not because of his talents, but because he’s easy to control and just smart enough to run internal processes to the liking of his superiors.
Hope this helps.
To be fair, it is not DW. EM was always a commodity company, making money or not depending on what OPEC decided to do with the oil price. In the meantime they pretended to do research, upstream and downstream but also they perpetuated a mythology of having competitive advantage - only thing was the discipline in investing in new assets and the care for safety after the Valdez incidents. It is true that management was more generous with the employees and had an appreciation (not sure if founded) of experience, rewarding it. Yet, first, Tillerson destroyed the financial health of the company with the XTO acquisition and then DW both under pressure for the horrendous 2020 and deeply hurt from the infamous forum with the uncontrolled forum decided to put an end to the fallacy of EM as an innovative place and call a spade, a spade. A commodity business that can use 2nd rate, cheap engineers all around the world. We are sad for that but at least we were paid well - upstream even more - while we pretended to be creative and successful. Sad, hard to fathom but true.
@1yuh+1 I’m listening. How do I make having an id--t boss work for me? It’s n not seeing the upside here.
Darren has fvcked up this company. This ship's already sinking. Get the hecck out of here before you drown. You've been warned.
Lots of things aren’t what they used to be.
If you find yourself pining for the so-called good old days then you should consider leaving the company and maybe even the workforce. It’s only going to get worse, and contrary to what many of you say, it was never great to begin with.
“The best workers aren’t just being ignored, they are being systemically trapped in servile positions…”
@frg You can leverage this to your advantage.
Make the fact that your manager is almost certainly an id--t work for you. Not hard to do in a big organization with a lot of bureaucracy.
That is obvious.
It used to be named Esso.
It’s a corporation, we are an asset. Also, they have all the gold (power). Let them pretend they care about their employees, because that how it is and that’s what you will get.
After over 30 years (h-Mobil), it's obvious that the senior leadership has made the shift from being employee-oriented to shareholder-oriented. It may be that this shouldn't be a surprise, as it is publicly traded. The world changes, and so has EM.
The large efforts to relocate work (e.g. HW3) to low-cost countries is a glaring example of just how extreme the shift has been. The corporation is admitting that the majority of work that is done in the different business lines is transactional, and that any deep or institutional knowledge is not of any significant value nor is a key differentiation in the market. As the corporation asked the businesses to self-identify these advantages, it became obvious that there really aren't any. Bust or bo-m is all driven by the market for oil. The only way to ensure profit during a bust is to cut opex to absolute bare bone KLO outlay at all times.
That old gray mare she ain't what she used to be after DW beat the life out of her that's for sure!
The best workers aren’t just being ignored, they are being systemically trapped in servile positions for the benefit of their elite HiPo overlords. The worst thing you can do for your career at Exxon is to excel at technical tasks.