Thread regarding Occidental Petroleum Corp. layoffs

You’re correct, we are just a support group. I can’t tell if you were being sarcastic or not but even though it’s a support role, it’s still significant. What is accounting started paying the wrong amounts for invoices, records stopped keeping track of the land we own, or facilities turned the power off.

I’m not saying we make the money but if our link in the chain is broken, it will affect everyone. And a lot of links in the chain are at risk of breaking.

You IT guys make it sound more difficult then it really is. It is just hardware and software. It is not like you are discovering or applying any science, engineering, or physics. Keep in mind you are just a support group.

In my area of IT there was a lot of collaboration on integrating systems. We came up with a great plan that would have a version better than either one of the legacy systems.

The budgets were then cut so we said OK we’ll go to plan B. Something that kept existing functionality but was a hack.

Budgets cut again and we said fine, we’ll run them in parallel.

Then all of LAPC left, we thought this was serious but we can hold it together until they backfill with contractors.

Now one guy is doing three roles two of which he’s brand new to.

This is how stuff like BP / Macondo happens. People start taking shortcuts because there are only so many hours in the day. Management knows it’s bad but doesn’t know how bad because the individuals don’t feel comfortable telling them since they are breaking arbitrary restrictions just to get the job done.

I’m not trying to say the sky is falling but I’ve seen enough catastrophic failure reports in my life to know this is how they start.

poison pill yes. Another Macondo on the making? For sure

Oxy hasn’t yet acknowledged (or realized?) that offshore requires a different skill set. They are just trying to find places to put people whom they know and trust from other parts of the company. It’s going to be on the remaining LAPC to fill the gaps for all this new leadership who don’t know what they don’t know and are managing the rest who do know what they (leadership) don’t know. And making comp decisions for those people. How can they judge their skills when they don’t even understand the skills required? You can imagine how inspired we fill.

Why don’t they simply lay those people off who are not qualified to work on offshore. I learned a longtime ago that offshore requires a very different experience base than onshore. Even if you are very smart you may not be qualified for offshore. What is the priority here? Is it to get the job done safely or to just give people jobs who otherwise should be let go.

Because the experienced people are glad to be gone and want nothing to do with this shtshw anymore. And that would defeat Oxys purpose which is to find positions for this odd assortment of cronies who have no where else to go.

Why not just hire the experienced people back for less pay.

Well if anyone was wondering if they would sell off GOM I guess the answer is no since they’re inserting all their inexperienced people who need jobs into the org. Oxy takes over GOM, runs off many of the most experienced people, and replaces them with cronies with serious deficiencies in key knowledge areas. Project inspection experience does not equal asset integrity experience and our ten floating facilities and expansive subsea infrastructure are going to be in a world of hurt if Oxy doesn’t know the difference. Same with compliance. Anybody have any guess as to how our relationship with BSEE is going to fare with the new compliance manager having zero GOM or BSEE experience and barely even any US experience?

Integrating IT was a way for the circle jerkers to promote themselves and act busy.

None of those people know how any of the LOXY systems work, let alone adding APC. They think SAP will somehow magically fix everything.

We will be a ZOMBIE company forever. Nobody will buy $9B of market cap with $40B of debt. VH is at top of list of dumbest CEO’s in the history of the planet.

Sold, I doubt it. Maybe, if its a sewage company that's the buyer.

If integration was truly a goal, LAPC's input would have been valued, asked for or at least heard in order to successfully integrate the best of both companies. Instead, we were asked to inventory our costs so they could cut them without regard of how it would affect production or business goals. Bottom line savings was all they wanted.

This was easily a poison pill purchase of egotistical proportions.