Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

I think the point of the post was to elicit feedback on the experience of operators and control rooms having a frat house culture and degree requiring roles being taught from the beginning to coddle operators. I think most engineers are taught on their first few weeks on the job how to work with operators. They are taught this because operators are indeed difficult. Operators are not taught any behavioral skills in the first few weeks on the job. This is the essence of the post. You guys have taken it out of context.

In summary the answer to the question is: yes engineers and others are taught to coddle operators, and yes operators should be taught soft skills. An atmosphere of disrespect from either side should not be allowed. The reason operators are allowed to be is because shift work and dead end work is not desired by many, we need someone to do it. In exchange people put up with some things. If I had my way, everyone would act as a professional or be out the door. Have a good day.

@3mjv+1923ngvN comments were about observations. That does not involve managing anything. These observations involved multiple people, not sure how this makes someone not cutout for a job from their observations. Ever heard of two ears one mouth? You observe, learn and then form a conclusion. The conclusion is that the culture in many if not most control rooms is much less than desired. Harassment, spinelessness, gossip, bullying other operators, and the list goes on of other behaviors that are common place and child like. People sitting around eating lettuce so they can fart in front of office people and laugh about it, s-x talk, open gender and s-xuality discrimination all are common place in my experience. I think others who have spent time within control rooms will say the same.

Homer Simpson award to best operator. There is no mistake why that character was depicted as an operator.

@2wpx+1923ngvN

Sounds to me like you may be the problem. Obviously not cut out for the job. Unless there is a serious potential or actual issue, you don't run to management with a complaint against someone. Getting angry at a vending machine is not exactly an uncontrolled or reportable behavior. Who hasn't done this? I had to intervene with an operator who was openly talking about k–ling co-workers at the plant. Now, that required immediate action. Turns out the guy had some serious issues at home, but not a bad guy. We got him the help he needed to get his life straightened out. But vending machines, no. I know several "office workers" who never earned the respect or trust of operators, drilling rig personnel, roustabout gangs, etc., but it was practically always the fault of the office personnel who sounded a lot like you. Yes, some operators can be jerks, but if you can look them in the eye and have a respectful conversation, I find they usually appreciate the help. If you can't manage a diverse group of personalities, including bullies, you need to get a different position.

Operations involve minimal work except at outages and even then their workload is not comparable to contractors and some other groups. They whine and complain. There’s a lot, I mean a ton of butt time for operators. It’s different between operators and maintenance and other groups. Operators seem spoiled and ill tempered relative. I walked into the control room one day, and one of them was criticizing my manager saying things were more reliable before my manager came. So I told him that he had been there long enough to be vested and he could leave anytime and continued about my business. I have zero tolerance for that junk at work. Another time I brought two intern to the control room who happened to be females, and one operator said verbatim “do we not hire boys anymore?”. Another time I had an operator tell me and the entire control room how that a specific person was homosexual. I told him not to do that around me. He continued a little bit. Another time I heard an operator insinuate to an engineer about birth control while talking about fitness. Another time I heard an operator commented to an engineer about their s-xy eyes. The engineer looked at the union rep who was in the room and asked for help and walked off. Another operator was at a vending machine shaking it and cursing while screaming. The machine took his dollar. I heard the same operator scream several times and act out of control. I reported it and nothing was ever done. He verbally assaulted people including an engineer who was doing their job and being nice. I am afraid this operator will lose his mind and hurt or k–l someone at work. These are just some examples. I had a shift supervisor make excuses to me for an adhd operator because his mom was a le–b-an and he was landing to me how aweful that was and that the op had issues. That same supervisor bragged to me about playing cards with women in non-platonic manner. He was married. I have sooooooo many experiences of the same, these are just a few.
For operators to do the right thing we always had to write down instructions as if it were to someone in elementary school. Tow separate occasions I worked with contractors and one me change who had near different misses due to inappropriate lockout tagout. I was working at night and a mechanic raged into the control room because pressure was not bled off of an exchanger and he broke the seal. The stories posted below are very typical of my experiences. No excuses.

I have never experienced these attitudes of blatant harassment and mean spiritedness from engineers.

Operators are a problem. This issue is not economic. Instead the issue is cultural that affects only a small percent of employees who work in continuous contact with operators. The OP wasn’t contributing their post with the downfall of Exxon. Rather it was just an inquiry for feedback on an issue they experience. There are issues with operators. Generally they are not very book smart and don’t have good personal skills. In general. I’ve worked with a handful whom could have gotten their engineering degree had they wanted or for some if they had the chance. I see engineers treating them with respect. I don’t typically see that from the operators. Sorry but it’s the truth. I’ve worked with ops who spread awful rumors about people and situations I knew not to be true, be reluctant to help when indeed it was their job, become physically angry, lie, gossip, etc. There is a lack of professionalism with operators. There are many stories of ops doing dumb stuff and it’s true. No reason to be offended by it. Not all are like this but many are. It’s the same with commenting on horror stories from China around their welding and fabrication quality. If you don’t bird dog the Chinese you can easily get junk work. Also it’s common place to comment on Chinese safety culture. Yet this is okay, but commenting on something people see with their own eyes at work is taboo. It’s as if people pity operators and allow them extra margin for failure. It’s not right.
And yes, management goes through the effort in how to deal with operators eg “don’t talk down to the operators, ask the operators as sometimes they can provide great insight, build relationships with the operators, ask the ops input on things to make them feel good, and many more”. I’ve never seen Superintendants or shift sups coach the operators in the same way. They should be telling ops the exact same thing!! When supervisors on either side see one group being jerks they should call them out and not allow it. I’ve worked with operators and shift supervisors who have tried to sabotage engineers and contractors. There’s zero place for this and they should be fired in my opinion because this threatens the business and safety. I’ve seen ops near destroy an engineers life from bullying. The worst I’ve seen from an engineer is one who talked to ops like they’re we’re engineers. They didn’t know what the guy was talking about and felt bad. The guy was coached and corrected his ways. The ops who were menaces are continuing in their ways with no coaching. So yes operators are babied, Andrew environment harbor troublemakers and covers up buddy mistakes.

@1myn

I don't know who 'we' are in your closing, but you generally hit the spots.
The company does use a 'we' element in hiring their white collars.
First criteria - belief in a class system of white collar high / other collar low.
Second criteria - a purty mouf.

Why the heck would anyone need to be “taught to be nice” to employees they supervise, or to co-workers ? Why wouldn’t you start off like that anyway ??

@1myn

Well stated, bravo!

Wow, from reading these posts there is a definite bias and discrimination against the operators. Making fun of what they drive, calling them racists, s-xists and homophobes. It is no wonder they do not respond well to those supervising them. My experience is that the operators know what is going on, prove it day in and day out, and know full and well that the supervisors, middle managers, plant managers, the VPs and the god pod totally look down on them as racist, s-xist, homophobics that would not know what to do until told to do so. The operators did not drive this Corporation into the ditch, it is all the Spring campus employees that drove this Corporation into the ditch and continue to do so. The campus is/was like a happy playground of delusional kool-aid drinking rollback college students, that believed they were always right and confirmed this on a daily basis with their colleagues. At least the god pod had good enough sense to terminate the white collar jobs and not the operators, because they are the only ones generating the revenue in our company. The Spring campus is a disaster on so many levels and has contributed to and accelerated our downfall which begin with Tillerson's awful business decisions (Russia, XTO, Permian, stock buy backs, importing LNG, etc.) and continue with Wood's awful decisions to spend, spend and spend some more developing his Value Chain model resulting in a highly leveraged company, two credit downgrades, kicked out of the Dow and still woefully behind Chevron on any induce you choose. No, the operators are not the problem, we are.

Operators should have performance reviews and go through the same process as everyone else. This will put a fire under them.

Operators should have performance reviews and go through the same process as everyone else. This will put a fire under them.

There's a big difference between union and non-union operators. Obviously no generalization applies to everyone, but from what I've seen, unionized operators are much more likely to be rude/non-responsive/uncaring. Non-union operators are generally more willing to do non-routine work, such as helping out management-types like new engineers

Management should encourage that from engineers but also encourage that operators. There be no excuse for rudeness and bad attitudes from anyone.

To the person who brought up they had a PhD - your post is ironic.

Posts are painting with way too broad a brush. Before Covid, you could walk through the Spring campus and see employees at large lunch meetings, standing around and laughing at coffee bars, bunched up chatting in cubes and offices, relaxing outside, etc. Is the campus a playground, or would this be an exaggeration?

As far as toxicity, most of the posters here are knee deep in the spread. And for the most part, they aren’t operators or field personnel. More hypocrisy.

I’ve worked and seen both sides. Until recently, most people were generally hard workers who reciprocate good will when treated with such. But there is such a behavioral and cultural divide between experienced vs recent hires that mutual respect is rapidly diminishing.

My experience is that it’s too easy to be hired in as an operator. It can depend on who you know and result in not the best being hired. They should put more emphasis on personality rather than on skill set alone. I always wanted to be in that type of leadership role and thought often about how to hire in and develop the best possible ops team. I would make it perfectly clear that we want someone who wants to learn, doesn’t have to be the smartest in room, just being humble enough to ask questions and learn is enough. Of course there is a minimum threshold of intelligence required. We can’t be holding hands. I would also make it perfectly clear that we want someone who has strong moral character, who will not come in and partake in gossip and stir trouble. I want to see people come forward and report that kind of stuff. It’s an environment that breeds bad behavior if not checked. They have a lot of time to just sit, think and talk. I would rotate people around shifts often as well. Control rooms are HR’s biggest nightmare. They sort of turn their heads.

I had operators on nights set their alarms on their phones for when samples needed to be collected. Then slept for 2 hours, run samples for 15 minutes then back to sleep. They did that for most of the night. They had side jobs as contractors during the day.

Not wearing PPE because it’s hot.

The pranking was getting out of hand.

They hid a weight bench and weights behind some equipment think it would never be found.

They would grill with an open flame in a not open flame zone. One of them tried to fill out the hot work permit for it but for the most part on nights they would just grill. Then we found the grill too, and it was always the other crews grill. But there was charcoal on fire in it and a bag of half used charcoal is the back of the operators truck.

White vs. non-White Collar reference is offensive.
It is about the individuals and your broad brush makes my blood boil.
I've got a PhD and find you snivelly BMW Bois engineers have a bad smell in general.
You set a new mark.

“ When I was a young engineer, I was tasked with working the overnight shift of a turnover at a world class chemical facility that we were really just there for support. I was supposed to go in and check on the operators every few hours in the control room. At my check at midnight ish I walked in and every operator was asleep at the controls. I was only working with a couple and went and woke them up and they were very upset with me. They told me if they needed to do anything an alarm would sound and they would wake up.

Another facility I worked in had way overengineered hard plastic covers on their ESD buttons and when I asked then why they told me it is because some of the operators throw tennis balls back and forth at night and one night someone missed and the tennis ball shut down the facility. Instead of telling them to stop throwing sh– around in the control room, they decided to protect the buttons from errant throws.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/ChemicalEngineering/comments/8urmn2/id–ts_at_plants/

Reddit article. It’s funny

It really depends, some sites have really bad cultures. I am an older engineer at one of the smaller North American sites and the operators are great, mix of older/younger folks and decently diverse. Sure a lot of them can be rough around the edges but with very few exceptions all good folks.

I’m the OP and am not a new engineer. This is from my observations and experiences. I worked with one guy, and it’s not a unique story, where he had been there 35 years and still did not have basic understanding. We tried to empower them during an outage and they royally messed it up. Gotta micromanage them. They are like kids. Not all, but this is my experience that majority are.

In my time, every new engineer was treated somewhat similarly, and it stayed that way until you earned the field/plant workers' respect, which is different from being nice to them. New engineers tend to talk and act like they know how to do things better, they are smarter, etc. Unfortunately, the reputation of young engineers is well earned. Not all, but many are pretty obnoxious when they first interface with hourly employees. Be patient, show respect for them, show that you are interested in learning from them, admit you have a lot to learn, etc. and in time the relationships will improve.
Just remember, each of those guys has forgotten more about the oil field than you ever learned. My dad was a roughneck and I hung out on drilling rigs where engineers are pretty much a laughing stock. But, I slowly earned my stripes when I understood my place. Wasn't long after that I became one of the guys, no longer a worm!