Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

The level of mistrust is so high that even if they would announce loud and clear that the oversized PIPs are over and things will supposedly return to normal, nobody will believe it. If what appears to be an upturn holds, the exodus seen so far will be nothing comparing to what comes next. Even a totally lateral move is worth doing, just to get out of this house of smoke and mirrors EM has become.

In May 2020, DW said that EM didn't have plan to lay-off employees (go google), while the competitors are announcing their lay-off...October 2020, they announce plan for lay-off in Europe...Knowing the company, the plan to lay-off is not just happening overnight....if your management is lying to the employees, what other lies do you think happening at the leadership level ? Ethics and compliance only applies at rank and file level - however not at management level...Do you think they can buy the trust of employees with salary increase?

I’m hoping you’re a retiree, and therefore, may not know what’s going on in the trenches. If you’re an employee, where have you been the last 2 years? This company does not care about its people. That is the root of all of its problems. Their true colors showed when times got really tough. Yeah management had to make some hard decisions. But HOW they went about it, for example, by firing so-called poor-performers with the mlrp instead of doing an actual layoff so they could save money, is why people are so disgruntled.

Employee trust is gone. EM once was a company that stood by its word, appreciated employees and even though never fully transparent at least did not outright lie. They do not want anyone to have a second/side job - claiming they don’t get the best of you as a worker - then turn around and take action behind their employees backs. Example: 401k suspension: employees found out via the media!! How shameful.
The ranking system is NOT THE SAME at other companies. As someone experienced with other corporations - there are many that actually are merit based, as it should be.
If you are a hard worker who wants mutual trust/respect and desire to get paid your worth (not based on fast talking peers) - this is not the best place. Employees- particularly the younger generation, do not want to be “controlled”. No internal job postings, your career is controlled.
Pension used to be a high point but people need $$ now while living and raising a family.
These are some of the reasons.

as an outsider looking in, IT from a nearby O&G company. you guys don't have 9/80 and WFH options. I do see a position I am fit for currently but the exodus has me hesitant.

Even more people will leave the B'pest and Prague GBCs. These GBCs received jobs from Belgium (25% of Brussels HQ people laid off, jobs transported) and other European countries this year, they have put in the hard work to learn in a very short period of time, only to then see these jobs quickly and very unexpectedly evaporate to Bangalore. Where of course they have full insight of European legislation (not!) and other regulations...

EM promised India to be carbon neutral around mid this century, Indian government is very generous to EM. Politics, money, power and greed make the world go round.

Most people joined EM because they were attracted by: career development and prospects, pay, benefits, status, mentoring... All of this was world class.

It is not any more.

Now people leave to go work for some other copmanies that offer world class career development and prospects, pay, benefits, status, mentoring...

I am on the tech side, there is probably several dozen companies that one up us in each of the aforementioned areas.

I retired recently, and despite 31+ years of enjoyable work, there was palpable pressure to leave - for all of us!! The disdain for experienced people was unprecedented (and silly? or fear driven??) LOL. Never in my career did I feel I wanted to be tossed, I am just thankful it happened at the best time for me.
I don't see how can you imagine that there will be a Pension waiting for you when you turn 60 or 55 given the surgical age discrimination exercised now.
If you are young, I wouldn't worry about the future too much - you can get valuable resume-experience staying a a handful years in ExxonMobil, then they will hire you quickly whenever you want to leave.

Outlook of the industry. Younger employees have options and by now, most options outside of oil and gas are more attractive for those who are capable enough to get in. Those who are not or who haven’t kept their market value up stay in XOM. Anyone “supervising,” “managing,” etc. has little to no value for similar roles in the outside world. (Believe it or not, there are excellent managers out there who don’t just increase headcount and waste money, but actually achieve something.)

I’ve worked at XOM for 3 years and left despite good rankings and raises. It just didn’t compare to what I could make in tech. The industry is in decline, and the company itself is a managerial disaster. I thought I had seen it all in the two jobs prior, but XOM was another level of incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. I wouldn’t wish working there on my worst enemies. It’s a very poor career choice.

@soc+1dJnkF7D
In every downturn Exxon and then EM has done LAYOFFS, although not in every department. Oversized, repeated, company-wide PIPs have NEVER been done before. Forced early retirements have NEVER been done before (in 2016-2017 they were offering incentives for early retirement), because building trust in the value of retirement takes decades to build, but goes out in flames in just one year.
When you actually work here you know exactly when everybody is turned into one year contractors - NEVER happened before, old management was as nasty as it gets but they were not lunat_ics like the current ones.

answers is easy... young people in EM are smart and have plenty of transferable skills to go somewhere else. For regular mortals (non-management positions) there is no ambition to work hard, motivation is lower every day. People who don't quit are just waiting retirement (like me).

Ignorant, obnoxious managers that are promoted because of gender that haven’t a clue and the pip system is why I’m leaving. Vindictive, bipolar, arrogant, ignorant engineering supervisor that plays the game a bit too well for me to stomach.

@pyz+1dJnkF7D XOM has absolutely done this before. It happened shortly after the XOM/Mobil merger and again it happened circa 2008 (I forget off the top of my head exactly when at this point). We’ve always laid people off when the economy went bad. You just didn’t notice it because we are a big company and didn’t have access to the same amount of public information and LinkedIn. But when you look at the internal data, if you have access to it, you’ll see every downturn we’ve done what we did this downturn. Just now everyone knows about it. The data doesn’t lie.

When I finally had time to start going on vacation I realized what a sh-t ho-e Houston is. There are so many amazing places you can live in the US, especially since most companies let you work remotely these days.

This stuff is now everywhere, these are just quotes. Do they imagine that we all started working here just last year, that we have no memory of how it was before or that we know nothing of other companies ?
“How we are treated via PIP and supposed “one year contracts” is how you’ll find every other company”
“When comparing directly to other companies, it's true that all the bad stuff at EM also exists elsewhere (e.g. forced ranking, prioritizing dividend over maintaining employee pay, etc.)”.

Compensation isn’t keeping pace with cost of living, much less with peers. Work-life balance sucks. Too many people leaving implies more work and even longer hours for those remaining.

I am grieving what the company was 10 plus years ago. We are definitely in decline.

Retiring in February, good luck to you all.

Not all companies have forced ranking. Stop pushing this lie.
This is an extremely wasteful way of evaluating employees and not everybody is so disdainful of their work force.
Imagine EM puts together a group with an important task and specifically gets there some of its top workers. At the end of the year, the group supervisor will have to come up with top performers (which are going to be the HiPos with powerful sponsors, unless the supervisor has a death wish), and “low performers”, who would be star employees anywhere else, but somebody has to be at the bottom.

@puc+1dJnkF7D
“How we are treated via PIP and supposed “one year contracts” is how you’ll find every other company”.
No kidding? Have you worked at EM five years ago, or ten, or twenty, so you would actually know what you’re talking about?
Neither EM nor the rest of the industry has ever done the cr_ap that EM has come up with in the last two years. Large repeated layoffs, no pay rises or promotions for years, yes, that’s the industry norm.
On the other hand, to debase the notion of full-time employee, to force workers into an endless game of musical chairs, to generate an uncontrolled exodus that destroys the company, to shatter any trust in a long term career and retirement, to eliminate virtually all experienced workers, nobody did or does that.

When comparing directly to other companies, it's true that all the bad stuff at EM also exists elsewhere (e.g. forced ranking, prioritizing dividend over maintaining employee pay, etc.)

However, ExxonMobil's entire recruiting pitch since the Great Recession was STABILITY. "We don't do layoffs," "You won't get big bonuses in good years but you also won't get pay cuts in bad years," etc. During COVID, ExxonMobil overnight abandoned this stability-based personnel strategy, which caused a lot of people who joined the company BECAUSE of that strategy to reassess their relationship with the company.

It's happening everywhere. Also, you are just seeing a small fraction of the people leaving, because most won't make the LinkedIn post.

I literally just put in my 2-week notice yesterday to bail on the industry. Feels excellent.

Seems like direct hire employees have less job security than a contractor at EM, unless you have a sponsor.

The odds of a new hire surviving until retirement are near zero unless he attains a sponsor.

Many sponsors retired last December. People that formerly had sponsors now realizing dead end and jumping ship.

Ranking system for me! Total S-H-I-T. Just like someone else said, working hard and doing good work does NOT get you ranked well. You can be incompetent, but just suck up and you’ll do well in uncon IT

lack of transparency, lack of trust, lack of care, as employees we are not valued.

Almost all of the oil companies will have the same fate, maybe some a little before others. There will also be some consolidation as well. One or two of the brands may survive as a green company too, but eventually it’ll sell all of its oil and gas to private firms and state run oil companies run by non democratic countries who can shield their climate impact. In public markets, oil and gas is never going to have a high multiple. So execs and shareholders chasing returns will shed the oil and gas as they turn green, for the ones that don’t die trying to turn green. Which brand I have no idea. Perhaps it’ll be XOM, perhaps not. The chances of Amazon/AWS, google, and Microsoft being around in 30 years is significantly higher, and even if XOM survives its future in 40 years is super bleak. So if you retire in 25 years, you’re looking at a stock at that point that is lower than now, with no pension and no pay raises for a while. Pretty bleak for a current employee.

@puc+1dJnkF7D

Great reply here, I completely agree.

When you saying dying business that will go private, do you think other oil and gas giants like Chevron and Shell fall into this category? If not, why? What makes them different and not falling off like ExxonMobil? Better management?

Recurring PIP for all NSIs and the subsequent layoffs.
It was a major act of betrayal that pays no heed to company loyalty and hard work … and the general lack of confidence in a company that had lost its past integrity and HR ethics.

How we are treated via PIP and supposed “one year contracts” is how you’ll find every other company. The fact that we didn’t do it before is WHY we have such sh-t managers and all the cr-p that we do.

My personal opinion on that aside, I can at least answer for why many in EMIT quit. It’s a bunch of small ones, but the big three that really drove them over the edge are pay, lack of respect from business, and no future. It’s hard to pass up $400k, 1 month vacation, WFH if you’d like, and being given the option to actually make decisions and work on tech newer than 2005 when currently as a 4 year employee I make 105k, get 2 weeks vacation, have to come to an office to sit on zoom all day, and have all of my ideas shot down because the business is terrified of automation. Business forces us to work on stupid dogs rather than more advanced ML for trading.

We are a dying commodity business. Even Darren’s chart showing us with our green business growing out of nowhere, we had a dip in income still. So in Dallas’ mind even our most optimistic projections have us shrinking slightly over the next 20 years. I don’t even want to see what the real projections are. Eventually XOM will become a private company to avoid as much scrutiny and to stop investing and drain the oil and gas for all its worth, significant dividends to the others until it privately sells itself off to others and declares bankruptcy. That’s how capital markets work for dying commodity businesses, pretty standard.

1 year contract and assssss k.ssing.

Corporate wide 1 year contracts for all employees (aka new ranking system without bucket safeguards).

Agree with other poster that ranking is said to be objective, but is really quite rigged. It's a popularity contest and if you don't have a manager pulling for you, kiss your career goodbye. Managers play favorites and if your management is in the same rank pool as you, they will push you down to ensure "points", or "buckets" now, for themselves.

Sh-t Show at the Fu-k Factory.

2019/2020/2021 PiP offs of minorities/females/retirement eligible left a bad taste in many people's mouths. Rigged employee evaluation system which encourages bu-t kissing to move up versus hard work. Greedy senior executive leadership mandated PiP-offs, removed benefits, then cut themselves multi-million $ bonuses. Tone-dear and absent leadership all around