A colleague did some data mining and figured out wells has about 15% of its staff at the JG2+ level, whereas the subsurface side is closer to 40%. I’m hearing of a lot of cuts at the lower levels in Development and Suburface, but more cuts up top in Wells. When I look at postings, lots of IC JG2s on the subsurface / development side. Does anyone have insight as to why? I would have expected a similar JG distribution for orgs under Ivan. Anytime a manager gets asked (VP and higher), they act surprised there is a discrepancy.
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About 20 years ago when I first started my career there was a huge generational gap due to very limited hiring between the mid 80s and early 00’s. Mgmt at the time vowed to stop the bo-m-bust hiring pattern but nothing seems to have changed.
Anecdotal but in my LOB we haven’t hired a graduate since 2019 and cut nearly 25% of JG5’s in this past re-org. We have no plan for the future.
it should be obvious by now that wael doesn’t care about developing new talent or investing any money long term for anything else
he wants a skeleton crew to maximize profit. to what end is the question. is it a merger, an acquisition? or will he just meet some sort of compensation targets based on cash flow metrics then bail and leave us as a dead husk? we’ll see.
my bet is dead husk.
I think the answer is clear. Shell doesn’t care about developing young professionals anymore because there is no future in here. There’s no new development nor discovery in the recent years and every subsurface team is getting leaner every reorg.
subsurface folks are move valuable
I agree. Surely IT or MF would have seen a job grade distribution by various VPs and noticed the discrepancies, no? If not, then major incompetence by them. If yes, then they should be able to justify the differences when asked about it and not play d-mb. All our town halls are like a bad episode of Black Mirror.
You have to frame the questions in a way that it highlights the risk to GMs and VPs. They shouldn’t want more lower JG staff below them. The more 2s, the more 1s you need to manage them, which means more As then Bs etc. The threat to them is that their peers in D&S have more high JG staff beneath them, which helps justify SVP vs VP roles. That means senior wells leaders are further from SVP roles than an equivalent GM or VP in development.
This 1000%, UPU wrote the SOP on this and then it infected DS&W when they saved those high flyers… One giant feedback loop
They need to make room for wells and facility parented folks to come over to development subsurface to play TL and pretend to understand how we find and develop oil before they shoot up higher. To do that they have to push more subsurface staff back into JG2 IC roles.
In reality? Dev subsurface side has tons of people that haven’t done real technical work since they were 4s. They have just been hiding in barely technical “broadening” roles. Not surprisingly they are also the most politically connected so they somehow remain unscathed or grow their ranks every reorg.