I have joined Chevron as mid career almost 2 years ago, and since the very beginning I have been taking mental note of all those (MANY) people that keep emphasizing how hard they work, how understaffed their team is, how the 2020 layoffs decimated the workforce and now everyone wears 2 or 3 hats to compensate for that.
And yet, here we are now, new mass layoff announced, all sort of commentary on the “bloated organization”, plethora of coffee badgers, etc etc.
This blows my mind. I guess being around for such a short time doesn’t help to understand what’s really going on here.
Please help me to rationalize all this.
Did I make a big mistake when I accepted to join this organization in 2023? I was so happy and proud of it, now I am just numb…
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I hear you. I once in an LT meeting for one of the Corp IT group, and they were all freaking out over their budget getting slashed. Their excuse? “We’re just so busy!” Meanwhile, I’m sitting there quietly thinking, “Sit in on any standup, and you’ll see people buried in busy work, old-timers whining, and MSP barely lifting a finger w no accountability
managers are too inept to actually know what their teams are doing or how busy/not busy they are
Identity crisis:
Old: Chevron can’t fail, we are the smartest people in the room, support employees first.
New: We can’t execute large projects, our workforce is overpaid, bloated, and inefficient, We steal Exxon’s playbook (Outsource, support the business first, “reset” the culture). Hyper-focused on the stock. Executive team misalignment. Zero accountability. Experts at adding work. Addicted to change. Houston or bust.
Don’t worry, our culture will be “reset” and we will be magically fixed.
mid career comments in this thread has a very common theme… I would see an external hire CIO to catch on this as well
love this thread - key comments are spot on
Agreed with the full buy into DEI scam. You have a whole bunch of people just doing absolutely nothing. Mindless jobs. Not to mention the entire agile mindset buy in and the full blown agile teams that were setup with people taken out of actual work to do cr-p like "product owner" roles and scrum master, and release train engineers and you name it. Its a total disaster and an abominable waste. So yes teams were understaffed because they lost folks and now had admin overhead added to them and actual contributors were taken out of their roles to do agile cr-p.
Chevron lifer here and it confuses me too. My best guess is many managers are kingdom building so admitting their teams are overstaffed hurts their goals and other managers are too inept to actually know what their teams are doing or how busy/not busy they are. Couple that with some groups having significantly more funding that others (Upstream vs Downstream, ABU vs NMA). The result is some teams and people worked to the bone and other teams and people with busy work or very little work.
You’re a mo--n if you consider DEI is related to the shift in reinvesting in our people and production to men’s of stock buybacks and LT pay raises. Chevron’s leadership under our uneducated CEO is a pattern of downsizes, out sourcing, and maximizing dividends and executive pay outs. FFS, MW just told you that we are slowing production and investment in Permian to keep that cash flowing out of the company. And now we have to borrow money to keep those dividends artificially high. Les was hired specifically to cut 6000+ jobs and you blame DEI? id--t.
It is a pretty easy formula that is repeated every 3-4 years:
Empire building inept leadership + Mckinsey curated ever-changing strategy + Zero appreciation of technical people = Layoffs + Declining Productivity
This might have been the most matured thread i have seen so far.
I came as midcareer. Always knew O&G was cyclical but I still scratch my head at what we are doing and for me it’s been a decade. They always seem not to trim where necessary and bank on those of us who are workhorses. Agree we lost good seasoned experienced people in 2020 - the ones I worked with just decided they wouldn’t necessarily get a fair shake and left. Can’t blame DEI because the numbers after 2020 aren’t indicative of anything other than they lowered the number of people at each psg and so the % looked better. It was falsely represented as progress. There is one key example I can think of in the sr. ranks and it was literally one person. Dei ia not really a think at psg 26+. It’s a small club and all know each other. Takes forever to get in because it is glacially frozen up there. They thought they were doing a favor trying to accelerate people to psg 24 - yet there is no where to go. So….
Also a mid career hire, from what I can see it’s the fact most work here at Chevron is in service of bureaucracy (the vaunted “processes”) and not towards productivity. So people are bogged down in tasks that need to be done, but aren’t value additive or productive. Add to that the fact almost no one is in seat more than 24 months, particularly managers, and it’s utter chaos to no where. Finally, technical expertise as your role isn’t valued, but chevron processes is worshipped like sacred texts. All the lifers don’t realize how little value most of it has, because they have been indoctrinated and know nothing else.
If you are in an understaffed group, doing tasks that provide clear immediate value to the bottomline, then it is unlikely you will be laid off. If in a bloated group on a project that has no immediate line of sight to profit generation then start worrying. Chevron has never been able to manage cull as you go, so instead relies on periodic, very slowing-planned, course redirection. The result, unfortunately, is loss of morale and huge loss of productivity as the plans unfold, which if totally unproductive. Me need Sr. Management to “do better”.
Chevron decided to put DEI at the heart of the Chevron way. In 2020 they took the opportunity to shred the older male workers who apparently, from comments on this website, had most of the experience and did most of the work. Couple that with MW's reputation for layoffs and here we are facing another layoff because apparently the 2020 message of win in any environment didn't go as planned.