Exxon’s Exodus

A dinosaur media company cheers on a dinosaur energy company's demise.

> a culture that’s increasingly out of step with the world around it. Those interviewed describe an organization trapped in amber, whose insular and fear-based culture—once a beacon of corporate America—has become a drag on innovation, risk taking, and career satisfaction.

It's a giant, old company, with 1000s of employees who were not at that town hall because they don't do things like that. They live in Texas, not in Palo Alto or Manhattan.

I think one factor the article doesn't mention is how alternative opportunities change at oil companies depending on the oil price. When oil is at $30/bbl, having a job at a big, boring, stable company like Exxon is very attractive. No one else in the industry is hiring, small companies are going under, there is motivation to keep your head down and ride it out.

When oil goes to $100 a barrel, there is a sudden explosion of opportunities for people with the right education and experience at a company like Exxon. They're looking at all these alternative things they could be doing for similar or better pay and start thinking about all the things that have annoyed them at the company.

In other words, maybe Exxon has an unusually stuffy or toxic environment for the industry, but I think a bigger factor might be that Chris Rock line "Men are as faithful as their options." Workers are as loyal to their employers as their options.

Seem about the same situation and questions as any company right now - high attrition, management indifferent to stopping it, future work practices undecided (or decided to the disdain of the employees), etc.

It should be clear that working at a fundamentally harmful company, like Exxon, Marlboro, or Peabody is going to self-select for certain types of people [late clarification: in leadership roles] and those people are simply not care about the wellbeing of others as much. I feel for the people highlighted in the article, and everybody wants to feed there family so I don't begrudge people working hard on land rigs in the Bakken, semi-submersibles in the Gulf, or even the development teams writing Exxon's reservoir modeling software or IT teams running them. But it is a company that has contributed to unbelievable harm to the planet and I would expect them to treat their line employees worse than an average employer for the same reason.

I've worked at Exxon through many of the events described by the article. I know some people say it sounds like a political jab, but the article is completely correct for the most part.

Exxon derailed regarding job security/attractiveness from 2019 onwards. Specially in the IT divisions. People were saying how underpaid they were compared to FAANG/Tech in general and the "leader" of the IT division (who has no background in Tech whatsoever) really told people to leave if they thing so highly of themselves. No apologies ever issued through what was a gross thing to say out loud.

Exxon's culture is indeed ridiculous (the whole safety first brainwash included) and the quality of its workers decrease by the day, as the company fails to address their needs/wants.

That being said, it is no secret oil/gas in necessary to keep our living standards, but goddammit, Exxon is a terrible place to work. Clueless VPs, Managers, Supervisors and Coworkers.

Lesson learned - it isn't great for retention when you tell employees to leave and make more money. :)

>Exxon spokesperson Amy von Walter rejects those characterizations. “The idea that ExxonMobil’s culture is what these employees say it is doesn’t hold water for two reasons: how many people join this company each year and how long people stay,” she wrote in an email.

Yeah, I feel like if you're focusing on "how long people stay", and also "how many people join" you're looking at entrenched middle management and rapid turnover of new hires.

What's really going on in that situation is that people are building little internal fiefdoms and engaging in petty middle management power plays like trying to sabotage each other's projects in case they make your own team look bad, and bloating your own department with unnecessary hires to enhance your own prestige. If you let certain kinds of people settle in to middle management they become like barnacles that are impossible to dislodge.

I've started noticing lately - Bloomberg's top-line photos/animated gifs have become really good.

> If you want to be a “hotshot” and triple your pay working for Amazon, then go right ahead, the people recall him saying. “Good luck to you.”

What does it say about a company if the CEO tells employees that they aren't good enough to be hired by Amazon?

This is worth noting:

> "One thing Woods didn’t cut was Exxon’s dividend, which is the third-largest in the S&P 500 and costs $15 billion a year. Employees recall the justification as basically this: A large portion of Exxon’s shareholder base comprised retail investors who relied on the dividend for income. “There might be many good business reasons to keep it, but don’t pretend to care about Grandma and her dividend when you’ve just fired thousands of employees,” says one former employee who quit in 2021 after more than a decade at Exxon."

This really points to a fundamental feature of the modern American economy - it is financialized to an unprecedented degree relative to the 20th century. The real power sits with the shareholders more than with industry.

This dividend issue also explains why the USA, which is also something of a petro-state (currently being the worlds largest fossil fuel producer since fracking took off), isn't really interested in developoing renewable energy. Renewable energy would destroy that whole market, and wouldn't replace those dividends.

This isn't too hard to understand, though some deliberately seem to avoid thinking about it. Renewable energy is mostly durable goods - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other storage systems. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels are a nice simple model - i.e., no fuel sales. This is offset a little bit by selling electricity over the power grid, and synthetic fuel production from air and water is another source of continual revenue (international jet travel requires this, in the absence of fossil fuels) - but make no mistake, those dividend payouts from continual sales at the pump over the lifetime of an internal-combustion vehicle will wither and die as renewable energy takes over.

All in all, I think that's why the Wall Street investment banks like Blackrock etc. are not moving investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables - all they'll see from that is a steep drop in profits.

Incidentally, this is not strictly a problem with investment capitalism - all countries that export fossil fuels face this economic dead end, be it socialist Venezuela, authoritarian Iran, capitalist America, etc. This is also why the main leaders in renewable manufacturing are places like China, Germany and Japan, which have no such resources (or only dirty coal).

> Keillor started by thanking everyone for their hard work over the past year, presented awards to three top-performing teams, and then opened the floor to questions. It was at this point things started to unravel, according to four people present who spoke on condition of anonymity. The software developers, data analysts, and technicians who run Exxon’s vast computing network, which helps the company manage everything from drilling wells to pipeline flows, were in no mood to celebrate. Emboldened by the virtual format, they began firing off tough questions. They wanted to know if there would be more layoffs, whether remote working would continue after the pandemic, and whether Exxon was willing to raise pay to the level of major tech companies.

> To an outside observer, the scene might have appeared like a slightly tense version of your average corporate town hall. But within Exxon, famous for its top-down, buttoned-up, authoritarian culture, where employees rarely challenge their superiors, and certainly not in an open forum, the moment had the strong whiff of rebellion. As Keillor bristled, other managers stepped in to take some questions, deflecting attention from the boss. But eventually, Keillor had had enough and snapped.

> If you want to be a “hotshot” and triple your pay working for Amazon, then go right ahead, the people recall him saying. “Good luck to you.”

> Rather than be humbled by the scolding, staffers began circulating memes mocking the event in private chat groups, which rapidly spread across the company. One depicted a long-term career at Exxon as a car hurtling off a highway. Another compared the awards ceremony to a piece of tape used to patch a leaking barrel of water. Others suggested it was about time employees take Keillor up on his advice and quit.

> A year and a half later, even as its stock surges again and Exxon makes more money than it has in its 140-year history, the company has experienced the highest attrition since its merger with Mobil in 1999. Of the 12,000 departures globally in the past two years, less than half were from layoffs. “Like nearly every company, attrition increased in the last two years, but we don’t see that as a long-term trend,” Exxon said in a statement. “Importantly, we are seeing good results when hiring top talent for roles throughout the company, at entry-level and for senior executive positions.”

> But a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation involving interviews with more than 40 current and former employees (many of whom requested anonymity because Exxon hasn’t authorized them to speak publicly), as well as reviews of dozens of internal documents, reveals one overriding reason talent is fleeing: a culture that’s increasingly out of step with the world around it. Those interviewed describe an organization trapped in amber, whose insular and fear-based culture—once a beacon of corporate America—has become a drag on innovation, risk taking, and career satisfaction. Although many expressed pride at working for an industry leader, they were also frustrated by how slow it was to invest in some of the energy industry’s biggest breakthroughs over the past decade, including shale oil and low-carbon technologies, making it a place where the best and brightest no longer want to spend their best years. “I was bored at my job,” says Avery Smith, who earned more than $100,000 a year as a data scientist right after graduating from college and quit last year, echoing what many other former employees told Businessweek. “I was pretty fed up with not innovating.”

> Exxon’s performance ranking system, which pits employees against each other, dominates the day to day. Subordinates are told not to speak out against their bosses in meetings for fear of being placed at the bottom of the rank and pushed out. Employees are reluctant to raise problems or speak freely about environmental issues. Senior managers too often promote people who look and sound like themselves at the expense of technical experts willing to deliver hard messages, and some employees of color say they’ve been marginalized. “Agreeability to senior leadership has become more important than capability,” says one executive who left the company last year after two decades. “Unfortunately this accelerated during the pandemic.”

Walled article with ads. Why is this on the front page?

Sounds like a company that sticks to its morals despite the pressure from youngens that would bankrupt them. From now on I'll try to buy only Exxon. It's good to know some companies have morals!