Texag5324 said:
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Where are all these people going to find jobs? I really feel for all the folks who have worked for years at these large O&G companies only to be let or go a victim of an acquisition. The few jobs that are out there have to be nearly impossible to get with so many in our industry out of work.
Chevron/Hess 20%+ layoff, BP 32% layoffs, and now COP 25% layoff. Its absolutely brutal, it reminds me of 2015 when every oil and gas company was laying off. There will be a lot of people looking for work and not enough jobs for everybody. Theres going to be a mass exodus of talent leaving the industry and will be similar to the dilemma a lot of oil companies were facing 10-15 years ago, they will have older employees and younger employees but no one in between.
Im not even sure recent college grads want to enter the oil and gas industry anymore, its no longer the "sexy" industry.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/global-oil-gas-company-layoffs-2024-2025-2025-09-03/
Was way longer than 10-15 years ago when I was in this situation. It was around 40 years ago when I was at an O&G company that had that exact situation in the part of the company in which I worked. A lot of folks (including me) with 5 years or less experience, and a lot of folks with 15 to 20 years or more, but not much in the middle. The company had grown fast and more than a few people got promoted into jobs for which they were not ready. While I am a firm believer in hiring from within, that can be bad when nobody within the company has the requisite experience but gets promoted anyway.
It was a **** show by the time I had been there five years. There was something like 61 million or 91 million (I forget which) in accounts receivable that we did not know how much was still owed to us, or had been collected and not credited to the right account, or (in a few instances paid twice to us). They had several dozen people working through that.
The only way to survive in those big oil and gas companies (and I suppose any big company regardless of industry but I only worked in oil and gas other than in public accounting) was to find out what closets contained the skeletons. Once you were aware, share that information with nobody, but let some of those above you know you know. The ones that also know of the problems.
I was still there when all the news programs showed people being let go, carrying those bankers boxes containing their personal possessions on their way out of their building. I wanted to be laid off so that they would vest me in the retirement plan (they often did that) and I had a job back in public accounting lined up. I think they did not let me go do so because of what I knew. There were like six things that could have cost the company $50 or $60 million and I think they didn't want to piss me off. Only 5 or 6 people knew of these issues, all of them higher up than me.
My reason for wanting to get out of industry was the way I saw people being treated. Or mistreated. Never happened to me, but I witnessed it with quite a few. It bothered me to see people with 10 or 12 years with a company that the company no longer wanted. Having to start over, spouse and kids in many situations. Had to be terrifying, I saw first hand how stressful it was.
I quit the afternoon of the day I became vested in the retirement plan, and it is strange looking back now at how that sequence of events impacted me my whole life. Most of the time after that, in businesses I owned, it was me and one other person, sometimes two other people. I could have made more money by hiring more people, or through smaller acquisitions, but I never wanted to be in a situation that I had to let good people go because business declined. I could fire folks for poor performance with no problem, but not sure I could handle letting good performing people go because of a decline in business, in other words through no fault of their own.
I feel for all those impacted by this and similar situations.
