“The reactions were overwhelming,” Samuel says at the start of our conversation in October. He alludes to the LinkedIn post he made when he left his role at Shell in Houston before embarking on another position in data analytics.
In the post, he wrote about the continuous reorganisations and the toll this took on him and his colleagues. Hundreds of thousands of people read the message, which is extraordinary because Samuel normally doesn’t post on social media. “It struck a chord with more people than I could have imagined,” he says.
I was intrigued to hear a bit more about Samuel’s experiences and motivation to leave his role and embark on a new career. Here, he shares his story.
“The basis for my decision,” Samuel says, “is that by the time we had a new organisation go live, rumours were already circulating about the next one. I know that as an industry we go through cycles, but what is happening now is an order of magnitude more frequent. And surviving a re-org is its own curse. The size of the workforce becomes smaller and smaller, but the amount of work remains the same.”
Granted, Samuel joined Shell at a special time, a month before the Covid outbreak. The Shell Graduate Program, a three-year on-the-job training program, did not go as planned, with many out-of-office activities shelved or cut entirely. “Online courses were not a replacement for face-to-face learning”, he says. “I felt behind in many respects, and I was isolated from mentors who should have played an integral role in my development.”
But apart from the uncertainty the pandemic caused, Samuel had joined a company that created a lot of internal uncertainty for itself.
Unrecognisable
For the first year and a half, Samuel worked as an asset geophysicist for the Vaca Muerta play in Argentina. Even though there was a re-org happening in unconventionals at the time, as a graduate, he was ring-fenced against these changes.
Then, Samuel was transferred to the Permian Basin, one week before the asset was sold to ConocoPhillips. The promise of a protected role was broken. “When a cash buyer like Conoco turns up and wants to interview all personnel in the asset, they’re not going to make an exemption for a handful of graduates.” He had to apply for a new role with Shell after Conoco’s takeover.
But the stars aligned.
“I secured an opportunity in seismic processing, the very discipline I fell in love with during grad school,” Samuel continues. But within a year of starting in the processing department, another company-wide restructuring was announced.
“In the background, while you are learning and delivering at a breakneck pace, the next re-org is there, buzzing in the back of your mind like a beehive. It makes for a very distracting work environment.”
Speaking to his more senior colleagues about this ongoing uncertainty, Samuel was told that the company had changed significantly over the years, to the point where it was almost unrecognisable. “In the end, I had to apply for my own role three times during the five and a half years I was with Shell,” Samuel says.
“The technology we use in processing is extraordinary – on one project in the Gulf of Mexico, we worked with ultra-low frequencies down to 0.6 Hz and even interpreted the Moho – but this came against a background of deliver, deliver, deliver. There was little time to delve into the technology, to appreciate the intricacies of processing and learn its nuances, as was so common in the past. I felt like I was only scratching the surface.”
Getting used to being told NO
Samuel did not enter the Shell graduate programme in the most conventional way. He graduated with a degree in international relations and Russian language before working in offshore logistics on an exploration drillship. Only then did he discover a passion for geophysics and decided to embark on a master’s programme. That was quite a challenge, though, and he had to apply many times to get admitted. “I was determined,” he says. “I wanted it. I wasn’t going to fail without giving it my all.” And it did pay off.
“I finished the master’s programme with top marks. So, you can imagine when I was offered the role at Shell, it felt like I had finally made it. Then, to find out that you entered an organisation marred by unrest, combined with a ten-year lag in geophysics, I felt behind in terms of professional growth and benefits compared to my peers who had joined straight from university. It was not the environment I had expected to join.”
“The moment I decided to leave”
“It was only four months after the most recent re-org went live that we were being told our group was facing another phase of staffing cuts,” says Samuel. But was this a surprise? No, it would have been naïve to think so, and that’s why he had already decided to take his future into his own hands.
“I received an incredible offer the very same day that leadership began using the euphemistic language indicating another lay-off,” says Samuel. “Our department lead wanted us to know, with tears in her eyes, that we were ‘reprioritizing our differentiating technologies.’ The decision to leave was practically made for me.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy to find a position. “Whilst searching for other roles, the biggest lesson I learned was how to translate your experience into a language that resonates with the people outside of the oil and gas industry. It didn’t go well in the beginning, which led to several rejections coming through,” Samuel explains.
But when it did happen, and after he had overcome the initial worry about not being able to fit in because of the jargon, Samuel quickly found out how transferable his skills are. “I can still apply many of the geoscience skills I learned in my previous roles, such as data interpretation and data processing. In fact, I think geoscientists have a leg up on candidates in other industries. The problems we face are some of the most technically challenging and most difficult to quantify in terms of risk. Finding any solution, even if it’s a simple model, requires problem-solving skills other industries desperately need.“
The million-dollar question
Why is there such a focus on reducing headcount while staffing costs are dwarfed by the costs of drilling a well or building a new platform? “It’s the question everybody has,” Samuel says, “but I think it’s partly due to the rapid cost increases we have seen for almost everything during the pandemic. Against that backdrop, staffing costs are one of the few items left that can be easily reduced. But this is a short-term solution with a significant long-term impact. I also fear that companies are becoming increasingly nervous about their ability to find new resources, so it’s no surprise that change is occurring. But the people who do the real work are the ones paying the price for uncertainty. That doesn’t sit well with me.”
“I couldn’t believe the sheer number of people in my new office when I walked in the first time,” Samuel explains when we continue to speak about his new role. “Where we would have one person at Shell doing different jobs and wearing multiple hats, we have a group of six to ten at my new company. Moving to this position really made it clear to me how understaffed oil companies are. It’s one of the main reasons why I chose to leave,” concludes Samuel. “I have a much better work-life balance, and I get to spend a lot more quality time with my family. It’s hard to put a price on that.”
