SLB reviews

Senior Management: I had a friend who rose to a VP role reporting to the CEO who told me "god help this company if it ever has a competitor run by competent professional management". (It was a joke - but not entirely). I guess that reflects on SLB - and on its competitors. My own perspective is that executive management is promoted from within (good) but with little formal training (bad) except experience from middle management roles on the way. That's compounded by at least until recently very short stays of said senior management in any one role, e.g. the current CEO resume shows, before his current job, hardly any roles which he occupied for more than two years. One person who worked for him in an earlier role told me "he put in place some procedural changes . . . it's too early to tell if they were good or bad !" (hmmm!). Specific examples of inept executive management include (on the biggest scale) the $ 3 billion loss on the purchase and sale of SEMA back in 2003, and on a much smaller scales spending $120 million in 2007 on relocating a research facility to a different city "to encourage academic collaboration" but not increasing the collaboration budget. Both cases where failure could have been, and was predicted, but dissenting voices were ignored. Middle Management (These are the people most employees will deal with as managers). My experience was there were a few good (effective, organized, caring of their staff, strove to get the job done despite "the system") - many well-meaning but ineffective ("box-tickers", more interested in themselves than their staff, follow the system even if it was obviously not working) - and a handful bad (self-serving, disingenuous, arbitrary). The Culture: Chronically secretive & dis-functionally unclear lines of command, BUT a strong "we in the trenches need to get this done despite the management/system" attitude among co-workers. For example - it's almost impossible (even as a manager) to find out what the salary bands are. Not "what is Fred paid" - that's reasonable in my view, but "what's the max and min for a grade x (my grade) employee". Also there is no way (except the unofficial water-cooler) to find out what other jobs within the company are available. Trying to find out is frowned upon - A LOT. The shareholders - e.g. via yahoo finance - know more (and sooner) about the company performance than the employees (via company communication). All marked contrasts to my current employer and SLB competitor. Decision making and chains of command are frequently confused with many stakeholders and it unclear who is making decisions. This is compounded by the perception that people have multiple managers (direct, functional, "other managers" - no-kidding there is an entry in the company directory for that). A colleague once showed me a Dilbert cartoon (with the comment "he works for Schlumberger"). It shows an inversion of the usual management pyramid, i.e. one worker reporting to 6 managers, each of whom reported to 6 managers. A big deal is made out of the mentoring of less experience staff by older staff - that sort of makes up for the lack of career guidance by management. I NEVER in 24 years received meaningful career guidance or development through the formal chain of management. I did try to initiate the formal process once (after 24 years) and was laid-off shortly afterwards (probably a coincidence . . . probably). Quirks - you have to propose yourself for promotion: fill out a self assessment with 5 categories (Technical Understanding - Solutions Experience - Input to Business Strategy - Mentoring & (Technical) Community Leadership - Professional Visibility); write a Proposal Letter (your manager is supposed to do it - but in my experience he will always say "draft it and I will sign it"; get letters of reference/support. The process is cumbersome (enough to discourage people in my experience) and favors "self-promoters". In practice this discourages some groups (e.g. some (but not all) women, certain cultures where "blowing your own trumpet" is regarded as distasteful). I've actually had people (women) tell me "I don't want to have to boast about myself to be recognized" and "I didn't want to embarrass you if you had to turn my request down" (I was her manager). When this failing was brought to HRs attention the (senior HR manager's) response was "tough, that's the system, they need to get over it". As I said in "Pros" the company says it would like more women - I'm skeptical that extends to changing the culture. If you are smart, accomplished, hard-working and - critically - prepared to tell everyone about how smart, accomplished and hard-working you are, you will do well. There's a grain of truth in the criticism I've heard "Schlumberger people are so arrogant".

The Indian part of the organization needs to work in a lot of areas. <br> HR: The HR is not transparent in many of their activities. They purposely hide a lot of important information. <br> E.g. 1 They will never tell you at the time of hiring that there is a probation period of 3 months where everyone will be evaluated on the basis of objectives. This does not happen anywhere in the world. <br> E.g. 2. Many people like me who joined in lower grades have to work on specific projects in order to get a pay raise. And management provides absolutely no help in this. Everything candidate has to do himself/herself. All such detailed information is never shared to the you before joining. And since this is not common industry practise, we do not ask and fall in their trap. Its easier to switch to another company and get better hike. May be this is also the reason that their induction is mere 3-4 hours where none of the policies are explained. Induction in other companies is for 2-3 days where all business heads come and talk, HR explains all policies, Fun committee does presentation, Org structure is explained. Here nothing of this sort happens. People: Mostly people are good to work with (if they have come from different organizations). But others who have stayed in this company for more than 4-5 years are difficult to work with. E.g. 1 The business people (they call them as portfolio or product) are the most difficult to work with. Inspite of being in an oil and gas company, these portfolio people have no experience of working on fields. They have no knowledge of what customers want. They love to boss around everybody else. The sad part is no one (literally no one) cares to question them. Its like they own the company and we are all their slaves. They are such nifty at hiding important information that I sometimes felt that they were hired from CBI or FBI. E.g. 2: The company HSE representatives behave as if they own this company. The HSE head in Pune has a lot of authority but lacks responsibility. Most of the time you will see him on phone in trainings, he will leave the mandatory trainings in the middle, he does a lot of jugaad himself but preaches safety and ethics to all. E.g. 3: There are many expats working in Pune center. However you are made to feel inferior compared to the fair-skinned people coming from other centers in US or UK or Brazil or Dubai. Promotions to higher positions are either reserved for such expats or only people who have started their careers in Schlumberger. People who join from other companies are almost always ignored during promotions. Many of these expats have very little respect for India as a country, its culture and people. They only come to India only for promotions and then go back to US or UK or whatever. Then the next batch of expats come for promotions. In meetings or discussions you will notice that everybody listens to them while no one listens to you. It’s like racial discrimination almost everyday. E.g.4 The company is very gender-biased. They favor female employees over male employees. When I worked there, I saw female employees never being questioned for poor performance and no work completed. In some cases, I saw peer employees were pressured to complete the female employees’ work. Recognition: You should not expect anyone to recognize your work or be ready to see some random person getting recognized at quarterly events. In the company’s rewards program there are numerous examples where people refer each other every quarter which looks like a bad use of policy. But even the management does not question these cases thereby degrading the merit and high standard of such awards. Work: You can learn a lot of cloud technologies [GCP, Azure, K8S, DevOps, etc] in this company. But you can never get satisfaction of somebody using your features/solutions because releasing to production is literally optional here. E.g. 1 They start work on many projects and scrap them everytime. Thanks to the careless work from the portfolio. They burn company's money on worthless features and useless foreign travels. E.g. 2 You have to attend late night calls from India. Atleast 3-4 times in a week and that too at odd hours like 9 pm or 10 pm. And you are micro scopically watched if you attend these meetings or not by your managers. You cannot skip such calls even if you have social functions outside standard Indian working hours (thinking what would happen if such complaints land in FITE or Ministry of Labor, Government of India). They dont like dark skinned Indian people saying them NO. E.g. 3. As a product company they should have had a lot of industry connect (especially considering the fact that they have setup their shop in Pune long ago). There is no opportunities to attend seminars, they dont speak at seminars, zero contribution to open source and no thought leadership. E.g.4: Almost every few weeks there are visitors from US or UK or wherever. Every time our managers used to ask us to prepare demos or slides or something to please them. This easily consumed days and some times even weeks. Then the portfolio comes and question why stories are not completed. The senior people in the company should not treat visitors as special VIPs. All should be treated equal. E.g. 5: Since most people working there are from common IT service industry, they only believe in sitting at office for late hours. And managers like only these people who do no work during day but stay late in night to impress their bosses. How cheap and childish mentality. Finally, there are no annual appraisals in this company. (Surprised?)