ConocoPhillips Reviews in Houston, TX Area

Pros

19/30 days we get one extra day off a year
401K matching is great
Free health insurance is great
Overall great benefits

Cons

I am in Global Procurement and have been with the company 3.5 years. I hope to be gone by next year. I find the GPS organization very depressing. Bad leadership and no real growth. Other parts of the company seem to be good though.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide advancement to the people that are in your organization and stop trying to force them to do things they don't want to do such as relocate to bad areas b/c it benefits you and not their development.

Pros

Ideas are respected and encouraged. The gym is also very nice.

Cons

A lot of management to get to a specific answer.

Advice to Senior Management

Follow through with descions and keep communication lines active.

Pros

Good salary and benefits compared to other major oil companies (except Exxon)

Cons

Way too policitical. Politics is everywhere, but it is heightened at COP. Also, heirarchy is supreme. Mid-level managers can be incompetent. Management is ineffecient. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few with no opportunity to impact decision-making.

Pros

- Benefits are great
- Experience opportunities are good
- Great internal networks

Cons

- Needs more balancing in job vs. salary recieved. They can get away with putting lower level salary grades in a bigger role and not compensating them for the work they are putting in.

Advice to Senior Management

Communication between management (all levels) and employees leaves a lot to be desired.

Pros

A relatively generous benefits package that includes company matched contributions plus an semiannual contributions of company stock (alot) that you can immediately transfer to any other fund vanguard has. An annual bonus that usually averages around 8% (also depends on company performance) of your gross annual salary, you get your own office, state-of-the-art gym and soccer field with various exercise classes available for free to employees and family, flexible schedule, tuition reimbursement (90%), good work life balance (at least for software guys)

Cons

Groups vary widely from each other and can have managers that are real slave drivers. Luckily, I'm not in one of those groups, but I have heard that for some groups Saturday is just another work day. ConocoPhillips likes to stick with older software platforms and has yet to take the leap to current technologies like GPGPU or even web services. It appears that software we end up supporting/developing has more to do with the person who yells the loudest, rather than what is truly useful or innovative. But, as long as you swim with the current, you'll be fine. Also, the career path for software developers isn't clear at ConocoPhillips, but who cares when you get a sweet benefits package.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more proactive about promoting training and going to conferences, even if they aren't directly related to our current work. Alot of times, innovation occurs when ideas are sparked from orthogonally related technologies. The more exposure we have to what's hot in software, the better armed ConocoPhillips will be to compete with the bigger fish that are surely doing this very thing. Also, give us a 4-10 schedule. That would be sweet.

Pros

Good people to work with

Cons

Difiicult industry regulations and economics

Advice to Senior Management

Short term must balance the long term

Pros

I feel COP truly wants to be progressive in certain business units and works hard to look for ways to improve.

Cons

COP management in downstream refining is being micromanaged! There is a tremendous amount of funds wasted due to senior management not allowing decisions to be made at levels where the knowledge of the details are best known. The culture has shifted since the Tosco refineries were acquired.

Advice to Senior Management

To much bureaucracy, upper middle management needs to be trimmed down. Decision making needs to be driven to lower levels where the real knowledge of the issues are best known.

Pros

great brand name, bold mover in conservative sector, good decision science personnel, good place to learn

Cons

cliquish, not fully leveraging their employees potential, career growth is a function of who is looking out for you.

Advice to Senior Management

Balance and team building

Pros

Plenty of opportunity; good people

Cons

Some managers talk positive about people but really lack character and integrity.

Advice to Senior Management

Weed out managers lacking character and integrity.

Pros

Lots of opportunities for change (not necessarily advancement), due to the size of the company. Good pay and great benefits compared to other industries. Relatively secure compared to more cut throat industries. If you are the kind of person who just wants to coast until retirement with decent pay and benefits this may be the place.

Cons

Job satisfaction is quite low. How people are promoted and rewarded is extremely political. You are rewarded more for conforming to the status quo than being innovative and using your abilities. Lots of wasted talent exists at this company and the seemingly endless supply of poor managers will never extract it. I would not waste too much time here if you really want to do more with your life and feel you have given and achieved your full potential.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward people for their achievements not for how they play politics or clone their managers. Give people opportunities when they are 50 to 70% ready vs. waiting until they are 250% ready. You have a lot of wasted talent that you are paying good money for, work on extracting it like you extract oil out of the ground!