Schlumberger Reviews in Paris, France Area

Pros

Travel, it can be fun for a while.

Cons

End of the month accounting and your boss's performance incentive bonus rules your life. You get promoted because they can earn more bonus by promoting someone. Likewise, you won't get promoted if it means their bonus will drop. Nothing matters but the reported profits and their bonus. The company is managed on a month to month basis with a long term outlook of about 3 months. They hire, fire, and transfer on a whim. I was transferred from Louisiana to Congo with 2 weeks notice, from Angola to UK with 1 weeks notice, etc, etc. Oh, and forget dual career, it only exists on paper. In reality, they use it to try to strong arm couples into taking horrible location assignments. "Oh you want to go dual career? Excellent, we can make that happen for you. We have a great position for you and your partner in Nigeria." -No thanks, I've been in Africa for a long time and would like to work elsewhere. "I see, well, we are transferring your partner to Nigeria anyway..."

Advice to Senior Management

Make the engineer career path more flexible. I worked in two product lines, won award after award for Intouch knowledge sharing, taught at the training centre, ran field tests of new technology, and served my last 15 months in the client office managing their projects (including the SLB contract, as an SLB employee no less). I was asked to resign after 5.5 yrs because I was delayed for my grade 11 promotion. Sorry, I was too busy excelling at what I did to fill out a couple thousand control cards on tools we no longer used. In the end, I decided my job performance was more important than my promotion. I guess my FSM did not agree. Asking me to resign was the best thing SLB ever did for me though. My career is 50 times better now.

-Thanks.