ExxonMobil Reviews

Cons

Work locations in the US are largely concentrated around the Gulf Coast. The international opportunities offer much more location diversity.

Cons

They are very strict and stick to their rules.

Cons

The work is unfulfilling. When recruiting while still in school the position on job board is very broad and you don't know exactly where you will be placed in the company. The company assigns positions by need basis and you really have no say as a new hire.

Cons

Limited vacation time for new hires.
Strict dress code

Cons

- Terrible onboarding & training, essentially thrown in the deep end and expected to keep yourself afloat.
- A very obvious work/life balance problem that has gone unaddressed for quite some time (a lot of lip service from management, with very little results). Working to near-death is the norm, and anything below that is considered poor performance, despite what anyone will tell you. Physical/emotional/mental health issues are pervasive and common among co-workers (which they will keep secret so it will not be used against them).
-95% of the meetings you will have here (in your entire career) are a complete waste of time, and will consider ridiculous questions and considerations with hair-splitting levels of detail, (the ones from my experience) tend to be poorly planned and facilitated, leading to what was supposed to be a one hour meeting turning into a 2 hour lecture of the biggest windbags thinking out loud to everyone with no consensus or resolution...Until two or three more iterations of these meetings take place. Because there are so many of these meetings, work can never get done-this is one of the main reasons why the work/life balance is poor. Spend the morning & afternoon surviving meetings, spend the nights catching up with work, repeat until inevitable burnout. Just remember: everyone likes the sound of their own voice here, plan accordingly...and bring aspirin.
- Other co-workers are extremely incompetent and make work a nightmare in comparison-if you have a whiff of capability on you they will snuff it out with their toxic personalities and their ability to jockey you around on wild goose chases by off-loading their work onto you with minimal guidance-and taking all the credit for anything that looks good, of course.
- Your relationship with your manager is everything, ESPECIALLY at the beginning. If your personalities conflict in any way-if he/she likes chocolate and you like vanilla-it will be used against you. It gets really nauseating seeing the great lengths some would take to get in with their manager-especially during ranking season...aspirin will not be enough...
- A lot of backstabbing/boot-licking/one-upping/unethical practices among peers, all in the name of ranking, your colleagues are not family, but competition to keep a watchful eye on...trust no one.
- New hires are treated like idiots with next to no capability (common phrase: "All the new hires know is where the coffee is..."), if you are one of them, you cannot have an opinion, in order to have one you will have to be hyper-aggressive and out-shout your co-workers rather than collaborate with them, or wait a few extremely bitter years where competency is measured by something as arbitrary as the number of years had with the company. When that kicks in, then take those years of frustration out on the new hires under you to perpetuate this stupid practice. A lot of lip service about being inclusive and empowered ("influence without authority" remains to be a hilariously hypocritical motto commonly used), but none of this is in practice-only the opposite: keep your head down, shut up and take your beatings, and work overnight because I said so. Meanwhile, experienced hires have issues with being pigeonholed into a position and being trapped there until retirement (OR they are rotated at a very slow rate relative to their peers who are or were new-hires)-basically taking away one of the main reasons for working here (frequent job rotations).
- Rotations are great, but they are very rarely planned well (most do not ever happen, yet are mentioned as if they will, and the ones that do give you too little time to prepare) - also be ready to accept something that you do not want nor did you ask for, in a location you were not too thrilled about. YOU CANNOT SAY NO, it's an option...but it isn't.
-Ranking is a taboo subject for a reason: it is an insidious process in that the ones who can influence/change/remove it are those who benefited the most from it, so it will never be influenced/changed/removed. It's typical that incompetent brown-nosers are rewarded in the top third, those who keep the lights on are in the middle third, and the bottom third are those who are being punished for political reasons (looked at the wrong person the wrong way), or cared too much about "silly" things such as the "life" part in a work/life balance.
-Personal perspective, but I feel like this company was designed for only one type of person in mind, and those who happen to deviate in one or many ways from this mold will have significant challenges to face working here. If you're sensitive, an introvert, are polite, are secure in yourself and feel no need to compete with others viciously, are empathetic, have a sense of humor (and not afraid to show it), are prone to anxiety/depression, are modest, are informal, etc. you will be fighting yourself in the name of your career, you will need to compromise your identity, and the wonderful things that make you-well-you, and fit the aforementioned mold if you want to make it here...A fate worse than death if you ask me: a walking corpse.
- Youngsters are typically looking elsewhere to springboard after a few years here, and the Old Folks are basically counting their days until retirement...not a good sign.
-From personal experience, the campus-despite being very pretty and full of amenities-is basically a very uptight and pretentious country club, dress code is strict, personnel is tight-lipped and formal, and the conversations you will have with peers are abysmally shallow (on purpose of course, the walls have ears). While the sites have some of these tight-lipped and formal folks, the atmosphere is more intense yet loose with everyone fighting their own respective fire (each site is very different, some better than others, so hope you're in one of the "good" ones if it applies) so it becomes as informal as the dress code there as everyone is essentially in the trenches together-these different worlds clash often when they have to work together, just another frustration to add to the laundry list.
-There are so many contractors here, doing essentially most of the hard work...It makes you wonder if management trusts the competency of their own employees...
-Bad managerial decisions are made frequently, sadly the excrement flows downstream to the poor saps who will clean up the mess hoping it would reflect well in their rankings.
-Generalized comment, but a very common one among myself and those who I have had candid conversations with: there is NO TRUST in anyone, none. Micromanagement is the norm here (find a study where that is NOT a terrible management style) regardless of your level of competence. Coupled with this micromanagement, everything has a checklist to go through, a process to follow, a list of people who have to approve unanimously, no decision is solely yours, but the decision of a committee on your behalf. Nothing is done by you, just pending approval from others. And you cannot circumvent or skip these process without going through an even more cumbersome process to skip the aforementioned process. The bureaucracy is beyond perplexing, and the fact that people have memorized and defend this is even more perplexing. It's weird how what was an initiative to idiot-proof everything has only lead to an inefficient weapon used by idiots to punish those who think outside of the box...it's a work of art, honestly. While there are new initiatives developed to cut down on this red tape, they are still using their cumbersome and mind-boggling processes to develop this process to cut down on their processes like some kind of Ouroboros...again, ART!
-High attrition rate from the 5-year mark onwards due to these aforementioned cons, who wants 5-35 years of this kind of abuse? At this rate you would not survive long enough for retirement.

Cons

The schedule is not concistant

Cons

Sometimes it can be hard to navigate the red tape, no 9/80 or defined flexible work schedule

Cons

Limited control over your career positions / advancement

Cons

Can be hard to make an impact
Hard to take risks

Cons

Low salary and no benefits for employees