Good people, great salary/benefits, but old technology, and always under pressure
Pros
- Smart and honest hard-working people - Safety focused culture - Learning opportunities exist for all employees, particularly for managers - Great salary & benefits packages - New building (in Edmonton) - Focus on integrity and collaboration; a number of different cultures work efficiently together - Revolutionary products have been created in-house to improve safety of pipeline - Annual objectives are set and reviewed for employees throughout the year, and performance reviewed at end of each year
Cons
- Some technology is very dated (though, recent projects are using modern tech) - Slow to change technology - lots of politics for approvals and buy-in - Workforce is 50/50 divided between employees and contractors. Contractors do not get the same learning opportunities. Contractors are renewed annually without a performance review. - Different departments are silos, with not enough inter-department collaboration - Several layers of management between front-line workers and the CEO - Mindset that external vendors are needed for creating first version of new projects, instead of creating new project implementations in-house - Not enough focus given to refactoring previous software products; instead focus is on new products - Oil industry is boom and bust. - Oil industry in Canada: lots of politics to create new pipelines