jobbite
The People are great along with the pay and career growth opportunities. Internal communication at Halliburton is something to be desired.
Pros: Solid Pay
Cons: long hours, overworked, no work life balance, no upward mobility
$70,000
Pros: Pay and benefits are good including bonus. Excellent training - lots of great camaraderie with field employees. You'll always have job security.
Cons: Don't expect anything close to work life balance or any sort of "thank you" from management. You'll be worked to death in horrible small towns.
Field engineer salary with bonus around 70-74k.
I held this position for almost five years. I will tell you to this day there is no other job that I would rather do, I've never enjoyed any job as much or felt as valuable as I did in this position.
So why only four stars? Two reasons, and they'll sound like major reasons to most everyone but that just goes to show how much I loved this job. First, most of these positions are in small towns and located several hours from any major city, which obviously limits your social life options. Second, this job can consume your life because of the 24-7 nature of the business, I routinely worked 80 hrs a week and have worked 100+ hrs on many occaisions.
Ok so this is a life draining job in the middle of nowhere, what is the good part? First the training program is outstanding, regardless of what your background is the training will give you the skills necessary to do the job and to do it well. The training program is so highly thought of that many of our customers hire away the field engineers because they find them to be so well trained and valuable. The atmosphere in the office is always very casual and we routinely joke around with one another and carry on conversations about things other than work. On the customer's job site while we are serious about safety and performing our job well we still manage to have fun, and it is a very team oriented atmosphere where you are almost more like family than co-workers. The job itself is a combination of technical skills in analyzing pressure response and downhole mechanics and people skills in dealing with team members and motivating them to do their best along with dealing with demanding customers. There is an incredible amount of responsibility and freedom placed on field engineer, my bosses never looked over my shoulder I was sent out to do services that would amount to nearly $2 million in a single day and it was up to me and my crew on how we would accomplish these services and work with the customer. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, you could see how much material you had physically moved from surface to the oil/gas formation and you would get feedback from the customer that you might have improved production on a well by a factor of 100.
This company is misunderstood thanks to the media. After over a year of working for Halliburton, I have a great respect for the company. My experience is very different from the engineers that I hire as I am on the corporate level where there is much red tape and a very distinct hierarchy which can be extremely frustrating. My exposure to other areas of the company and their operations have been the foundation of my respect. In general, I would much rather work for this company on the innovation, technology, engineering side of the business rather than in a support function. Pay is higher than average and employees are very helpful, knowledgeable and open.
