Pros
Pay is generally good, benefits are good, 9/80 work schedule (9 hour days 8 hour Fridays, every other Friday off). 3 weeks starting vacation for engineers paired with 9/80s allow for excellent weekend trips around California and beyond. CFO Mark Smith seems extremely sharp. Some really excellent individuals at the company. There is an employee stock purchase program. During the current downturn bonuses have been maintained and base salaries (to my knowledge) have not been reduced. At one point the 401k match was reduced, however, it was reinstated and whatever portion was not matched prior to reinstating was fully reimbursed by CRC. This was not required of the company and speaks to the integrity of Todd Stevens, CEO. It was communicated to the employees that these initiatives were at his behest. Some very solid assets. Some of the assets are world class, and there is a huge variety of artificial lift as well as reservoir drive mechanisms to learn about. In a higher price environment, the impact of the outstanding debt would be less and the company could theoretically be a good place to work. Depending on your goals it can be a good fit.
Cons
I will break down the cons into those that CRC can control, and those mostly out of it's sphere of influence. Within CRC's Control Talent Retention - some of the most capable and talented have been leaving the company for a variety of reasons. Lack of Organization At the technical level - technical work documentation is at the discretion of the individual doing the work. It is extremely common to be unable to find work that was done as recently as one year prior, and duplications of effort are an every day occurrence. With regard to personnel - this is primarily due to high internal employee turnover. Most engineers only hold the same field/business unit responsibility for two years at most. Paired with a complete lack of formal folder structure on the "shared drive" it's easy to see how quality work can be lost. With regard to management roles - the best analogy for the management to employee ratio is an NFL front office. Sports analogies are frequent at CRC, so this seems appropriate. Essentially in the NFL corporate office there is the GM and his closest 40 friends all with ambiguous, vague, important sounding titles (most are VPs of something) and you aren't sure exactly what 29 of them actually ever do. During the two rounds of layoffs due to lower commodity prices, the safest role was seemingly at the management level. Every technical meeting has a minimum of 3 managers, often times with similar responsibilities. I have been to an 8 person meeting with 4 managers before. This leads to managers who seemingly should not be involved in technical projects reaching across dotted lines of jurisdiction and "advising" staff level production engineers (typically 3-5 years experience), for example, on whether or not to increase stroke rate on a new well... We are talking the staff engineer's boss's boss instructing how to optimize well production. Just really strange that such a high level manager is reaching into such granular items. With regard to office locations - there are somewhere around 6 buildings that house CRC employees (in Bakersfield) not including the field offices. It feels as though all of the buildings are only 1/3 full. Particularly confusing is the housing of facilities and ops engineers in the Elk Hills (one of the biggest assets) field office. A lot of them have primary responsibilities in fields an hour or more away and have as much as 50% of their meetings "in town" aka one of the many offices in Bakersfield. It is also about a half hour from Bakersfield, where many of them reside. Beyond CRC's Direct Control California regulatory environment - California is obviously and decidedly anti oil and gas, despite the financial boon to the government. Regulations become more stringent every year, and with Gov Jerry Brown likely leaving office next year will only continue further in this direction. The California oil and gas industry is at least one if not multiple decades behind the rest of the industry. This leads into the next issue... CRC is only allowed to operate in California as per the spinoff agreement with parent company Occidental Petroleum. This, in conjunction with the bloated management population, puts a huge perception of limitation for career growth and opportunity. I believe this was for 5 years post spin, which would end Q4 2019 approximately. Debt - the company was burdened with what many believe to be an outrageous portion of Oxy's debt at spinoff. Initially in the 6 billion ballpark, currently somewhere just north of 5 billion. This extreme debt burden has forced the company to seek joint ventures for external funding of projects so the debt can be serviced. If depressed commodity prices persist, this is the foreseeable future for the corporation. Commodity Price - as with the rest of the industry commodity prices are low relative to the past 10 years or so and this makes operations more difficult.