Field engineer, specializing in wireline
From January 2006 to June 2010, I was a wireline field engineer with Schlumberger, now SLB. The job is simple to describe and hard to do well: we lowered measurement instruments into wells on an electric cable to understand the rock and the fluids it holds.
The measurement was only part of the work. A field engineer prepares and maintains the equipment, runs the operation safely, guarantees the quality of the data, and leads a crew that often works through the night, far from home. That is where I learned what a decision costs when the well, the client, and the team are all waiting on you.
January 2006 to March 2007: Alberta, Canada
I started in Airdrie, Alberta, on land operations. Canada was my school: long drives between wellsites, cold that tests every piece of equipment, and a steep learning curve on both the tools and the people. It was also when I started writing about the job, in a blog I began in 2006.
March 2007 to fall 2009: Aberdeen and the North Sea
In March 2007 I moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, to work offshore in the North Sea. Offshore changes everything: helicopter rotations, tight rig schedules, and a safety culture where nothing is left to chance. I was promoted to Senior Field Engineer in early 2008, then to General Field Engineer in 2009.
Training to grow in the field
Schlumberger invests heavily in its engineers. Throughout these years, I attended training programs abroad that took me from running jobs to understanding the physics behind each measurement, and later to managing crews and operations.
Fall 2009 to June 2010: Sakhalin, Russia
In November 2009 I arrived in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. It was a demanding environment, technically and humanly, and a lesson in working across languages and cultures. In June 2010 I left field engineering to become head of operations in Russia.
Passing it on, and learning to work together
What I kept from these years is less about tools than about people. On a wellsite, the best result comes from a crew that trusts each other, shares what it knows, and speaks up when something looks wrong. I have tried to carry that into every role since, from management at SLB to co-founding jll.spear, and today as CTO of GOWell, a company that builds the same kind of wireline technology I once ran in the field.